Not wit, nor piety, could fate prevent;
Nor was the cruel destiny content
To finish all the murder at a blow,

To sweep at once her life and beauty too;

But, like a harden'd felon, took a pride

To work more mischievously flow,
And plunder'd first, and then destroy'd.

O double facrilege on things divine,
To rob the relick, and deface the shrine !

But thus Orinda dy'd :

Heaven, by the fame disease, did both tranflate; As equal were their fouls, so equal was their fate.

IX.

Meantime her warlike brother on the feas His waving streamers to the winds displays, And vows for his return, with vain devotion, pays. Ah, generous youth, that wish forbear, The winds too foon will waft thee here!

Slack all thy fails, and fear to come, Alas, thou know'st not, thou art wreck'd at home! No more shalt thou behold thy sister's face, Thou hast already had her last embrace. But look aloft, and if thou ken'st from far Among the Pleiads a new-kindled star, If any sparkles than the reft more bright; 'Tis she that shines in that propitious light.

Χ.

When in mid-air the golden trump shall found,
To raise the nations under ground;

When in the valley of Jehofhaphat,

The judging God shall close the book of fate;
And there the last affizes keep,

For those who wake, and those who fleep:
When rattling bones together fly,
From the four corners of the sky;
When finews o'er the skeletons are spread,
Those cloth'd with flesh, and life inspires the dead;
The facred poets first shall hear the found,

And foremost from the tomb shall bound,
For they are cover'd with the lightest ground;
And straight, with in-born vigour, on the wing,
Like mounting larks, to the new morning fing.
There thou, sweet Saint, before the quire shall go,
As harbinger of heaven, the way to show,
The way which thou so well hast learnt below.

III.

Upon the Death of the EARL of DUNDEE. Tranflated from the Latin of Dr. PITCAIRN.

0

H last and best of Scots! who didst maintain
Thy country's freedom from a foreign reign;

New people fill the land, now thou art gone,
New gods the temples, and new kings the throne.
Scotland and thou did each in other live;
Nor would'st thou her, nor could she thee survive.
Farewell, who dying didst support the state,
And couldst not fall but with thy country's fate.

ELEOIV.

ELEONORA: A PANEGYRICAL POEM, Dedicated to the Memory of

The late COUNTESS of ABINGDON.

To the Right Honble the Earl of ABINGDON, &C.

MY LORD,

T

me

HE commands with which you honoured fome months ago are now performed: they had been fooner; but betwixt ill health, some business, and many troubles, I was forced to defer them till this time. Ovid, going to his banishment, and writing from on shipboard to his friends, excused the faults of his poetry by his misfortunes; and told them, that good verses never flow but from a serene and composed spirit. Wit, which is a kind of Mercury, with wings fastened to his head and heels, can fly but flowly in a damp air. I therefore chose rather to obey you late than ill; if at least I am capable of writing any thing, at any time, which is worthy your perusal and your patronage. I cannot say that I have escaped from a shipwreck; but have only gained a rock by hard fwimming; where I may pant a while and gather breath: for the doctors give me a fad assurance, that my disease never took its leave of any man, but with a purpose to return. However, my lord, I have laid held on the interval,

interval, and managed the small stock, which age has left me, to the best advantage, in performing this inconfiderable service to my lady's memory. We, who are priests of Apollo, have not the inspiration when we please; but must wait till the God comes rushing on us, and invades us with a fury which we are not able to refift: which gives us double strength while the fit continues, and leaves us languishing and spent at its departure. Let me not feem to boast, my lord; for I have really felt it on this occafion, and prophefied beyond iny natural power. Let me add, and hope to be believed, that the excellency of the subject contributed much to the happiness of the execution; and that the weight of thirty years was taken off me while I was writing. I swam with the tide, and the water under me was buoyant. The reader will easily observe, that I was transported by the multitude and variety of my fimilitudes; which are generally the product of a luxuriant fancy, and the wantonnefs of wit. Had I called in my judgment to my assistance, I had certainly retrenched many of them. But I defend them not; let them pass for beautiful faults amongst the better fort of critics: for the whole poem, though written in that which they call Heroic verse, is of the Pindaric nature, as well in the thought as the expression; and, as fuch, requires the fame grains of allowance for it. It was intended, as your lordship fees in the title, not for an elegy, but a panegyric: a kind of apotheosis, indeed, if a Heathen word may be applied to a Chriftian ufe. And on all occafions of praise, if we take the Ancients

for

for our patterns, we are bound by prescription to employ the magnificence of words, and the force of figures, to adorn the fublimity of thoughts. Ifocrates amongst the Grecian orators, and Cicero and the Younger Pliny amongst the Romans, have left us their precedents for our security: for I think I need not mention the inimitable Pindar, who stretches on these pinions out of fight, and is carried upward, as it were, into another world.

This, at least, my lord, I may justly plead, that, if I have not performed so well as I think I have, yet I have ufed my best endeavours to excel myself. One disadvantage I have had; which is, never to have known or seen my lady: and to draw the lineaments of her mind from the defcription which I have received from others, is for a painter to set himself at work without the living original before him: which, the more beautiful it is, will be so much the more difficult for him to conceive, when he has only a relation given him of fuch and fuch features by an acquaintance or a friend, without the nice touches which give the best resemblance, and make the graces of the picture. Every artist is apt enough to flatter himself (and I amongst the reft) that their own ocular observations would have difcovered more perfections, at least others, than have been delivered to them: though I have received mine from the best hands, that is, from persons who neither want a just understanding of my lady's worth, nor a due veneration for her memory.

Doctor Donne, the greatest wit, though not the greatest poet of our nation, acknowledges, that he had