Muse begin her career; but there is yet more

to be done.

Let the poftilion Nature mount, and let
The coachman Art be fet;

And let the airy footmen, running all befide,
Make a long row of goodly pride;

Figures, conceits, raptures, and fentences,
In a well-worded drefs,

And innocent loves, and pleasant truths, and
ufeful lies,

In all their gaudy liveries.

Every mind is now difgufted with this cumber of magnificence; yet I cannot refuse myself the four next lines :

Mount, glorious queen, thy travelling throne,
And bid it to put on ;

For long though cheerful is the way,
And life alas allows but one ill winter's day,

In the fame ode, celebrating the power of the Mufe, he gives her prefcience, or, in poetical language, the forefight of events hatching in futurity; but having once an egg in his mind, he cannot forbear to fhew us that he knows what an egg contains:

Thou into the clofe nefts of Time doft peep,

And there with piercing eye

Through the firm fhell and the thick white

doft fpy

Years to come a-forming lie,

Clofe in their facred fecundine asleep.

The fame thought is more generally, and therefore more poetically, expreffed by Cafimir, a writer who has many of the beauties and faults of Cowley:

Omnibus mundi Dominator horis
Aptat urgendas per inane pennas,

Pars adhuc nido latet, & futuros

Crefcit in annos.

Cowley, whatever was his fubject, feems to have been carried, by a kind of destiny, to the light and the familiar, or to conceits which require still more ignoble epithets. A flaughter in the Red Sea, new dies the waters name; and England, during the Civil War, was Albion no more, nor to be named from white. It is furely by fome fafcination not eafily furmounted, that a writer profeffing to revive the nobleft and highest writing in verfe, makes this address to the new year:

Nay,

Nay, if thou lov'ft me, gentle year,

Let not fo much as love be there,

Vain fruitless love I mean; for, gentle year,

Although I fear,

There's of this caution little need,
Yet, gentle year, take heed

How thou doft make

Such a mistake;

Such love I mean alone

As by thy cruel predeceffors has been fhewn;
For, though I have too much cause to doubt it,
I fain would try, for once, if life can live with-
out it.

The reader of this will be inclined to cry out with Prior

Ye Criticks, say,

How poor to this was Pindar's ftyle!

Even those who cannot perhaps find in the Ifthmian or Nemeæan fongs what Antiquity has difpofed them to expect, will at least see that they are ill reprefented by fuch puny poetry; and all will determine that if this be the old Theban ftrain, it is not worthy of revival.

To the difproportion and incongruity of Cowley's fentiments must be added the uncertainty and looseness of his measures. He takes the liberty of using in any place a verse of any length, from two fyllables to twelve. The verses of Pindar have, as he obferves, very little harmony to a modern ear; yet by examining the fyllables we perceive them to be regular, and have reafon enough for supposing that the ancient audiences were delighted with the found. The imitator ought therefore to have adopted what he found, and to have added what was wanting; to have preferved a conftant return of the same numbers, and to have fupplied fmoothness of tranfition and continuity of thought.

It is urged by Dr. Sprat, that the irregularity of numbers is the very thing which makes that kind of poefy fit for all manner of fubjects. But he should have remembered, that what is fit for every thing can fit nothing well. The great pleasure of verfe arifes from the known measure of the lines, and uniform ftructure of the ftanzas, by which the voice is regulated, and the memory relieved.

If the Pindarick ftyle be, what Cowley thinks it, the higheft and nobleft kind of writing in verse, it can be adapted only to high and noble subjects; and it will not be easy to reconcile the poet with the critick, or to conceive how that can be the highest kind of writing in verse, which, according to Sprat, is chiefly to be preferred for its near affinity to profe.

This lax and lawless verfification fo much concealed the deficiencies of the barren, and flattered the laziness of the idle, that it immediately overfpread our books of poetry; all the boys and girls caught the pleasing fashion, and they that could do nothing else could write like Pindar. The rights of antiquity were invaded, and diforder tried to break into the Latin: a poem on the Sheldonian Theatre, in which all kinds of verfe are shaken together, is unhappily inserted in the Mufe Anglicana. Pindarifm prevailed above half a century; but at last died gradually away, and other imitations fupply its place.

The