And take his bag, but thus much know,
When next he came a pilfering so,

He should from her full lips derive
Honey enough to fill his hive."

Of Marvell I have spoken with such praise as appears to me his due, on another occasion; but the public are deaf, except to proof or to their own prejudices, and I will therefore give an example of the sweetness and power of his verse.

"To his Coy Mistress.

Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.

We would sit down and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love's day.
Thou by the Indian Ganges' side
Should'st rubies find: I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the flood;
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires, and more slow,
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast;
But thirty thousand to the rest.
An age at least to every part,

And the last age should show your heart.

For, lady, you deserve this state;

Nor would I love at lower rate.

But at my back I always hear

Time's winged chariot hurrying near:
And yonder all before us lie

Deserts of vast eternity.

Thy beauty shall no more be found;

Nor in thy marble vault shall sound

My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long preserved virginity;

And your quaint honour turn to dust;

And into ashes all my lust.

The grave's a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.

Now, therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin, like morning dew,

And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may ;
And now, like amorous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour,

Than languish in his slow-chapp'd pow'r..
Let us roll all our strength, and all
Our sweetness up into one ball;
And tear our pleasures with rough strife,
Through the iron gates of life.

Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run."

In Browne's 'Pastorals,' notwithstanding the weakness and prolixity of his general plan, there are repeated examples of single lines and passages of extreme beauty and delicacy, both of sentiment and description, such as the following Picture of Night:

"Clamour grew dumb, unheard was shepherd's song,

And silence girt the woods: no warbling tongue
Talk'd to the echo; satyrs broke their dance,

And all the upper world lay in a trance,

Only the curled streams soft chidings kept;

And little gales that from the green leaf swept
Dry summer's dust, in fearful whisperings stirr'd,
As loth to waken any singing bird."

Poetical beauties of this sort are scattered, not sparingly, over tne green lap of nature through almost every page of our author's writings. His description of the squirrel hunted by mischievous boys, of the flowers stuck in the windows like the hues of the rainbow, and innumerable others, might be quoted.

6

His Philarete' (the fourth song of the 'Shepherd's Pipe') has been said to be the origin of Lycidas;' but there is no resemblance, except that both are pastoral elegies for the loss of a friend. The Inner Temple Mask' has also been made the foundation of 'Comus,' with as little reason. But so it is: if an author is once detected in borrowing, he will be suspected of plagiarism ever after; and every writer that finds an ingenious or partial editor, will be made to set up his claim to originality against him. A more serious charge of this kind has been urged

against the principal character in 'Paradise Lost' (that of Satan), which is said to have been taken from Marino, an Italian poet. Of this we may be able to form some judgment, by a comparison with Crashaw's translation of Marino's 'Sospetto d'Herode.' The description of Satan alluded to is given in the following

stanzas:

"Below the bottom of the great abyss,

There where one centre reconciles all things,
The world's profound heart pants; there placed is
Mischief's old master; close about him clings
A curl'd knot of embracing snakes, that kiss
His correspondent cheeks; these loathsome strings
Hold the perverse prince in eternal ties
Fast bound, since first he forfeited the skies.

The judge of torments, and the king of tears,
He fills a burnish'd throne of quenchless fire;
And for his own fair robes of light, he wears
A gloomy mantle of dark flames; the tire
That crowns his hated head, on high appears;
Where seven tall horns (his empire's pride) aspire;
And, to make up hell's majesty, each horn
Seven crested hydras horribly adorn.

His eyes, the sullen dens of death and night,
Startle the dull air with a dismal red;
Such his fell glances as the fatal light
Of staring comets, that look kingdoms dead.
From his black nostrils and blue lips, in spite
Of hell's own stink, a worser stench is spread.
His breath hell's lightning is; and each deep groan
Disdains to think that heaven thunders alone.

His flaming eyes' dire exhalation
Unto a dreadful pile gives fiery breath;
Whose unconsum'd consumption preys upon
The never-dying life of a long death.

In this sad house of slow destruction

(His shop of flames) he fries himself beneath

A mass of woes; his teeth for torment gnash,

While his steel sides sound with his tail's strong lash."

This portrait of monkish superstition does not equal the grandeur of Milton's description:

"His form had not yet lost

All her original brightness, nor appear'd

Less than archangel ruin'd and the excess
Of glory obscured."

Milton has got rid of the horns and tail, the vulgar and physical insignia of the devil, and clothed him with other greater and intellectual terrors, reconciling beauty and sublimity, and converting the grotesque and deformed into the ideal and classical. Certainty, Milton's mind rose superior to all others in this respect, on the outstretched wings of philosophic contemplation, in not confounding the depravity of the will with physical distortion, or supposing that the distinctions of good and evil were only to be subjected to the gross ordeal of the senses. In the subsequent stanzas, we however find the traces of some of Milton's boldest imagery, though its effect be injured by the incongruous mixture above stated.

"Struck with these great concurrences of things,*
Symptoms so deadly unto death and him :
Fain would he have forgot what fatal strings
Eternally bind each rebellious limb,

He shook himself, and spread his spacious wings,
Which like two bosom'd sailst embrace the dim
Air, with a dismal shade, but all in vain :
Of sturdy adamant is his strong chain.

While thus heav'n's counsels, by the low
Footsteps of their effects, he traced too well,
He tost his troubled eyes, embers that glow
Now with new rage, and wax too hot for hell.
With his foul claws he fenced his furrow'd brow,
And gave a ghastly shriek, whose horrid yell
Ran trembling through the hollow vaults of night."

The poet adds

"The while his twisted tail he gnaw'd for spite."

There is no keeping in this. This action of meanness and mere vulgar spite, common to the most contemptible creatures,

* Alluding to the fulfilment of the prophecies and the birth of the Messiah. "He spreads his sail-broad vans."- Par. Lost,' b. ii., l. 927.

takes away from the terror and power just ascribed to the prince of Hell, and implied in the nature of the consequences attributed to his every movement of mind or body. Satan's soliloquy to himself is more beautiful and more in character at the same time:

"Art thou not Lucifer? he to whom the droves

Of stars that gild the morn in charge were given ?
The nimblest of the lightning-winged loves?
The fairest and the first-born smile of heav'n?
Look in what pomp the mistress planet moves,
Reverently circled by the lesser seven:
Such and so rich the flames that from thine eyes
Opprest the common people of the skies?

Ah! wretch! what boots it to cast back thine eyes

Where dawning hope no beam of comfort shows ?" &c.

This is true beauty and true sublimity: it is also true pathos and morality: for it interests the mind, and affects it powerfully with the idea of glory tarnished, and happiness forfeited with the loss of virtue; but from the horns and tail of the brute-demon, imagination cannot re-ascend to the Son of the morning, nor be dejected by the transition from weal to woe, which it cannot without a violent effort picture to itself.

In our author's account of Cruelty, the chief minister of Satan, there is also a considerable approach to Milton's description of Death and Sin, the portress of hell-gates :

"Thrice howl'd the caves of night, and thrice the sound,

Thundering upon the banks of those black lakes,

Rung through the hollow vaults of hell profound:
At last her listening ears the noise o'ertakes,
She lifts her sooty lamps. and looking round,
A general hiss, from the whole tire of snakes
Rebounding through hell's inmost caverns came,
In answer to her formidable name.

'Mongst all the palaces in hell's command,
No one so merciless as this of hers,

The adamantine doors for ever stand

Impenetrable, both to prayers and tears.

* See Satan's reception on his return to Pandemonium, in book x. of 'Paradise Lost.'