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enough. The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked | be retrieved, or something new is to be examby violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subtlety surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought, and though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased.

From this account of their compositions it will be readily inferred, that they were not successful in representing or moving the affections. As they were wholly employed on something unexpected and surprising, they had no regard to that uniformity of sentiment which enables us to conceive and to excite the pains and the pleasures of other minds; they never inquired what, on any occasion, they should have said or done; but wrote rather as beholders than partakers of human nature; as beings looking upon good and evil, impassive and at leisure; as Epicurean deities, making remarks on the actions of men, and the vicissitudes of life, without interest and without emotion. Their courtship was void of fondness, and their lamentation of sorrow. Their wish was only to say what they hoped had never been said

before.

ined. If their greatness seldom elevates, their acuteness often surprises; if the imagination is not always gratified, at least the powers of reflection and comparison are employed; and, in the mass of materials which ingenious absurdity has thrown together, genuine wit and useful knowledge may be sometimes found buried perhaps in grossness of expression, but useful to those who know their value; and such as, when they are expanded to perspicuity, and polished to elegance, may give lustre to works which have more propriety, though less copious ness of sentiment.

This kind of writing, which was, I believe, borrowed from Marino and his followers, had been recommended by the example of Donne, a man of very extensive and various knowledge; and by Jonson, whose manner resembled that of Donne more in the ruggedness of his lines, than in the cast of his sentiments.

When their reputation was high, they had undoubtedly more imitators than time has left behind. Their immediate successors, of whom any resemblance can be said to remain, were Suckling, Waller, Denham, Cowley, Cleiveland, and Milton. Denham and Waller sought another way to fame, by improving the harmony of our numbers. Milton tried the metaphysic style only in his lines upon Hobson the Carrier. Cowley adopted it, and excelled his predecessors, having as much sentiment and more music. Suckling neither improved versification, nor abounded in conceits. The fashionable style remained chiefly with Cowley; Suckling could not reach it, and Milton disdained it.

Nor was the sublime more within their reach than the pathetic, for they never attempted that comprehension and expanse of thought which at once fills the whole mind, and of which the first effect is sudden astonishment, and the second rational admiration. Sublimity is produced by aggregation, and littleness by dispersion. Great thoughts are always general, and consist in positions not limited by exceptions, and in descriptions not descending to minuteness. It is with great propriety that subtlety, which in its ori- CRITICAL REMARKS are not easily understood ginal import means exility of particles, is taken without examples; and I have therefore collectin its metaphorical meaning for nicety of dis-ed instances of the modes of writing by which tinction. Those writers who lay on the watch this species of poets, (for poets they were called for novelty, could have little hope of greatness; by themselves and their admirers,) was emifor great things cannot have escaped former ob-nently distinguished. servation. Their attempts were always ana- As the authors of this race were perhaps more lytic; they broke every image into fragments; desirous of being admired than understood, they and could no more represent, by their slender sometimes drew their conceits from recesses of conceits and laboured particularities, the pros-learning not very much frequented by common pects of nature, or the scenes of life, than he readers of poetry. Thus Cowley on Know who dissects a sun-beam with a prism, can ex-ledge: hibit the wide effulgence of a summer noon, What they wanted, however, of the sublime, they endeavoured to supply by hyperbole ; their amplification had no limits; they left not only reason but fancy behind them; and produced combinations, of confused magnificence, that not only could not be credited, but could not be imagined.

Yet great labour, directed by great abilities, is never wholly lost; if they frequently threw away their wit upon false conceits, they likewise sometimes struck out unexpected truth: if their conceits were far-fetched, they were often worth the carriage. To write on their plan it was at least necessary to read and think. No man could be born a metaphysical poet, nor assume the dignity of a writer, by descriptions copied from descriptions, by imitations borrow-a ed from imitations, by traditional imagery, and hereditary similes, by readiness of rhyme, and volubility of syllables.

In perusing the works of this race of authors, the mind is exercised either by recollection or inquiry; either something already learned is to

The sacred tree 'midst the fair orchard grew,
The phoenix Truth did on it rest,

And built his perfum'd nest,

That right Porphyrian tree which did true logic shew,
Each leaf did learned notions give,

And th' apples were demonstrative:

So clear their colour and divine,

The very shade they cast did other lights outshine.

ON ANACREON CONTINUING A LOVER IN HIS OLD

AGE.

Love was with thy life entwin'd,
Close as heat with fire is join'd;
A powerful brand prescribed the date
Of thine, like Meleager's fate.
Th' antiperistasis of age

More enflamed thy amorous rage.

In the following verses we have an allusion to
Rabbinical opinion concerning manna:

Variety I ask not: give me one
To live perpetual upon.

The person Love does to us fit,

Like manna, has the taste of all in it.

Thus Donne shows his medicinal knowledge in some encomiastic verses:

From whence these take their birth which now are few lines so many remote ideas could be brought

By the same author a comon topic, the danger common subject, which poets have contended of procrastination, is thus illustrated:

His Miscellanies contain a collection of short pression, such varied similitude, such a succescompositions, written, some as they were dictat- sion of images, and such a dance of words, it is ed by a mind at leisure, and some as they were in vain to expect except from Cowley. His called forth by different occasions, with great strength always appears in his agility; his volavariety of style and sentiment, from burlesque tility is not the flutter of a light, but the bound levity to awful grandeur. Such an assemblage of an elastic mind. His levity never leaves his of diversified excellence no other poet has hither-learning behind it; the moralist, the politician, to afforded. To choose the best, among many and the critic, mingle their influence even in this good, is one of the most hazardous attempts of airy frolic of genius. To such a performance, criticism. I know not whether Scaliger himself Suckling could have brought the gayety but not has persuaded many readers to join with him in the knowledge: Dryden could have supplied his preference of the two favourite odes, which the knowledge, but not the gayety. he estimates in his raptures at the value of a The verses to Davenant, which are vigorouskingdom. I will, however, venture to recom-ly begun, and happily concluded, contain some mend Cowley's first piece, which ought to be in-hints of criticism very justly conceived and hapscribed "To my Muse," for want of which the pily expressed. Cowley's critical abilities have second couplet is without reference. When the not been sufficiently observed; the few decisions title is added, there will still remain a defect; and remarks, which his prefaces and his notes for every piece ought to contain in itself what- on the Davideis supply, were at that time accesever is necessary to make it intelligible. Pope sions to English literature, and show such skill has some epitaphs without names; which are as raises our wish for more examples. therefore epitaphs to be let, occupied indeed for the present, but hardly appropriated.

The Ode on Wit is almost without a rival. It was about the time of Cowley that wit, which had been till then used for intellection, in contradistinction to will, took the meaning, whatever it be, which it now bears.

The lines from Jersey are a very curious and the burlesque. pleasing specimen of the familar descending to

Reason, are no mean specimens of metaphysiHis two metrical disquisitions for and against cal poetry. The stanzas against knowledge Of all the passages in which poets have exem-intended to exalt the human faculties, reason produce little conviction. In those which are plified their own precepts, none will easily be has its proper task assigned it; found of greater excellence than that in which not of things revealed, but of the reality of rethat of judging, Cowley condemns exuberance of wit: velation. In the verses for Reason, a passage which Bentley, in the only English verses which he is known to have written, seems to have copied, though with the inferiority of an imitator.

Yet 'tis not to adorn and gild each part,
That shows more cost than art,
Jewels at nose and lips but ill appear;

Rather than all things wit, let none be there.
Several lights will not be seen,

If there be nothing else between.

Men doubt, because they stand so thick i' the sky,
If those be stars which paint the galaxy.

In his verses to Lord Falkland, whom every man of his time was proud to praise, there are, as there must be in all Cowley's compositions, some striking thoughts, but they are not well wrought. His elegy on Sir Henry Wotton is vigorous and happy: the series of thoughts is easy and natural; and the conclusion, though a little weakened by the intrusion of Alexander, is elegant and forcible.

The Holy Book like the eighth sphere doth shine
With thousand lights of truth divine

So numberless the stars, that to our eye

It makes all but one galaxy.

Yet reason must assist, too; for, in seas
So vast and dangerous as these,
Our course by stars above we cannot know
Without the compass too below.
After this says Bentley:*

Who travels in religious jars,

Truth mix'd with error, shade with rays,
Like Whiston wanting pyx or stars,
In ocean wide or sinks or strays.

Cowley seems to have had what Milton is be

It may be remarked, that in this Elegy, and in most of his encomiastic poems, he has forgot-lieved to have wanted, the skill to rate his own ten or neglected to name his heroes.

In his poem on the death of Hervey, there is fore closed his Miscellanies with the verses upon performances by their just value, and has theremuch praise, but little passion; a very just and Crashaw, which apparently excel all that have ample delineation of such virtues as a studious gone before them, and in which there are beauties privacy admits, and such intellectual excellence which common authors may justly think not as a mind not yet called forth to action can dis-only above their attainment, but above their play. He knew how to distinguish, and how to ambition. commend, the qualities of his companions; but, when he wishes to make us weep, he forgets to weep himself, and diverts his sorrow by imagining how his crown of bays, if he had it, would crackle in the fire. It is the odd fate of this thought to be the worse for being true. The bay leaf crackles remarkably as it burns, as therefore this property was not assigned it by chance, the mind must be thought sufficiently at ease that could attend to such minuteness of physiology. But the power of Cowley is not so much to move the affections, as to exercise the understanding.

The Chronicle is a composition unrivalled and alone: such gayety of fancy, such facility of ex

To the Miscellanies succeed the Anacreontiques, or paraphrastical translations of some little poems, which pass, however unjustly, under the same name of Anacreon. Of these songs dedicated to festivity and gayety, in which even the morality is voluptuous, and which teach nothing but the enjoyment of the present day, he has given rather a pleasing than a faithful representation, having retained their sprightliness, but lost their simplicity. Cowley, like the Homer of Pope, has admitted The Anacreon of the decoration of some modern graces, by which he is undoubtedly more amiable to common