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There Shakspeare! on whose forehead climb The crowns o' the world! O eyes sublimeWith tears and laughter for all time!

MRS. E. B. BROWNING.

The glory dies not, and the grief is past.

SIR S. E. BRYDGES: Death of Sir Walter Scott.

Where sense with sound and ease with weight combine

In the pure silver of Pope's ringing line;
Or where the pulse of man beats loud and strong
In the frank flow of Dryden's lusty song.
BULWER: New Timon.

When Bishop Berkeley said, "There was no matter,"

And proved it-'twas no matter what he said.
BYRON.

Evergreen forest! which Boccaccio's lore
And Dryden's lay made haunted ground to me,
How have I loved the twilight hour and thee!

BYRON.

Cervantes smiled Spain's chivalry away.

BYRON.

Yet truth will sometimes lend her noblest fires,
And decorate the verse herself inspires:
This fact, in Virtue's name, let Crabbe attest:
Though Nature's sternest painter, yet the best.
BYRON: English Bards and Scotch Reviewers.

And stoic Franklin's energetic shade,
Robed in the lightning which his hand allay'd.
BYRON: Age of Bronze.

The starry Galileo with his woes.

BYRON: Childe Harold. The blind old man of Scio's rocky isle. BYRON: Bride of Abydos. Think you, if Laura had been Petrarch's wife, He would have written sonnets all his life?

BYRON.

The self-torturing sophist, wild Rousseau, The apostate of affection-he who threw Ecchantment over passion, and from woe Wrung overwhelming eloquence.

BYRON: Childe Harold.

The isles of Greece! the isles of Greece! Where burning Sappho loved and sung.

BYRON.

The Ariosto of the North.

BYRON: Childe Harold.

Sighing that nature form'd but one such man, And broke the die-in moulding Sheridan.

BYRON.

And aye that volume on her lap is thrown, Which every heart of human mould endears; With Shakspeare's self she speaks and smiles alone,

And no intruding visitation fears

To shame the unconscious laugh or stop her sweetest tears.

CAMPBELL: Gertrude of Wyoming. And rival all but Shakspeare's name below. CAMPBELL: Pleasures of Hope. Condorcet filter'd through the dregs of Paine. CANNING: Anti-Jacobin.

Be that blind bard, who on the Chian strand By those deep sounds possess'd with inward light,

Beheld the Iliad and the Odyssee
Rise to the swelling of the voiceful sea.

COLERIDGE: Fancy in Nubibus. Too nicely Jonson knew the critic's part; Nature in him was almost lost in Art.

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Noble Boyle, not less in nature seen
Than his great brother read in states and men.
DRYDEN.

Great Fletcher never treads in buskins here,
Nor greater Jonson dares in socks appear.
DRYDEN.

In easy dialogues is Fletcher's praise:
He moved the mind, but had not pow'r to raise.
DRYDEN.

When did his muse from Fletcher scenes purloin,
As thou whose Eth'ridge dost transfuse to thine?
But so transfused as oil and waters flow:
His always floats above, thine sinks below.
DRYDEN.
Ganfride, who couldst so well in rhyme com-
plain

The death of Richard, with an arrow slain.
DRYDEN.
Homer, whose name shall live in epic song,
While music numbers, or while verse has feet.
DRYDEN.

Three poets, in three distant ages born,
Greece, Italy, and England did adorn:
The first in majesty of thought surpass'd,
The next in gracefulness; in both the last.
The force of nature could no further go:
To make a third she join'd the other two.
DRYDEN: On Milton.

Horace, with sly insinuating grace,
Laugh'd at his friend, and look'd him in the
face;

Would raise a blush where secret vice he found, And tickle while he gently probed the wound; With seeming innocence the crowd beguiled, But made the desperate passes when he smiled. DRYDEN.

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That good man, who drank the pois'nous Their discords sting through Burns and Moore,

draught

With mind serene, and could not wish to see His vile accuser drink as deep as he.

DRYDEN.

Burns o'er the plough sung sweet his woodnotes wild,

And richest Shakspeare was a poor man's child.
E. ELLIOTT.

O ye muses! deign your bless'd retreat,
Where Horace wantons at your spring,
And Pindar sweeps a bolder string.

FENTON.
Morals snatch from Plutarch's tatter'd page,
A mildew'd Bacon, or Stagyra's sage.
GAY.
Thus flourish'd love, and beauty reign'd in state,
Till the proud Spaniard gave this glory's date:
Past is the gallantry; the fame remains,
Transmitted safe in Dryden's lofty scenes.

GRANVILLE.

Dryden himself, to cure a frantic age,
Was forced to let his judgment stoop to rage;
To a wild audience he conform'd his voice,
Complied to custom, but not err'd through
choice:

Deem then the people's, not the writer's sin,
Almansor's rage, and rants of Maximin.

GRANVILLE.

Homer shall last, like Alexander, long; As much recorded, and as often sung.

GRANVILLE.

Like hedgehogs dress'd in lace.

O. W. HOLMES: Music Grinders.

Good Homer sometimes nods.

HORACE.

Each change of many-colour'd life he drew,
Exhausted worlds, and then imagined new:
Existence saw him spurn her bounded reign,
And panting Time toil'd after him in vain.
DR. S. JOHNSON.
From Marlborough's eyes the streams of dotage
flow,

And Swift expires a driveller and a show.
DR. S. JOHNSON: Vanity of Human Wishes.
Martial, thou gav'st far nobler epigrams
To thy Domitian than I can my James;
But in my royal subject I pass thee,
Thou flattered'st thine, mine cannot flatter'd be.
BEN JONSON.

Soule of the Age!

The applause! delight! the wonder of our
Stage!

My Shakespeare, rise; I will not lodge thee by
Chaucer, or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lye
A little further, to make thee a roome:
Thou art a Monument, without a tombe,
And art aliue still, while thy Booke doth liue,
And we haue wits to read, and praise to giue.
BEN JONSON: Preface to First Folio, 1622.
And half had stagger'd that stout Stagirite.
LAMB.

Love warms our fancy with enliv'ning fires,
Refines our genius, and our verse inspires;
From him Theocritus, on Enna's plains,
Learnt the wild sweetness of his Doric strains;
Virgil by him was taught the moving art,
That charm'd each ear and soften'd every heart.
LORD LYTTELTON.

For his chaste Muse employ'd her heaventaught lyre

None but the noblest passions to inspire;
Not one immoral, one corrupted thought,
One line which, dying, he could wish to blot.
LORD LYTTELTON: Prologue to Thomson's
Coriolanus.

What neede my Shakespeare for his honour'd bones,

The labour of an Age in piled stones,

Or that his hallow'd Reliques should be hid
Under a star-ypointing pyramid?

Dear Sonne of Memory, great Heire of Fame,
What need'st thou such weak witness of thy
Name?

Thou in our wonder and astonishment
Hast built thyselfe a lasting Monument:
For whilst, to th' shame of slow-endevouring Art,
Thy easie numbers flow, and that each part
[heart]

Hath from the leaves of thy unvalued Booke, Those Delphicke Lines with deep Impression tooke;

Then thou, our fancy of herself bereaving,
Dost make us Marble with too much conceiving,
And so Sepulcher'd, in such pompe does lie,
That Kings for such a Tombe would wish to die.
MILTON.

Or sweetest Shakspeare, fancy's child, Warble his native wood-notes wild.

MILTON.

The plain good man, whose actions teach
More virtue than a sect can preach,
Pursues his course unsagely blest,
His tutor whisp'ring in his breast:
Nor could he act a purer part
Though he had Tully all by heart;
And when he drops the tear on woe,
He little knows, or cares to know,
That Epictetus blamed that tear,
By Heav'n approved, to virtue dear.

MOORE.

Oh! who that has ever had rapture complete Would ask how we feel it, or why it is sweet;

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No longer now that golden age appears,
When patriarch-wits survived a thousand years;
Now length of fame, our second life, is lost,
And bare threescore is all ev'n that can boast;
Our sons their fathers' failing language see,
And such as Chaucer is, shall Dryden be.

POPE.

Less reading than makes felon 'scape,
Less human genius than God gives an ape,
Can make a Cibber.

POPE.

With equal rays immortal Tully shone:
Behind, Rome's genius waits with civic crowns,
And the great father of his country owns.

РОРЕ.

Begone, ye critics, and restrain your spite;
Codrus writes on, and will forever write.

POPE.
Who now reads Cowley? If he pleases yet,
His moral pleases, not his pointed wit.

POPE.

Yet time ennobles or degrades each line;
It brighten'd Craggs's, and may darken thine.
POPE.

Earless on high stood unabash'd Defoe,
And Tutchin, flagrant from the scourge, below.
POPE.

Leave such to tune their own dull rhymes, and know

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Be Homer's works your study;
Thence form your judgment, thence your notions
bring,
And trace the muses upwards to their spring.
POPE.

See Dionysius Homer's thoughts refine,

What's roundly smooth, or languishingly slow; And call new beauties forth from ev'ry line. And praise the easy vigour of a line

Where Denham's strength and Waller's sweetness join.

POPE.

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POPE. Those oft are stratagems which errors seem; Nor is it Homer nods, but we who dream.

POPE.

Horace still charms with graceful negligence,
And without method talks us into sense;
Will, like a friend, familiarly convey
The truest notions in the easiest way.

POPE.

There are, who to my person pay their court;
I cough like Horace, and, though lean, am short.
Amnon's great son one shoulder had too high;
Such Ovid's nose, and, sir! you have an eye!
POPE.

Whether the darken'd room to muse invite,
Or whiten'd wall provoke the skewer to write;
In durance, exile, Bedlam, or the Mint,
Like Lee or Budgell, I will rhyme and print.
POPE.

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