"Whoever comes to shroud me, do not harm

Nor question much

That subtle wreath of hair, about mine arm;

The mystery, the sign you must not touch."

The scholastic reason he gives quite dissolves the charm of tender and touching grace in the sentiment itself—

"For 'tis my outward soul,

Viceroy to that, which unto heaven being gone,
Will leave this to control,

And keep these limbs, her provinces, from dissolution."

Again, the following lines, the title of which is 'Love's Deity,' are highly characteristic of this author's manner, in which the thoughts are inlaid in a costly but imperfect mosaic-work.

"I long to talk with some old lover's ghost,
Who died before the God of Love was born;
I cannot think that he, who then loved most,
Sunk so low, as to love one which did scorn.
But since this God produc'd a destiny,
And that vice-nature, custom, lets it be;

I must love her that loves not me."

The stanza in the 'Epithalamion on a Count Palatine of the Rhine,' has been often quoted against him, and is an almost irresistible illustration of the extravagances to which this kind of writing, which turns upon a pivot of words and possible allusions, is liable. Speaking of the bride and bridegroom he says, by way of serious compliment

"Here lies a she-Sun, and a he-Moon there,
She gives the best light to his sphere;

Or each is both and all, and so

They unto one another nothing owe."

His love-verses and epistles to his friends give the most favourable idea of Donne. His satires are too clerical. He shows, if I may so speak, too much disgust, and, at the same time, too much contempt for vice. His dogmatical invectives hardly redeem the nauseousness of his descriptions, and compromise the imagination of his readers more than they assist their reason.

The satirist does not write with the same authority as the divine, and should use his poetical privileges more sparingly. "To the pure all things are pure," is a maxim which a man like Dr. Donne may be justified in applying to himself; but he might have recollected that it could not be construed to extend to the generality of his readers, without benefit of clergy.

Bishop Hall's Satires are coarse railing in verse, and hardly that. Pope has, however, contrived to avail himself of them in some of his imitations.

Sir John Davies is the author of a poem on the Soul, and of one on Dancing. In both he shows great ingenuity, and sometimes terseness and vigour. In the last of these two poems his fancy pirouettes in a very lively and agreeable manner, but something too much in the style of a French opera-dancer, with sharp angular turns, and repeated deviations from the faultless line of simplicity and nature.

Crashaw was a writer of the same ambitious stamp, whose imagination was rendered still more inflammable by the fervours of fanaticism, and who having been converted from Protestantism to Popery (a weakness to which the "seething brains” of the poets of this period were prone) by some visionary appearance of the Virgin Mary, poured out his devout raptures and zealous enthusiasm in a torrent of poetical hyperboles. The celebrated Latin epigram on the miracle of our Saviour, "The water blushed into wine," is in his usual hectic manner. His translation of the contest between the Musician and the Nightingale is the best specimen of his powers.

Davenant's 'Gondibert' is a tissue of stanzas, all aiming to be wise and witty, each containing something in itself, and the whole together amounting to nothing. The thoughts separately require so much attention to understand them, and arise so little out of the narrative, that they with difficulty sink into the mind, and have no common feeling of interest to recall or link them together afterwards. The general style may be judged of by these two memorable lines in the description of the skeletonchamber.

"Yet on that wall hangs he too, who so thought,
And she dried by him whom that he obeyed."

Mr. Hobbes, in a prefatory discourse, has thrown away a good deal of powerful logic and criticism in the recommendation of the plan of his friend's poem. Davenant, who was poet-laureate to Charles II., wrote several masques and plays which were well received in his time, but have not come down with equal applause to us.

Marvel (on whom I have already bestowed such praise as I could, for elegance and tenderness in his descriptive poems) in his satires and witty pieces was addicted to the affected and involved style here reprobated, as in his 'Flecknoe' (the origin of Dryden's 'Macflecknoe') and in his satire on the Dutch. As an instance of this forced, far-fetched method of treating his subject, he says, in ridicule of the Hollanders, that when their dykes overflowed, the fish used to come to table with them,

And sat not as a meat, but as a guest."

There is a poem of Marvel's on the death of King Charles I., which I have not seen, but which I have heard praised by one whose praise is never high but of the highest things, for the beauty and pathos, as well as the generous frankness of the sen timents, coming, as they did, from a determined and incorruptible political foe.

Shadwell was a successful and voluminous dramatic writer of much the same period. His 'Libertine' (taken from the celebrated Spanish story) is full of spirit; but it is the spirit of licentiousness and impiety. At no time do there appear to have been such extreme speculations afloat on the subject of religion and morality, as there were shortly after the Reformation, and afterwards under the Stuarts, the differences being widened by political irritation; and the Puritans often over-acting one extreme out of grimace and hypocrisy, as the king's party did the other out of bravado.

Carew is excluded from his pretensions to the laureateship in Suckling's 'Sessions of the Poets,' on account of his slowness. His verses are delicate and pleasing, with a certain feebleness, but with very little tincture of the affectation of this period. His masque (called 'Calum Britannicum') in celebration of a marriage at court, has not much wit or fancy, but the accompanying

prose directions and commentary on the mythological story, are written with wonderful facility and elegance, in a style of famil iar dramatic dialogue approaching nearer the writers of Queen Anne's reign than those of Queen Elisabeth's.

Milton's name is included by Dr. Johnson in the list of metaphysical poets on no better authority than his lines on Hobson the Cambridge Carrier, which he acknowledges were the only ones Milton wrote on this model. Indeed, he is the great contrast to that style of poetry, being remarkable for breadth and massiness, or what Dr. Johnson calls "aggregation of ideas," beyond almost any other poet. He has in this respect been compared to Michael Angelo, but not with much reason: his verses

are

"inimitable on earth

By model, or by shading pencil drawn.”

Suckling is also ranked, without sufficient warrant, among the metaphysical poets. Sir John was "of the court, courtly;" and his style almost entirely free from the charge of pedantry and affectation. There are a few blemishes of this kind in his works, but they are but few. His compositions are almost all of them short and lively effusions of wit and gallantry, written in a familiar but spirited style, without much design or effort. His shrewd and taunting address to a desponding lover will sufficiently vouch for the truth of this account of the general cast of his best pieces.

If of herself she will not love,

Nothing can make her;

The Devil take her."

The two short poems against Fruition, that beginning, "There never yet was woman made, nor shall, but to be cursed,"—the song, I pr'ythee, spare me gentle boy, Press me no more for that slight toy, That foolish trifle of a heart,”—another, ""Tis now, since I sat down before That foolish fort, a heart,"—Lutea Alanson-the set of similes, "Hast thou seen the down in the air, When wanton winds have tost it," and his "Dream," which is of a more tender and romantic cast, are all exquisite in their way. They are the origin of the style of Prior and Gay in their short fugitive verses, and of the songs in the 'Beggar's Opera.' His 'Ballad on a Wedding' is his masterpiece, and is indeed unrivalled in that class of composition, for the voluptuous delicacy of the sentiments, and the luxuriant richness of the images. I wish I could repeat the whole, but that, from the change of manners, is impossible. The description of the brid is (half of it) as follows: the story is supposed to be told countryman to another:

one