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As a poetical narrator of fiction, Chalkhill is rather tedious; but he atones for the slow progress of his narrative by many touches of rich and romantic description.

FROM "THEALMA AND CLEARCHUS."
DESCRIPTION OF THE PRIESTESS OF DIANA.

Within a little silent grove hard by,
[pon a small ascent, he might espy
A stately chapel, richly gilt without,
Beset with shady sycamores about;
And ever and anon he might well hear
A sound of music steal in at his ear,

As the wind gave it being. So sweet an air
Would strike a siren mute, and ravish her.
He sees no creature that might cause the same,
But he was sure that from the grove it came,
And to the grove he goes to satisfy
The curiosity of ear and eye.

Thorough the thick-leaved boughs he makes a way,
Nor could the scratching brambles make him stay,
But on he rushes, and climbs up a hill,
Thorough a glade. He saw and heard his fill-
A hundred virgins there he might espy,
Prostrate before a marble deity,
Which, by its portraiture, appear'd to be
The image of Diana. On their knee
They tended their devotions with sweet airs,
Offering the incense of their praise and prayers,
Their garments all alike.

*

*

*

*

And cross their snowy silken robes they wore
An azure scarf, with stars embroider'd o'er;
Their hair in curious tresses was knot up,
Crown'd with a silver crescent on the top;
A silver bow their left hand held, their right,
For their defence, held a sharp-headed flight
Of arrows
Under their vestments, something short before,
White buskins, laced with ribbanding, they wore;
It was a catching sight to a young eye,
That Love had fix'd before. He might espy
One whom the rest had, sphere-like, circled round,
Whose head was with a golden chaplet crown'd:
He could not see her face, only his ear

Was blest with the sweet words that came from her.

THE IMAGE OF JEALOUSY IN THE CHAPEL OF DIANA.

* A curious eye

Might see some relics of a piece of art

That Psyche made, when Love first fired her heart;
It was the story of her thoughts, that she
Curiously wrought in lively imagery;
Among the rest she thought of Jealousy,
Time left untouch'd to grace antiquity,
She was decypher'd by a tim'rous dame,
Wrapt in a yellow mantle lined with flame;
Her books were pale, contracted with a frown,
Her eyes suspicious, wandering up and down;
Behind her Fear attended, big with child,
Able to fright Presumption if she smiled;
After her flew a sigh between two springs
Of briny waters. On her dove-like wings
She bore a letter seal'd with a half moon,
And superscribed-this from Suspicion.

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The ground was strewn with flowers, whose sweet scent,
Mixt with the choice perfumes from India brought,
Intoxicates his brains, and quickly caught

His credulous sense. The walls were gilt, and set
With precious stones, and all the roof was fret
With a gold vine, whose straggling branches spread
O'er all the arch-the swelling grapes were red;
This art had made of rubies, cluster'd so,

To the quickest eye they more than seem'd to grow.
About the walls lascivious pictures hung,
Such as whereof loose Ovid sometimes sung;

On either side a crew of dwarfish elves
Held waxen tapers taller than themselves,
Yet so well shaped unto their little stature,
So angel-like in face, so sweet in feature,
Their rich attire so differing, yet so well
Becoming her that wore it, none could tell
Which was the fairest.

After a low salute they all 'gan sing,
And circle in the stranger in a ring;
Orandra to her charms was stept aside,
Leaving her guest half won, and wanton eyed:
He had forgot his herb-cunning delight
Had so bewitch'd his ears, and blear'd his sight,
That he was not himself. * * *
Unto his view

*

*

*

*

*

*

She represents a banquet, usher'd in
By such a shape as she was sure would win
His appetite to taste-so like she was
To his Clarinda both in shape and face,
So voiced, so habited-of the same gait
And comely gesture. *
*
* Hardly did he refrain
From sucking in destruction at her lip;
Sin's cup will poison at the smallest sip.
She weeps and woos again with subtleness,
And with a frown she chides his backwardness:
Have you (said she) sweet prince, so soon forgot
Your own beloved Clarinda? Are you not
The same you were, that you so slightly set
By her that once you made the cabinet

Of your choice counsel? Hath some worthier love
Stole your affections? What is it should move
You to dislike so soon? Must I still taste
No other dish but sorrow? When we last
Emptied our souls into each other's breast,
It was not so. *

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* With that she wept afresh * * She seem'd to fall into a swound; And stooping down to raise her from the ground, He puts his herb into his mouth, whose taste Soon changed his mind: he lifts her-but in vain, His hands fell off, and she fell down again : With that she lent him such a frown as would Have kill'd a common lover, and made cold

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Of

able-although, to save myself farther impediment in the text, I must subjoin it in a note*.

ENEAS'S NARRATIVE AFTER THE DEATH OF PRIAM.
ENEID II.

Than first the cruel fear me caught, and sore my sprites
appall'd,

And on my father dear I thought, his face to mind I call'd, Whan slain with grisly wound our king, him like of age in sight,

plight.

I looked, and about me view'd what strength I might me make.

All men had me forsake for paynes, and down their bodies drew,

In classical translation Phaer and Golding were the earliest successors of Lord Surrey. Phaer published his "Virgil" in 1562, and Golding his "Ovid" three years later. Both of these translators, considering the state of the language, have considerable merit. Like Lay gasping dead, and of my wife Creuse bethought the them, Chapman, who came later, employed in Alone, forsake, my house despoil'd, my child what chaunce his version of the "Iliad" the fourteen-syllable had take, rhyme, which was then in favourite use. the three translators, Phaer is the most faithful and simple, Golding the most musical, and Chapman the most spirited; though Chapman is prone to the turgid, and often false to the sense of Homer. Phaer's Eneid has been praised by a modern writert, in the "Lives of the Nephews of Milton," with absurd exaggeration. I have no wish to disparage the fair value of the old translator; but when the biographer of Milton's nephews declares, “ that nothing in language or conception can exceed the style in which Phaer treats of the last day

of the existence of Troy," I know of no answer

To ground they leapt, and some for woe themselves in fires
they threw.

And now alone was left but I whan Vesta's Temple stair
To keep and secretly to lurk all crouching close in chair,
Dame Helen I might see to sit; bright burnings gave me
light,

Wherever I went, the ways I pass'd, all thing was set in

sight.

She fearing her the Trojans wrath, for Troy destroy'd to wreke,

Greek's torments and her husband's force, whose wedlock she did break,

The plague of Troy and of her country, monster most ontame,

There sat she with her hated head, by the altars hid for shame.

to this assertion but to give the reader the Straight in my breast I felt a fire, deep wrath my heart

very passage which is pronounced so inimit

[*The seven first books of Phaer's Virgil were first printed in 1558, the eighth, ninth, and the fragment of the tenth in 1562. Twyne's continuation was first printed in 1573.

In 1565 Golding published the four first books of Ovid's Metamorphoses, and in 1567 a translation of the whole.

We have had the good fortune to fall in with a notice of Arthur Golding in a Museum MS. of orders made on petitions to the Privy Council from 1605 to 1616. "No par ticulars," says Mr. Collier, "of the life of Golding have been recovered. He does not appear to have written anything after 1590, but the year of his death is uncertain."—Bridge. Cat. p. 130.

Arthure Golding to have the sole printing of some books translated by himself.

Hatfield, the xxvth of July, 1605. His Matee is graciouslie pleased that the lord Archbyshopp of Canterburie his Grace and his Mats Atturney Gen all shall advisedlie consider of this sut, and for such of the books as they shall think meete for the benefitt of the church and commonweale to be solie printed by this peticon' and wherby noe enormious monopolies may ensue, his Mats Atturney is to drawe a book ready for his Mats signature, contayning a graunt hereof to the peticoner, leaving a blank for the number of yeires to be inserted at his Mats pleasure.

Lans. MSS. No. 266, Folio 61.] [t William Godwin.]

did strain,

My country's fall to wreak, and bring that cursed wretch
to pain.

What! shall she into her country soil of Sparta and high
Mycene,

All safe shall she return, and there on Troy triumph as
queen?

Her husband, children, country, kynne, her house, her parents old,

With Trojan wives, and Trojan lords, her slaves shall she behold?

Was Priam slain with sword for this? Troy burnt with fire so wood?

Is it herefore that Dardan strondes so often hath sweat with blood?

Not so, for though it be no praise on woman kind to wreak,

And honour none there lieth in this, nor name for men to speak;

Yet quench I shall this poison here, and due deserts to dight,

Men shall commend my zeal, and ease my mind I shall outright:

This much for all my peoples' bones and country's flame
to quite.

These things within myself I tost, and fierce with force
I ran,

Whan to my face my mother great, so brim no time till
than,

Appearing shew'd herself in sight, all shining pure by night,

Right goddess-like appearing, such as heavens beholds her
bright.

So great with majesty she stood, and me by right-hand take,
She stay'd, and red as rose, with mouth these words to me

she spake:

The harmony of Fairfax is justly celebrated*. | took up the subject with a very different spirit. Joshua Sylvester's version of the "Divine Mr. Todd, the learned editor of Spenser, noticed Weeks and Works" of the French poet Du- in a number of the Gentleman's Magazine+, bartas was among the most popular of our the probability of Milton's early acquaintance early translations; and the obligations which with the translation of Dubartas's poem; and Milton is alleged to have owed to it, have Mr. Dunster has since, in his "Essay on Milton's revived Sylvester's name with some interest early reading," supported the opinion, that the in modern criticism. Sylvester was a puritan, same work contains the prima stamina of Paraand so was the publisher of his work, Hum- dise Lost, and laid the first foundation of that phrey Lownes, who lived in the same street “monumentum ære perennius." Thoughts and |with Milton's father; and from the congeniality expressions there certainly are in Milton, which of their opinions, it is not improbable that they leave his acquaintance with Sylvester hardly might be acquainted. It is easily to be con- questionable; although some of the expressions ceived that Milton often repaired to the shop quoted by Mr. Dunster, which are common to of Lownes, and there first met with the pious them both, may be traced back to other poets didactic poem. Lauder was the earliest to older than Sylvester. The entire amount of trace Milton's particular thoughts and expres- his obligations, as Mr. Dunster justly admits, sions to Sylvester; and, as might be expected, cannot detract from our opinion of Milton. If maliciously exaggerated them. Later writers Sylvester ever stood high in his favour, it must have been when he was very young+. The beauties which occur so strangely intermixed with bathos and flatness in Sylvester's poem, might have caught the youthful discernment, and long dwelt in the memory, of the great poet. But he must have perused it with disgust at Sylvester's general manner. Many of his epithets and happy phrases were really worthy of Milton; but by far the greater proportion of his thoughts and expressions have a quaintness and flatness more worthy of Quarles and Wither.

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My son, what sore outrage so wild thy wrathful mind upstares?

Why frettest thou, or where alway from us thy care withdrawn appears?

Nor first unto thy father see'st, whom, feeble in all this

woe,

Thou hast forsake, nor if thy wife doth live thou know'st

or no,

Nor young Ascanius, thy child, whom throngs of Greeks about

Doth swarming run, and, were not my relief, withouten doubt

By this time flames had by devoured, or swords of en'mies kill'd.

It is not Helen's fate of Greece this town, my son, hath spill'd,

Nor Paris is to blame for this, but Gods, with grace unkind,

This wealth hath overthrown, a Troy from top to ground

outwind.

Behold! for now away the cloud and dim fog will I take,
That over mortal eyes doth hang, and blind thy sight doth

make;

Thou to thy parents haste, take heed (dread not) my mind obey.

In yonder place, where stones from stones, and buildings huge to sway,

Thou seest, and mixt in dust and smoke, thick streams of richness rise,

Himself the God Neptune that side doth turn in wonders wise,

With fork three-tined the walls uproots, foundations all too shakes,

And quite from under soil the town with ground-works all uprakes.

On yonder side, with furies mixt, Dame Juno fiercely stands,

The gates she keeps, and from their ships the Greeks, her friendly bands,

In armour girt, she calls.

[* Many besides myself have heard our famous Waller own that he derived the harmony of his numbers from the Godfrey of Bulloigne, which was turned into English by Mr. Fairfax-DRYDEN, Malone, vol. iv. p. 592. See Note A at the end of this volume.]

The following lines may serve as no unfavourable specimens of his translation of Dubartas's poem.

PROBABILITY OF THE CELESTIAL ORBS BEING

INHABITED.

I not believe that the great architect
With all these fires the heavenly arches deck'd
Only for show, and with these glistering shields
T' amaze poor shepherds, watching in the fields;
I not believe that the least flower which pranks
Our garden borders, or our common banks,
And the least stone, that in her warming lap
Our mother earth doth covetously wrap,
Hath some peculiar virtue of its own,

And that the glorious stars of Heaven have none.

For November, 1796.

[ I remember, when I was a boy, I thought inimitable Spenser a mean poet in comparison of Sylvester's Dubartas, and was rapt into ecstacy when I read these lines:

Now, when the Winter's keener breath began
To crystallize the Baltic ocean;
To glaze the lakes, to bridle up the floods,

And periwig with wool the bald-pate woods.

I am much deceived if this be not abominable fustian.-
DRYDEN.]

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however, between Davies and the commonly styled metaphysical poets, that he argues like a hard thinker, and they, for the most part, like madmen. If we conquer the drier parts of Davies's poem, and bestow a little attention on thoughts which were meant, not to gratify the indolence, but to challenge the activity of the mind, we shall find in the entire essay fresh beauties at every perusal for in the happier parts we come to logical truths so well illustrated by ingenious similes, that we know not whether to call the thoughts more poetically or philosophically just. The judg. ment and fancy are reconciled, and the imagery of the poem seems to start more vividly from the surrounding shades of abstraction.

Such were some of the first and inferior luminaries of that brilliant era of our poetry, which, perhaps, in general terms, may be said to cover about the last quarter of the sixteenth, and the first quarter of the seventeenth century; and which, though commonly called the age of Elizabeth, comprehends many writers belonging to the reign of her successor. The romantic spirit, the generally unshackled

The school of poets which is commonly called the metaphysical, began in the reign of Elizabeth with Donne; but the term of meta-style, and the fresh and fertile genius of that physical poetry would apply with much more justice to the quatrains of Sir John Davies, and those of Sir Fulke Greville, writers who, at a later period, found imitators in Sir Thomas Overbury and Sir William Davenant*. Davies's poem on the Immortality of the Soul, entitled "Nosce teipsum," will convey a much more favourable idea of metaphysical poetry than the wittiest effusions of Donne and his followers. Davies carried abstract reasoning into verse with an acuteness and felicity which have seldom been equalled. He reasons, undoubtedly, with too much labour, formality, and subtlety, to afford uniform poetical pleasure. The generality of his stanzas exhibit hard arguments interwoven with the pliant materials of fancy so closely, that we may compare them to a texture of cloth and metallic threads, which is cold and stiff, while it is splendidly curious. There is this difference,

[*This has been re-echoed by Mr. Hallam in his History. Johnson has been unjustly blamed for the name applied to Donne and his followers of metaphysical poets, but it was given to this school before Johnson wrote, by Dryden and by Pope. However, as Mr. Southey has said, "If it were easy to find a better name, so much deference is due to Johnson, that his should be still adhered to."]

period, are not to be called in question. On the other hand, there are defects in the poetical character of the age, which, though they may disappear or be of little account amidst the excellencies of its greatest writers, are glaringly conspicuous in the works of their minor contemporaries. In prolonged narrative and description the writers of that age are peculiarly deficient in that charm, which is analogous to "keeping" in pictures. Their warm and cold colours are generally without the gradations which should make them harmonize. They fall precipitately from good to bad thoughts, from strength to imbecility. Certainly they are profuse in the detail of natural circumstances, and in the utterance of natural feelings. For this we love them, and we should love them still more if they knew where to stop in description and sentiment. But they give out the dregs of their mind without reserve, till their fairest conceptions are overwhelmed by a rabble of mean associations. At no period is the mass of vulgar mediocrity in poetry marked by more formal gallantry, by grosser adulation, or by coarser satire. Our amatory strains in the

tune of Charles the Second may be more dissolute, but those of Elizabeth's age often abound in studious and prolix licentiousness. Nor are examples of this solemn and sedate impurity to be found only in the minor poets: our reverence for Shakspeare himself need not make it necessary to disguise that he willingly adopted that style in his youth, when he wrote his Venus and Adonis*.

The fashion of the present day is to solicit !public esteem not only for the best and better, but for the humblest and meanest writers of the age of Elizabeth. It is a bad book which has not something good in it; and even some of the worst writers of that period have their twinkling beauties. In one point of view, the research among such obscure authors is undoubtedly useful. It tends to throw incidental lights on the great old poets, and on the manners, biography, and language of the country. So far all is well-but as a matter of taste, it is apt to produce illusion and disappointment. Men like to make the most of the slightest beauty which they can discover in an obsolete versifier; and they quote perhaps the solitary good thought which is to be found in such a writer, omitting any mention of the dreary passages which surround it. Of

[⚫ Shakspeare's sonnets are addressed to a youth of both sexes, to some hermaphrodite or Stella of his own fancy, and Barnfeild is guilty of eulogising a youth in the language of I love in its most womanly signification. Had Shakspeare published these now over-rated productions of his muse (of which no one throughout is positively excellent), this unnatural association had never existed, but several of his supared sonnets among his private friends, when copyrights were not acknowledged or made the subject of law, falling into the hands of T. T. a bookseller, the said T. T., whose name was Thomas Thorpe, printed them with a hieroglyphical inscription, that is the puzzle of commentator, critic and reader. It deserves transcription :

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course it becomes a lamentable reflection, that so valuable an old poet should have been forgotten. When the reader however repairs to him, he finds that there are only one or two grains of gold in all the sands of this imaginary Pactolus. But the display of neglected authors has not been even confined to glimmering beauties; it has been extended to the reprinting of large and heavy masses of dulness. Most wretched works have been praised in this enthusiasm for the obsolete; even the dullest works of the meanest contributors to the "Mirror for Magistrates+." It seems to

be taken for granted, that the inspiration of the good old times descended to the very lowest dregs of its versifiers; whereas the bad writers of Elizabeth's age are only more stiff and artificial than those of the preceding, and more prolix than those of the succeeding period.

Yet there are men, who, to all appearance, would wish to revive such authors-not for the mere use of the antiquary, to whom every volume may be useful, but as standards of manner, and objects of general admiration. Books, it is said, take up little room. In the library this may be the case; but it is not so in the minds and time of those who peruse them. Happily indeed, the task of pressing indifferent authors on the public attention is a fruitless one. They may be dug up from oblivion, but life cannot be put into their reputations." Can these bones live?" Nature will have her course, and dull books will be forgotten, in spite of bibliographers.

or That by mere initials. Mr. W. H. was well enough known in his own day; what is enigmatical to us was no obscurity then. T. T. had not dared to address the Earl of Pembroke as Mr. W. H.

The same Mr. W. H. is said to have been "the only begetter of these ensuing Sonnets;" but in what signification is the word used? An instance is given from Dekker, where its purport is to procure. Was Mr. W. H. the procurer-the person by whose means T. T. had been able to print them?-a character akin to the mysterious man who brought the letter of Pope to the piratical Curll; or is he the individual to whom they are addressed? But all is conjecture; one thing however is evident, that if T. T. meant that Mr. W. H. was addressed throughout by the poet, he had never read the Sonnets, for the last twentyeight are to a woman.]

[t The Mirror for Magistrates was one of Haslewood's reprints a heavy man, with no kind or degree of good taste.]

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