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Absent from thee I languish still,
Then ask me not, when I return?
The straying fool 'twill plainly kill

To wish all day, all night to mourn.

Dear, from thine arms then let me fly,
That my fantastic mind may prove
The torments it deserves to try,

That tears my fixed heart from my love.

When, wearied with a world of woe,

To thy safe bosom I retire,

Where love and peace and honour flow,
May I contented there expire.

Lest once more wandering from that heaven,
I fall on some base heart unblessed,

Faithless to thee, false, unforgiven,
And lose my everlasting rest.

EPITAPH ON CHARLES II.

Here lies our Sovereign Lord the King,
Whose word no man relies on,

Who never said a foolish thing,
Nor ever did a wise one.

1

THOMAS OTWAY.

[THOMAS OTWAY was born at Trottin, in Sussex, March 3, 1651, and died at Tower Hill, April 14, 1685, choked by a mouthful of bread ravenously eaten when he was at the brink of starvation. His most famous tragedies, The Orphan, and Venice Preserved, were printed respectively in 1680 and 1682.]

This is not the place to dwell on the splendid tragic genius of Otway, or to discuss his abject failure as a comedian. He claims our attention here on the score of two slender quartos of nondramatic verse, The Poet's Complaint of his Muse, 1680, and Windsor Castle, 1685. The latter is a political and descriptive piece in the heroic measure; it is modelled on Denham's Cooper's Hill, and betrays, notwithstanding some felicitous passages, the fatigue which was stealing over the dying author. But The Poet's Complaint of his Muse is a much more original and powerful poem ; it is written in the irregular measure called 'Pindaric,' and contains a satirical portrait of the poet and of his times, drawn without charm or colour, but in firm, bold lines, like a harsh engraving. Otway displays more observation of nature than most of his contemporaries; but when he draws the world we live in, he is a draughtsman even sterner than Crabbe. We quote as an example of this important but rugged and unattractive poem the first strophe, which contains some picturesque and vivid lines. It should be remarked that Otway was absolutely unable to write even a fairly good song. EDMUND W. GOSSE.

FROM THE POET'S COMPLAINT OF HIS MUSE.'

To a high hill where never yet stood tree,
Where only heath, coarse fern, and furzes grow,
Where, nipped by piercing air,

The flocks in tattered fleeces hardly graze,
Led by uncouth thoughts and care,

Which did too much his pensive mind amaze,
A wandering bard, whose Muse was crazy grown,
Cloyed with the nauseous follies of the buzzing town,

Came, looked about him, sighed, and laid him down.
'Twas far from any path, but where the earth
Was bare, and naked all as at her birth,

When by the Word it first was made,
Ere God had said:-

:

Let grass and herbs and every green thing grow, With fruitful herbs after their kinds, and it was so. The whistling winds blew fiercely round his head; Cold was his lodging, hard his bed;

Aloft his eyes on the wide heavens he cast,
Where, we are told, peace only is found at last;
And as he did its hopeless distance see,

Sighed deep, and cried 'How far is peace from me!'

JOHN OLDHAM.

[BORN August 9, 1653, at Shipton, near Tedbury, in Gloucestershire; after taking his degree at Oxford, spent three years as usher at the Croydon Free School, and not long afterwards settled among the wits in London. He died December 9, 1683, on a visit to the Earl of Kingston at HolmesPierpont in Nottinghamshire.]

Certain features in the brief life of Oldham, as well as in the verse to which his name owes its celebrity, have very naturally engaged the attention of historical enquirers, while others have attracted the sympathy of literary students. He seems really to have valued that independence of which authors too often only prate; he left it to the leaders of fashionable society and of fashionable literature to seek him out in his obscurity; and when he ventured to publish his poems, he published them without a patron. But if he had a high spirit, he lacked the equally noble possession of an unfettered mind. Even a domestic chaplain in the Restoration days-such a one as Oldham has painted in one of the following extracts, and such as Macaulay, largely following Oldham, has repainted in a well-known passage of his History-may have in him more of human dignity and freedom than the flatterer of popular fury and the pandar to mob-prejudice. Oldham was the laureate of the Popish Plot frenzy; and his laurels are accordingly stained with much mire and with much blood.

To what lengths the fanaticism of excited popular feeling, together with an inborn love of strong language, can carry a bold and facile pen, the second of the following extracts will suffice to show. It illustrates the indignation which inspired Oldham's most sustained series of efforts, and the unreasoning violence and malignant exuberance of his invective, together with its frequent bad rhymes and occasional bad grammar. He has been repeatedly compared with Dryden, whose earlier and worse

manner he imitated in his own earlier efforts, but whom he preceded as a satirist. It is in the latter capacity only that Oldham is memorable among our poets; for his panegyrical and other odes are laboured without being effective; his paraphrases have the flatness too common to their kind; and the rest of his verse, though occasionally pleasing, has no peculiar value. But on the roll of our later poetic satirists, which begins with Donne and ends with Gifford, Oldham occupies a far from insignificant place. Both Johnson and Pope may have owed something to him; but by Dryden he was valued and acknowledged as to him the most congenial of his fellow-authors. At the time of Oldham's death Dryden, though a supporter of the Court, was not yet a Roman Catholic; and there was accordingly no stint in the praise which, with his usual magnanimity, he offered on the early death of his younger predecessor. He had but one exception to take, and even this he was ready himself to overrule. Had Oldham lived longer, Dryden wrote, advancing age

'might (what Nature never gives the young)
Have taught the numbers of thy native tongue;
But satire needs not these, and wit will shine
Through the harsh cadence of a rugged line.'

To us there is much besides defects of form to overlook or forgive in Oldham. His most famous satires have the reek of an essentially grosser flame than that in which the greatest masters of poetic satire, ancient or modern, forged their darts. But he was capable of productions tempered with nicer art if with less expenditure of vigour than those by which he is best known. His Imitations of Horace, Juvenal, and Boileau are all more or less felicitous; and in a few shorter original pieces of the same cast he shows occasional lightness as well as his habitual strength of touch. It should certainly not be forgotten that he died at thirty-one, and that the species of poetry in which he was chiefly gifted for excelling was one more especially suited to matured powers. And to have been the foremost English writer of satire at a time when Dryden was already famous, though not in this branch of poetry, was to have secured a fair title to remembrance.

A. W. WARD.

VOL. II.

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