CHAPTER XI.
"SACRA POESIS" AND "GERALDINE." With the exception of "Rough Rhymes," my first Continental Journal as aforesaid, and a song or two, and a few juvenile poems, my first appearance in print, the creator of a real bound volume (though of the smallest size) was as author of a booklet called "Sacra Poesis;" consisting of seventy-five little poems illustrative of engravings or drawings of sacred subjects, and intended to accompany a sort of pious album which I wished to give to my then future wife.

Most of it was composed in my teens, though it found no technical "compositor" of a printing sort until I was twenty-two (in 1832), when Nisbet published the pretty little 24mo, with a picture by myself of Hope's Anchor on the title.

The booklet is now very rare, and a hundred years hence may be a treasure to some bibliomaniac.

Of its contents, speaking critically of what I wrote between fifty and sixty years ago, some, of the pieces have not been equalled by me since, and are still to be found among my Miscellaneous Poems: but, many are feeble and faulty.

Some of the reviews before me received the new poetaster with kindly appreciation; some with sneers and due disparagement,--much as Byron's "Hours of Idleness" had been treated not very many years before: though another cause for hatred and contempt may have operated in my case, namely this: Ever since youth and now to my old age I have been exposed to the "_odium theologicum_," the strife always raging between Protestant and Papist, Low Church and High, Waldo and Dominic, Ulster and Connaught: hence to this hour the frequent rancour against me and my writings excited by sundry hostile partisans.
* * * * * My next volume was "Geraldine and other Poems," published by Joseph Rickerby in 1838.