Thomas Dermody

You recommend to my attention the lately-emerged poems of Dermody. When he was quite a boy, I received a great heap of his verses, in loose sheets, from the press. They were pretty enough for years so early; yet I discerned not in them the germs of genius.... You say Dermody was in morals, in genius, and in destiny, a second Savage. If his compositions are not better, the task you enjoin will weary me. As I remember, there are not more than fifty lines in the volume of Savage that I would have given a pin to have written.