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No sails of Tyrian silk proud pavements sweeping
&c. &c.

But walks and unshorn woods ;·

No weeping orphan saw his father's stores
Our shrines irradiate, or emblaze the floors,
No silver saints, by dying misers given,
Here bribe the rage of ill-requited heaven.
But such plain roofs as piety could raise.

In these lone walks.

CRASHAW.

POPE.

POPE.

Crashaw, oddly describing the woods that surround the Religious House, says,

-the natural locks

Of these loose groves, rough as th' unpolished rocks—
This is what Pope means when he says,

Ye grots and caverns shagg'd with horrid thorn.The most tender circumstance in all Pope's Epistle, is, perhaps, the idea beginning at the 347th line.

If ever chance two wandering lovers brings, &c. &c.

This is evidently suggested by a passage in the Alexias, the complaint of the forsaken wife of St. Alexis, 1st Elegy.

And sure where lovers make their watery graves,
The weeping mariner will augment the waves,
For who so hard, but passing by that way,
Will take acquaintance of my woes, and say,
Here 'twas the Roman Maid found a hard fate,

While through the world she sought her wand'ring mate,
Here perish'd she, poor heart! Heavens be my vows
As true to me as she was to her spouse.—

CRASHAW.

If these lines are deficient in elegance, they make it in sentiment and simplicity:

For thee I talk to trees, with silent groves
Expostulate my woes and much wrong'd loves,

up

Hills and relentless rocks, or if there be
Things that in hardness more allude to thee.
CRASHAW, 2 Elegy.

This epithet Pope has taken:

Relentless walks, whose darksome round contains, &c. &c.
How sweet the mutual yoke of man and wife,
When holy fires maintain love's heavenly life!

CRASHAW, 3 Elegy.

Pope, though his idea is different, has an exclamation somewhat similar

Oh happy state! when souls each other draw,
When love is liberty, and nature law.

Crashaw says most beautifully of Hope what Pope has transferred to Faith

Fair Hope! our earlier Heaven, by thee

Young time is taster to eternity.

Fresh blooming Hope, gay daughter of the sky,
And Faith our early immortality.

POPE.

Whether Pope was a reader of the poetry of Phineas Fletcher, I know not; in his Eloisa to Abelard he has the following phrase, which we find likewise in Fletcher:

See my lips tremble and my eye-balls roll,
Suck my last breath, and catch my flying soul.

And by his side, sucking his fleeting breath,
His weeping spouse, Elisa.

РОРЕ.

FLETCHER.

Where sprawl the saints of Verrio and Languerre,

is a line in Pope's Epistles, which Dr. Warton has noticed for the peculiar felicity of the word sprawl: it is used with the same felicity and force by Drayton, B. Warrs, 6 B. XLII. where he describes the painted roof of the tower of Mortimer

Where, as among the naked Cupids sprawl,
Some at the sundry-coloured birds do shoot,
Some swarming up to pick the purp: fruit.

We find a passage in Drayton, B. Warrs, 5 B. XLIII. not unlike lines from the 241 to the 244 Epist. Eloisa to Abelard.

See likewise a passage in Young's Night Thoughts, 1 Night, beginning with,

"Tis past conjecture, all things rise in proof

Drayton has the word touch, in the same sense Pope has used it, in the invocation to his Muse-Polyolb.

Touch my invention so with thy true genuine heat.-

Had Pope been a reader of Quarles, which possibly, by the bye he might have been, notwithstanding he has given him a niche in the Dunciad, he would have taught him the art of reasoning in verse much better than Blackmore, whom Dr. Johnson has recommended for that purpose; there is an energy and compression in some of Quarles lines, not to be found in any of his contemporaries; but, as to versification -what could Dr. Johnson mean by supposing him to stand in need of any instruction on that head? There is a moral and philosophical cast in some passages of Quarles not unlike Pope, in his Essay on Man. See the whole of the 11th Meditation, Job Militant:--

Since thou art dead (Lord), grant thy servant roome
Within his breast to build thy heart a toombe.

These lines of Quarles, p. 75, edit. 1630, contain the same idea with that in Gay's Epitaph, upon which so much has been said:

But that the worthy and the good may say,

Striking their pensive bosoms, "here lies Gray."

POPE. The thought is old; it is said of Sir P. Sidney, by Spenser, In worthy hearts sorrow hath made thy tomb.

Dr. Johnson's criticism on this line of Pope is equally as destitute of common sense as of common feeling.-See Dr. J. Warton, likewise, on Pope, vol. I. p. 95. who calls the idea forced and far-fetched-for which I see no tolerable reason.* 1786, April. T-C-O.

[* We cannot help subscribing to Dr. Warton's opinion. E.]

XCII. Critique on a Passage in Virgil.

MR. URBAN,

June 13.

VIRGIL, in his praises and commendations of a country life, hath the following verse:

Fundit humo facilem victum justissima tellus.
Georg. 2. V. 460.

The peculiar epithet justissima is, I apprehend, copied from the succeeding fragment of Philemon:* though it hath escaped the observation of Macrobius and Ursinus, and is not to be found in the literary dirt which Bentley and Le Clerc amused themselves with exchanging in their publications concerning Menander and Philemon.

ΔΙΚΑΙΟΤΑΤΟΝ κλημ' εσιν ανθρωποις άγξος.
Ων ἡ φύσις δελαι γας επιμελως φερει.

"A field is the justest possession which a man can have, for it diligently produces those things which nature requires."

As the above-mentioned dramatic writers were contemporaries and competitors for theatrical fame, it is not improbable that the following passage of Menander was intended to ridicule the foregoing quotation from Philemon :

Αγρον ευσεβήσερον γεωργείν αδεια

Οίμαι φέρει γας ως Θεοις ανθη καλα,

Κιτίου, δαφνην κριθας δ' εαν σπείρω ΠΑΝΥ
ΔΙΚΑΙΟΣ απέδωκεν του οσσ' αν καταβαλω.

"I am sure no one ever cultivated a more religious field that mine; for it bears beautiful flowers, ivy, and laurel, as if to adorn the altars of the Gods; but if I sow it with barley, this very just field is sure to return me exactly as much as I sowed."

There is a vein of elegant irony in this passage which makes us much regret, that we have not the works of this comic writer complete. We could well have spared all the coarse jests of Aristophanes, which degrade the Athenian audience who could endure them, for a few plays written with the same taste and spirit as this quotation. It is particularly unfortunate that Terence, who is said to have done

[* "rho.ov dizaiтato," occurs in Xenophon's Cyropæd. E.]

little more than translate Menander, should have neglected and omitted every spark of his humour and pleasantry. As it is the distinguishing criterion of genuine wit to bear transferring from one language to another, what could induce Scipio and Lælius, when they assisted Terence, to patronize this defect, which Julius Cæsar, within a century afterward, in his well-known epigram, laments so emphatically?

Comica

Vis

Unum hoc maceror et doleo tibi deesse, Terenti.

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XCIII. Strictures on Dr. Johnson's Criticism on Milton's Latinity.

Fragili quærens illidere dentem

Offendet solido.

HOR.

MILTON'S supreme pleasure, Dr. Johnson says, is to tax his adversary (Salmasius), so renowned for criticism, with vicious Latin. "He opens his book with telling that he has used persona, which, according to Milton, signifies only a mask, in a sense not known to the Romans, by applying it as we apply person. But as Nemesis is always on the watch, it is memorable that he has enforced the charge of solecism by an expression in itself grossly solecistical, when for one of these supposed blunders he says, Propino te grammatistis tuis vapulandum. From vapulo, which has a passive sense, capulandus can never be derived." Lives of English Poets. I will endeavour to shew that the Doctor's criticism is totally without foundation.

We find "vapulando et somno pereo" at the conclusion of the first act of Plautus's Curculio. In the second scene of the fourth act of the Panulus, we have,

Ut enim mihi vapulandum est, tute corium sufferas. And in the Adelphi of Terence (act II. sc. 2.) we read, Ego vapulando, verberando ille, usque ambo defessi sumus.

This critic, finding the word gloriosissimus in a passage he quoted from Milton's Second Defence of the

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