them, and with how bad an effect, at leaft to our cars, will appear by a paffage, in which every reader will lament to see juft and noble thoughts defrauded of their praise by inelegance of language:

Where honour or where confcience does not bind, No other law fhall fhackle me;

Slave to myself I ne'er will be;

Nor fhall my future actions be confin'd
By my own prefent mind.

Who by refolves and vows engag'd does stand
For days, that yet belong to fate,
Does like an unthrift mortgage his estate,
Before it falls into his hand,

The bondman of the cloister so,

All that he does receive does always owe.
And ftill as Time comes in, it goes away,
Not to enjoy, but debts to pay!
Unhappy flave, and pupil to a bell!

Which his hours' work as well as hours does tell:
Unhappy till the last, the kind releafing knell.

His heroick lines are often formed of monofyllables; but yet they are sometimes sweet and fonorous.

He fays of the Meffiah,

7

Round

And reach to worlds that must not yet be found.

In another place, of David,

Yet bid him go fecurely, when he fends;
'Tis Saul that is his foe, and we his friends.
The man who has his God, no aid can lack;
And we who bid him go, will bring him back.

Yet amidst his negligence he fometimes attempted an improved and scientifick versification; of which it will be beft to give his own account fubjoined to this line,

Nor can the glory contain itself in th' endless fpace.

"I am forry that it is neceffary to admo"nish the moft part of readers, that it is not

by negligence that this verfe is fo loose, "long, and, as is were, vaft; it is to paint "in the number the nature of the thing "which it defcribes, which I would have ob"ferved in divers other places of this poem, "that else will pafs for very careless verses: "as before,

And over-runs the neighb'ring fields with violent courfe.

"In the fecond book;

Down a precipice deep, down he cafts them all. —

"And,

And fell a-down his shoulders with loofe care. "In the third,

Brafs was his helmet, his boots brass, and o'er His breaft a thick plate of strong brass he wore. "In the fourth,

Like fome fair pine-o'er-looking all th' ignobler wood. “ And,

Some from the rocks caft themselves down headlong. "And many more: but it is enough to "inftance in a few. The thing is, that the

difpofition of words and numbers fhould ❝be fuch, as that, out of the order and found "of them, the things themselves may be re"prefented. This the Greeks were not fo "accurate as to bind themselves to; neither "have our English poets obferved it, for

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aught I can find. The Latins (qui mufas "colunt feveriores) fometimes did it, and "their prince, Virgil, always: in whom the “examples are innumerable, and taken no

❝tice.

"tice of by all judicious men, fo that it is fuperfluous to collect them."

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I know not whether he has, in many of these instances, attained the representation or resemblance that he purposes. Verse can imitate only found and motion. A boundless verse, a beadlong verfe, and a verse of brass or of ftrong brass, seem to comprise very incongruous and unfociable ideas. What there is peculiar in the found of the line expreffing loofe care, I cannot discover; nor why the pine is taller in an Alexandrine than in ten fyllables.

But, not to defraud him of his due praise, he has given one example of representative versification, which perhaps no other English line can equal:

Begin, be bold, and venture to be wife.
He who defers this work from day to day,
-Does on a river's bank expecting stay

Till the whole ftream that ftopp'd him shall be

gone,

Which runs, and as it runs, for ever shall run on.

VOL. I.

H

Cowley

Cowley was, I believe, the firft poet that mingled Alexandrines at pleasure with the common heroick of ten fyllables, and from him Dryden borrowed the practice, whether ornamental or licentious. He confidered the verse of twelve fyllables as elevated and majestick, and has therefore deviated into that measure when he fuppofes the voice heard of the Supreme Being.

The Author of the Davideis is commended by Dryden for having written it in couplets, because he discovered that any staff was too lyrical for an heroick poem; but this feems. to have been known before by May and Sandys, the tranflators of the Pharfalia and the Metamorphofes.

In the Davideis are fome hemiftichs, or verfes left imperfect by the author, in imitation of Virgil, whom he supposes not to have intended to complete them: that this opinion is erroneous, may be probably concluded, because this truncation is imitated by no fubfequent Roman poet; because Virgil himself filled up one broken line in the

heat