sudden and unexpected transitions. You will hereafter have an opportunity of observing the performance of great masters upon this plan. I might, indeed, refer you to the practice of Dryden himself, in his "Ode to the Memory of Mrs. Killegrew;" a composition which no less a judge than Dr. Johnson has pronounced one of the finest of its class in the English language. I know not that it has received such commendation from any other modern critic; and to me, I confess, it appears such a medley of extravagance and conceit, that I can only account for the favour it has met with from the eminent writer above mentioned, upon the supposition of its having fallen in with one of those early associations, which are continually imposing prejudices upon us in the shape of judgments.

But it is time now to close my so adieu!

lecture:

Your truly affectionate, &c.

LETTER IV.

SUPPOSING my pupil to be well grounded in the harmony and diction of Dryden and Pope, I now proceed to put into her hands other standard writers, who rank in the same poetical class, though they have reached only an inferior point of excellence.

The courtly WALLER, to whom the praise is commonly, but unjustly, given of having been the first who wrote rhymed heroic verse with elegance and correctness, may certainly lay claim to a lady's notice, since to her sex he devoted some of his choicest strains. I am apprehensive, however, that his gallantries may seem to you somewhat far-fetched, and his compliments over-strained, and that, for your own part, you would prefer tenderness to deification. Love, in its highest tone, is, indeed, favourable to poetry, which scorns the limits of

truth and nature, and in every thing affects hyperbole. But in such cases, the fancy is gratified at the expense of the feeling, and fiction occupies the place of reality.

:

There are three topics which poets (and often the same poets) treat in a similar manner; devotion, love, and loyalty or rather, they apply to the two latter, expressions and sentiments borrowed from the former. Thus Waller, speaking of his

Saccharissa;

Scarce can I to Heaven excuse

The devotion which I use

Unto that adored dame,

For 'tis not unlike the same

Which I thither ought to send.

In the piece containing these lines, he has made an ingenious parallel between his high-flown passion for this lady, and that which at the same time he felt for one whom he calls Amoret; and you may make it an exercise of the heart, as well as of the taste, to consider whether you would have chosen to be the poet's Saccharissa or his

Amoret. I am inclined to think that the latter had the best chance of being long and truly loved. We know, from Waller's history, that he did not obtain his Saccharissa, and yet he does not appear to have been a sufferer from amorous disappointment. It is, however, but an idle task to compare a poet's life with his verses; and the grave critics who have spent much pains on such disquisitions with respect to many eminent votaries of the Muses, have only proved how little they entered into the character and feelings of this capricious set of mortals.

In Waller, the affection of loyalty was not less mutable than that of love, and he equally made it the servant of present dominion, in whatever hands. His "Panegyric of Cromwell" is thought to be the composition in which his muse has taken the loftiest flight. The cause of its superiority to others of his adulatory strains was probably the reverse of that which he ingeniously suggested by way of apology to

Charles II." that poets succeed better in fiction than in truth :" it was, that in Cromwell he had a really great though a bad man to celebrate; with whom the indolent and inglorious Charles could stand in no degree of competition. From this piece you may take the measure of his powers in the heroic style. You will find them not inconsiderable, though wanting the support of correct taste and uniform elevation of thought. I imagine, however, that you will receive more pleasure from some of his lighter effusions, in which his fancy sports with ease and grace. The application of the story of Phoebus and Daphne to a poet who obtained the laurel, while he missed the object of his amorous pursuit, was greatly admired in its day, and may, even in this correcter age, be allowed the praise of ingenuity, though its concluding point is but a kind of play on words.. I shall not particularize other pieces, but leave you the agreeable employment of culling from his poetic garden those which best please you.