stories which Horace has introduced into his second epistle, with so much nature and humour; namely, the story of the slave-seller, at verse 2; that of the soldier of Lucullus, at verse 26; and the story of the madman at Argos, verse 128. The last, particularly, loses much of its grace and propriety, by transferring the scene from the theatre to the parliament-house; from poetry to politics.

64. Two noblemen of taste and learning, the Duke of Shrewsbury and the Earl of Oxford, desired POPE to melt down, and cast anew, the weighty bullion of Dr. Donne's Satires; who had degraded and deformed a vast fund of sterling wit, and strong sense, by the most harsh and uncouth diction. POPE succeeded in giving harmony to a writer, more rough and rugged than even any of his age, and who profited so little by the example Spenser had set, of a most musical and mellifluous versification; far beyond the versification of Fairfax, who is so frequently mentioned as the greatest improver of the harmony of our language. The Satires of Hall, written in very smooth and pleasing numbers, preceded

preceded those of Donne many years; for his Virgidemiarum were published, in six books, in the year 1597; in which he calls himself the very first English satirist. This, however, was not true, in fact; for Sir Thomas Wyatt, of Allington Castle, in Kent, the friend and favourite of Henry VIII. and, as was suggested, of Ann Boleyn, was our first writer of satire worth notice. But it was not in his numbers only that Donne was reprehensible. He abounds in false thoughts; in far-sought sentiments; in forced, unnatural conceits. He was the corrupter of Cowley. Dryden was the first who called him a metaphysical poet. He had a considerable share of learning; and though he entered late into orders,

* He was one of our poets who wrote elegantly in Latin; as did Ben Jonson, (who translated into that language great. part of Bacon de Augmentis Scient.) Cowley, Milton, Addison, and Gray. In Donne's introduction to his witty catalogue of curious books, written plainly in imitation of Rabelais, (whom also Swift imitated, in a catalogue of odd treatises, prefixed to the Tale of a Tub,) there is a passage so minutely applicable to the present times, that I am tempted to transcribe it. Evum sortiti sumus, quo planè indoctis nihil turpius, plenè doctis nihil rarius. Tam omnes in literis aliquid sciunt, tam nemo omnia. Mediâ igitur plerumque itur viâ, & ad evitandam ig. norantiæ turpitudinem, & legendi fastidium.

orders, yet was esteemed a good divine. James 1: was so earnest to prefer him in the church, that he even refused the Earl of Somerset, his favourite, the request he earnestly made, of giving Donne an office in the council. In the entertaining account of that conversation which Ben Jonson is said to have held with Mr. Drummond of Hawthornden, in Scotland, in the year 1619, containing his judgments of the English poets, he speaks thus of Donne, who was his intimate friend, and had frequently addrest him in various poems. "Donne was originally a poet: his grandfather, on the mother's side, was Heywood, the epigrammatist; that Donne, for not being understood, would perish. He esteemed him the first poet in the world for some things: his verses of the lost Ochadine he had by heart, and that passage of the calm, that dust and feathers did not stir, all was so quiet. He affirmed, that Donne wrote all his best pieces before he was twenty-five years of age. The conceit of Donne's transformation, or metempsychosis, was, that he sought the soul of that apple which Eve pulled, and hereafter made it the soul of a bitch, then of a she-wolf, and so of a woman: his ge

1

neral

He

neral purpose was to have brought it into all the bodies of the heretics, from the soul of Cain, and at last left it in the body of Calvin. only wrote one sheet of this, and since he was made doctor repented earnestly, and resolved to destroy all his poems. He told Donne, that his Anniversary was prophane, and full of blasphemies; that if it had been written on the Virgin Mary, it had been tolerable: to which Donne answered, that he described the idea of a woman, and not as she was.

65. The two Dialogues, entitled One Thousand Seven Hundred and Thirty-Eight, which are the last pieces that belong to this section, were more frequently transcribed, and received more alterations and corrections, than almost any of the foregoing poems. By long habit of writing, and almost constantly in one sort of measure, he had

now

*And B. Jonson again in his Discoveries :-" As it is fit to read the best authors to youth first, so let them be of the openest and the clearest. As Livy before Sallust, and Sydney before Donne." But Milton, in one of his Latin letters, prefers Sallust to all the Roman historians.

now arrived at a happy and elegant familiarity of style, without flatness. The satire in these pieces is of the strongest kind; sometimes direct and declamatory; at others, ironical, and oblique. It must be owned to be carried to excess. Our country is represented as totally ruined, and overwhelmed with dissipation, depravity, and corruption. Yet this very country, so emasculated and debased by every species of folly and wickedness, in about twenty years afterwards, carried its triumphs over all its enemies, through all the quarters of the world, and astonished the most distant nations with a display of uncommon efforts, abilities, and virtues. So vain and groundless are the prognostications of poets, as well as politicians. It is to be lamented, that no genius could be found to write an One Thousand Seven Hundred and Sixty One, as a counterpart to these two satires. Several passages deserve particular notice and applause. The design of the Friend, introduced in these dialogues, is to dissuade our

poet

* We cannot ascribe these successes, as M. de Voltaire does, to the effects of Brown's Estimate. See Additions à P'Hist, Generale, p. 409.