To the two tops of spiritual dignities. The English word, spiritual, as applied to dignities, means religious or ecclesiastical, in opposition to civil or temporal. But the French word, spirituel, of like sound, means, also, witty or intellectual. Hence the equivoque; with which our poet was not a little pleased, as we may see by his repetition of it, in the Complaint, St. ii. "Among the spiritual lords of peaceful fame." -He forgot, on this and other occasions, his own definition of true wit by negatives ""Tis not, when two like words make up one noise." PAGE 146. St. ii. 6. The fame of friendship, which so long had told. Mrs. Philips was as much famed for her friendships, as for her poetry. Dr. J. Taylor addressed his discourse on the nature and offices of friendship, to this lady. HYMN TO LIGHT.-PAGE 146. The moral strokes in this hymn amply atone for the false wit and quaint imagery, in which it too much abounds. It was the malady of that age, to be only taken, "With glitt'ring thoughts struck out at ev'ry line." Pope. And the abundance of Mr. Cowley's wit made it but too easy for him to regale the vitiated taste of his readers with this sort of entertainment. PAGE 147. Let a post-angel start with thee. One of the most glaring faults in the poetry of Mr. Cowley's age was the debasing of great sentiments and images by low allusion, and vulgar expressions. What the reader looked for, was wit; and he looked no farther: as if that rule of common sense had been a discovery of yesterday "Expression is the dress of thought, and still VOL. I. Pope, Essay on Crit. ver. 318. BB PAGE 148. Night, and her ugly subjects, thou dost fright. "Night, and all her sickly dews, "Her spectres wan," &c. Mr. Gray, in The Progress of Poesy. This excellent writer, not unfrequently, alludes to passages in Mr. Cowley, whose manners and genius much resembled his own. Both charm us with the spleen of virtue: and both were equally qualified, by the gifts of nature, to adorn the nobler and the more familiar poetry.-The taste, the execu tion, the success, were happily on the side of our late poet. Ill omens and ill sights removes out of thy way. Alluding to the old Roman superstition, which anxiously provided, when a great general marched out of the city, that no inauspicious object should obstruct or pollute his passage. PAGE 149. A crown of studded gold thou bear'st. In the flower so called, or Crown Imperial. The name of the flower, and of its bearing, being the same, he could not well express them both. Yet, in the connection which this line has with the foregoing, the mention of one only, has an ill effect. PAGE 150. Thou cloth'st it in a gay and party-colour'd coat. Prettily alluding to Joseph's coat of many colours. Gen. xxxvii. 3, 4. To me the sun is more delightful far. An inimitable stanza, in which the whole soul of the poet comes out, and shines through the purest and clearest expression: like one of the virgin-lilies he before celebrates, -" clad with the lawn of almost naked light." TO THE ROYAL SOCIETY. PAGE 151. This poem (besides its intrinsic merit) is entitled to distinction, from the relation it has to the Proposition for the advancement of experimental philosophy; which the reader will find in the third volume. It gives, too, an amiable pic ture of the poet's mind, in the concluding panegyric on his friend Dr. Sprat, who had written the history of the Royal Society. A science so well bred and nurs'd. By Pythagoras and Democritus. PAGE 152. With the desserts of poetry they fed him. Much of the ancient philosophy was only a luscious mythology. The way of accounting for a natural phænomenon, was to tell a pleasant story. I suppose, the author had especially in view Lord Bacon's Sapientia veterum, where that wise man amused himself and others-with the sports of wanton wit. Into the pleasant labyrinths of ever-fresh discourse. The Platonic school, which joined eloquence to philosophy. His curious, but not covetous eye. i. e. ingenious speculation, and not use, was the object of that philosophy. With painted scenes and pageants of the brain. The peripatetic fancies "tricks to shew the stretch of human brain." Pope. Some few exalted spirits this lutter age has shown. P. Ramus, and his followers, who laboured to assert the liberty of philosophy from the usurped dominion of the Aristotelians; men, who, under colour of guarding the rights of the old philosophy, tyrannized over reason herself. To graves from whence it rose, &c. Dr. Hurd, in his text, has omitted the remainder of this stanza. PAGE 153. He pressed them wisely the mechanic way. i. e. in the way of experiment. PAGE 154. Must not from others' work a copy take. As Gassendi did, whose philosophy is nothing more than a copy, a fine one indeed from that of Epicurus. ANON. Th' ideas and the images, which lie In his own fancy, or his memory. Meaning Des Cartes, who went to work in this ma spun a subtle cobweb theory out of his own brain. The natural and living face. r, and ANON. "The naked nature and the living grace." Pope. From these and all long errors of the way. A beautiful Latinism – pelagine venis erroribus actus?" Virg. Æn. vi. 532. "Sive errore viæ, seu tempestatibus acti." Ib. vii, 199. 'twixt th' excess Of low affliction and high happiness. So expressed, as to convey not only the poet's idea of this situation, but his sense of it. PAGE 155. Their wondrous pattern too you take: His lavish wit never knows when to have done with an allusion. PAGE 156. Who would to laughter or to scorn expose.—It is not to be conceived what ridicule this society drew upon itself from the wits on its first institution "But sense surviv'd, when merry jests were past; PAGE 157. Th' historian to the story fit. Dr. Sprat. END OF THE FIRST VOLUME. C. Whittingham, Goswell-Street. |