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Thus thus, and thus we compass round
Thy harmless and enchanted ground;
And, as we sing thy dirge, we will
The daffodil

And other flow'rs lay upon

The altar of our love, thy stone.

Thou, wonder of all maids! ly'st here,
Of daughters all the dearest dear;
The eye of virgins, nay the queen
Of this smooth green,

And all sweet meads, from whence we get
The primrose and the violet.

Too soon, too dear did Jephthah buy,
By thy sad loss, our liberty:

His was the bond and cov'nant; yet
Thou paid'st the debt,

Lamented maid! He won the day,
But for the conquest thou didst pay.

Thy father brought with him along
The olive branch and victor's song:
He slew the Ammonites, we know,
But to thy woe;

And, in the purchase of our peace,
The cure was worse than the disease.

For which obedient zeal of thine,
We offer thee, before thy shrine,

Our sighs for storax, tears for wine;
And to make fine

And fresh thy herse-cloth, we will here
Four times bestrew thee ev'ry year.

Receive, for this thy praise, our tears;
Receive this off'ring of our hairs:
Receive these crystal vials, fill'd
With tears, distill'd

From teaming eyes; to these we bring,
Each maid, her silver filleting,

To gild thy tomb; besides, these cauls,
These laces, ribbands, and these fauls,
These veils, wherewith we us'd to hide
The bashful bride,

When we conduct her to her groom:
All, all, we lay upon thy tomb.

No more, no more, since thou art dead,
Shall we e'er bring coy brides to bed;
No more at yearly festivals

We cowslip balls

Or chains of columbines shall make
For this or that occasion's sake.

No, no; our maiden pleasures be
Wrapt in the winding-sheet with thee;
"Tis we are dead, though not i' th' grave,
Or if we have

One seed of life left, 'tis to keep

A Lent for thee, to fast and weep.

Sleep in thy peace, thy bed of spice,
And make this place all paradise:

May sweets grow here! and smoke from hence
Fat frankincense.

Let balm and cassia send their scent

From out thy maiden-monument.

May no wolf howl or screech-owl stir

A wing about thy sepulchre!

No boisterous winds or storms come hither
To starve or wither

Thy soft sweet earth! but, like a spring,
Love keep it ever flourishing.

May all thy maids, at wonted hours,

Come forth to strew thy tomb with flow'rs:
May virgins, when they come to mourn,
Male-incense burn

Upon thine altar! then return

And leave thee sleeping in thy urn."

And now farewell, young Herrick! for young is the spirit of thy poetry as thy wisdom is old: and mayest thou flourish in immortal youth, thou boon companion and most jocund songster! May thy purest poems be piped from hill to hill, throughout England; and thy spirit, tinged with superstitious lore, be gladdened by the music! May the flowers breathe incense to thy fame, for thou hast not left one of them unsung! May the silvery springs and circumambient air murmur thy praises, as

thou hast warbled theirs! And may those, who live well, sing, and those, who love well, sigh sweet panegyrics to thy memory! Ours shall not be wanting, for we have read thee much, and like thee much, and would fain hope that this our paper, being nearly all made up of thy thoughts and language, may be liked as well

as we like thee!

ART. VIII.-Enchiridion; containing Institutions,

Divine {Practicall.
S Contemplative.

Ethicall.

Moral Economicall.

Written by Fra: Quarles. London, 1702.

Politicall.

12mo.

Francis Quarles, the author of this excellent little book, has met with hard measure from the wits and poets who succeeded him. Popular as he was in his own day, that popularity was very short lived-more so, indeed, than merited popularity should be. As a devotional and pious poet, he was, of course, proscribed by the profligate and licentious court of Charles the Second, and those who called him a dull writer meant, in fact, no more than that he was a serious one. Pope, with the usual hastiness of satirists, took the ridicule upon trust, without examining into its justice, and has accordingly mentioned our author amongst the heroes of the Dunciad, in a line which has the dishonour of undervaluing the efforts of two good writers, and one well meaning man. For a long period subsequent, the names of "Wither, Quarles, and Blome," were used but as the synonymes of neglected and deservedly neglected scribblers. Of late, however, the merits of our author have excited more attention. It could not, indeed, be, that the character and intellect of a man, like Quarles, should fail, in the end, of being candidly and properly appreciated.

The pretensions of Quarles as a poet may be easily adjusted. Like Herbert, Wither, and Crashaw, he endeavoured to mix the waters of Helicon with the waters of Sion; to give devotion some of the attractions and ornaments of verse; and it can be no disgrace to Quarles, if, in common with these and other greater men, he had but little success in his attempt. He wanted, indeed, almost all the requisites for a poet. With

great sagacity and good sense, which, where human nature was concerned, seldom allowed him to be mistaken, he had little or no fancy, and scarcely any perception of harmony. Pious enthusiasm therefore in him supplied the place of poetic fervor, and much conceit was substituted for imagination. Wanting the real afflatus of the bard, and yet glowing with heavenly energies, feeling his own want of power, and yet conceiving himself to be strengthened from above, he struggled and lashed himself to give his thoughts a vent worthy of their importance. But his struggles are unfortunately all against the grain. He is continually quaint, where he meant to be poetical; and turgid, where he intended to be sublime. He either soars into the regions of bombast or extravagance, or sinks down into a state of very prosaical flatness. Like other persons, who endeavour to divest themselves of their own intellectual character for another which is unattainable, he loses what was really valuable in his prose style, without supplying its place with any better quality; and we miss his own admirable. vein of contemplative good sense, without finding any thing which compensates for the deficiency. His poetry is, therefore, never likely to be popular. Probably the cuts which accompany his Emblems have done more than any thing else to enlarge the period of their existence. And yet the poetry of Quarles is not entirely deficient in merit. That, indeed, in a man of his high rank of intellect would be impossible. There are, as we may perhaps hereafter shew, occasionally spirited and harmonious passages interspersed. Still these are but few, and we believe the general character of Quarles's poetry must remain as we have given it above.

As a prose writer, Quarles stands upon much more distinguished ground. He has been excelled by none of his contemporaries in vigour or nervousness of language. He is generally brief, pithy, and concentrated, as perhaps most contemplative and serious writers are; yet when he allows himself to expatiate, there is sometimes a rich copiousness and singular sweetness in his diction, which rise even to the highest eloquence. This is, however, not often. His principal characteristics were sagacity, penetration, and good sense; and, marked by these distinguishing features, his style is generally clear, perspicuous, and forcible. It is only in the fervor of his devotion, or the enthusiasm of prayer, that he is carried beyond his usual sententiousness and brevity, and that traces of a higher power are suffered to develope themselves. Quarles, with too much coolness and intellectual self possession to be a mystic, was ever intensely devout. In him, religious enthusiasm operated over a temperament naturally calm, and thus increased the vigour and interest of his speculations, without leading

them on to wildness or extravagance. The prose of Quarles is, in fact, of that precise sort, which dwells upon the ear and seizes on the mind, and pleases more the oftener it is perused. Rich as it is with instruction, and pregnant with well digested thought, it can never lose its value. We are only induced to regret, that there is not more of it. His two principal prose works are his Judgment and Mercy for Afflicted Souls, and his Enchiridion. The former has been republished by Sir Egerton Brydges, and no work was ever better deserving of republication. His Enchiridion, though unquestionably the most valuable of the two, has never been reprinted since the beginning of the last century. We think, the extracts we are about to give from it will induce our readers to wish to see this admirable little book as widely diffused as its excellence deserves.

It is, as its title imports, a collection of maxims, divine and moral, and is, perhaps, the best collection of maxims in the English language. Nor is it merely valuable for the discernment and knowledge of mankind which it evinces, the justness and weight of its matter, and the pithiness and conciseness of the style. Quarles had always something higher in view than the exercise of his own ingenuity, or the mere intellectual gratification of his readers. His maxims fully display that his object was to produce a beneficial effect over human practice-to amend and reform mankind; and his observations always carry with them a seriousness and unity of purpose. There is little of paradox, and nothing of the ostentation of ingenuity, in his Enchiridion, but every sentence strikes upon the reader with the force of irresistible truth. He speaks not with the levity of the fanciful theorist, or the more worldly sagacity of the worldly-wise man, but with the correctness of sincere conviction, and the determination of profound inquiry. He arrests the attention not by subtle chimeras or sophistical display-he does not plead with the dextrousness of the counsel, but pronounces with the gravity of he judge. He does not, like another great writer of maxims, anatomise the heart with curious and searchful malignity, merely to show his skill, probe into its secret wounds, and leave them to fester as he found them, and hold up, with petty triumph, the nakedness of his nature to derision; but broods over her weaknesses and failings with the gentle and kindly regard of the good physician, not more skilful in discerning the maladies and disorders of his patient, than able to alleviate and wishful to cure them.

His maxims, though all valuable, have different degrees of merit. They generally commence in an injunction which the author clenches by some pointed antithesis, or illustrates by some ingenious metaphor, or supports by some shrewd thought, or weighty apothegm. Originality does not appear to have

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