His starry front low-roofed beneath the skies.
O what a mask was there! what a disguise!
Yet more; the stroke of death he must abide,
Then lies him meekly down fast by his brethren's side.

IV.

These latest scenes confine my roving verse,
To this horizon is my Phoebus bound.
His Godlike acts, and his temptations fierce,
And former sufferings otherwhere are found;
Loud o'er the rest Cremona's trump doth sound.
Me softer airs befit, and softer strings

Of lute, or viol still, more apt for mournful things.

V.

Befriend me, Night, best patroness of grief!

Over the pole thy thickest mantle throw,

And work my flattered fancy to belief,

That heaven and earth are coloured with my woe;

My sorrows are too dark for day to know.

The leaves should all be black whereon I write,

And letters, where my tears have washed, a wannish white.

30

VI.

See, see the chariot, and those rushing wheels,
That whirled the prophet up at Chebar flood!

19. Oh, what, etc.

Alluding to the masks then so much in vogue: see v. 2. 21. Then lies him. It should be lays him. A man lies down; lays him (-self) down. The more usual mistake is lay for lie. We have seen a MS. letter of Addison's in which occurs, "and had it laying by him."

22. latest. later, ed. 1645.-confine, i.e. limit.

26. Loud, etc. Meaning the Christiad of Vida of Cremona.

28. still, i.e. gentle, not loud. See on Il Pens. v. 127.

30. pole. See on Vac. Exercise, v. 34.

34. The leaves, etc. The absurd usage of black title-pages with white letters actually prevailed at that time.

36. See, see, etc. Alluding to the eighth chapter of Ezekiel, in which the Prophet, at Chebar flood,' is, in ecstatic vision, snatched up by him that sat on the chariot with the 'rushing wheels,' and carried to Jerusalem. The young poet seems to have thought that it was one of the Cherubim that transported the Prophet.

My spirit some transporting Cherub feels

To bear me where the towers of Salem stood,

Once glorious towers, now sunk in guiltless blood.
There doth my soul in holy vision sit,

In pensive trance, and anguish, and ecstatic fit.

VII.

Mine eye hath found that sad sepulchral rock,
That was the casket of heaven's richest store,
And here, though grief my feeble hands up-lock,
Yet on the softened quarry would I score
My plaining verse as lively as before;
For sure so well instructed are my tears,
That they would fitly fall in ordered characters.

VIII.

Or should I, thence hurried on viewless wing,
Take up a weeping on the mountains wild,
The gentle neighbourhood of grove and spring
Would soon unbosom all their echoes mild,
And I-for grief is easily beguiled--

Might think the infection of my sorrows loud
Had got a race of mourners from some pregnant cloud.

40

50

This subject the author finding to be above the years he had, when he wrote it, and nothing satisfied with what was begun, left it unfinished.

39. To bear, i.e. bearing. Like the classic and Romanic languages.

40. sunk in guiltless blood, i.e. sunk or ruined on account of having shed the guiltless blood of Jesus.

41. There doth, etc. He had probably the Lamentations of Jeremiah in his mind.

47. as before. As in the Ode on the Nativity?

50. thence hurried, i.e. hurried thence. Hurried is rapt, carried away precipitately. He uses it frequently in Par. Lost.-viewless, i.e. invisible.

51. "For the mountains will I take up a weeping and a wailing." Jer. ix. 10.-W.

56. Had got, etc. Alluding to the story of Ixion. We fear that Dunster had too much reason for saying that the stanza "terminates feebly, in a most miserable, disgusting concetto."

31

ON SHAKESPEARE.-M.

1630.)

WHAT needs my Shakespeare for his honoured bones
The labour of an age in piled stones?

Or that his hallowed reliques should be hid

Under a star-ypointing pyramid?

Dear son of memory, great heir of fame,

What needest thou such weak witness of thy name?
Thou, in our wonder and astonishment,
Hast built thyself a live-long monument.

For whilst, to the shame of slow-endeavouring art,
Thy easy numbers flow, and that each heart
Hath from the leaves of thy unvalued book
Those Delphic lines with deep impression took,
Then thou, our fancy of itself bereaving,
Dost make us marble with too much conceiving;
And so sepulchred in such pomp dost lie,

That kings for such a tomb would wish to die.

10

4. y-pointing. This term is incorrect, for it was only to the past participle that y (A.-S. ge) was prefixed.

5. "Ye English shepherds, sons of memory." Brown, Brit. Past. ii. 1.—T. -heir, i.e. possessor. See on Comus, v. 334.

"And make us heirs of all eternity." Love's Lab. Lost, i. 1.-K.

9. whilst, i.q. when. See on Ode on Nativ. v. 30. When writing this and the following line he may have thought on these words of the editors of Shakespeare's Plays, 1623: "His mind and hand went together, and what he thought he uttered, with that easiness that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers."

11. unvalued, i.e. invaluable. See on Par. Lost, i. 554.

12.

"Inestimable stones, unvalued Jewels." Rich. III. i. 4.—T.
"Utiliumque sagax rerum, et divina futuri,

Sortilegis non discrepuit sententia Delphis." Hor. A. P. 218.-K. 14. Dost make, etc. i.e. we are so entirely absorbed by thy poetry, that we become almost as insensible to external objects as if we were made of marble. 15. sepulchred. Accented like sepulcrum and sepolcro, It.-in such pomp, etc. Todd (on Mansus, v. 16) quotes the following lines from a sonnet of Marino's to the memory of T. Tasso :

:

"Sepolto! ah no; che quanto ammira e sente

Il tuo nome gli è tomba."

This however is a mere coincidence.

10

ON THE UNIVERSITY CARRIER,

WHO SICKENED IN THE TIME OF HIS VACANCY, BEING FORBID TO GO
TO LONDON, BY REASON OF THE PLAGUE.-M.

HERE lies old Hobson. Death hath broke his girt,
And here, alas! hath laid him in the dirt;
Or else the ways being foul, twenty to one,
He is here stuck in a slough, and overthrown.
"T was such a shifter, that, if truth were known,
Death was half glad when he had got him down ;
For he had any time this ten years full
Dodged with him, betwixt Cambridge and the Bull.
And surely Death could never have prevailed,
Had not his weekly course of carriage failed;

But lately finding him so long at home,

And thinking now his journey's end was come,
And that he had ta'en up his latest inn,

In the kind office of a chamberlin

Shewed him his room where he must lodge that night,
Pulled off his boots, and took away the light.

If any ask for him, it shall be said,

Hobson has supped, and is newly gone to bed.

ANOTHER ON THE SAME.-M.

HERE lieth one, who did most truly prove
That he could never die while he could move;

5. 'Twas, i.e. He was. An indefinite familiar mode of expression, like es war, Germ.; c'était, Fr.

7. any time, i.e. at various times.

8. Dodged, i.e. tried to circumvent him. To dodge is merely a form of to dog.—the Bull. This was the inn in Bishopsgate Street at which Hobson used to put up. Hobson's stable at Cambridge was in existence some years ago, and may be still. On the walls we remember seeing a large picture of the old man and his horse.

14. chamberlin. The chamberlain at the inns of those times, like the Italian cameriere of the present day, united in himself the offices of waiter, chambermaid, and Boots.

So hung his destiny, never to rot

While he might still jog on and keep his trot;
Made of sphere-metal, never to decay
Until his revolution was at stay.

Time numbers motion, yet-without a crime
'Gainst old Truth-motion numbered out his time;
And, like an engine moved with wheel and weight,
His principles being ceased, he ended straight.
Rest, that gives all men life, gave him his death,
And too much breathing put him out of breath;
Nor were it contradiction to affirm

Too long vacation hastened on his term.

Merely to drive the time away he sickened,
Fainted, and died, nor would with ale be quickened.
'Nay,' quoth he, on his swooning bed outstretched,
'If I mayn't carry, sure I'll ne'er be fetched,
But vow, though the cross doctors all stood hearers,
For one carrier put down to make six bearers.'
Ease was his chief disease, and, to judge right,
He died for heaviness that his cart went light.
His leisure told him that his time was come,
And lack of load made his life burdensome,

10

20

5. sphere-metal, i.e. metal like that of which the celestial spheres are composed, which are in perpetual motion.

7. Time, etc. i.e. the motion or velocity of a body is computed by the time it takes to go through a given space.

10. His principles, i.e. the weight and wheels by which it acted.-being ceased, i.e. having ceased; or ceased may be used in a causal sense, as in Ode on Nativ. v. 45.

12. breathing, i.e. relaxation. "It is the breathing-time of day with me." Ham. v. 2. "He breathed his sword and rested him till day." F. Q. vi. 11,

47.

14. term, i.e. termination, end. A play on the college term.

18. fetched, i.e. brought. We still say, " Fetch me a porter," etc.

20. For one, etc., i.e. if he is put down, suppressed, put out of employment, or it may be, put down in his grave, there must be six persons to carry his eoffin. Carrier is to be read as in v. 28.

22. heariness, sc. of mind, grief.

26. As, i.e. as if.--were prest to death. On this expression see Life of Milton, p. 265. There is another sense of prest (sc. ready),—

"To warn her foe to battle to be prest." F. Q. v. 7, 27. But it would hardly answer here.

VOL. I.