truths in as disagreeable a way as possible, or to convey a pleasing and affecting thought (of which there are many to be found in his other writings) by the harshest means, and with the most painful effort. His Muse suffers continual pangs and throes. His thoughts are delivered by the Cæsarean operation. The sentiments, profound and tender as they often are, are stifled in the expression; and "heaved pantingly forth," are "buried quick again" under the ruins and rubbish of analytical distinctions. It is like poetry waking from a trance: with an eye bent idly on the outward world, and half-forgotten feelings crowding about the heart; with vivid impressions, dim notions, and disjointed words. The following may serve as instances of beautiful or impassioned reflections losing themselves in obscure and difficult applications. He has some lines to a Blossom, which begin thus:

Little think'st thou, poor flow'r,

Whom I have watched six or seven days,
And seen thy birth, and seen what every hour
Gave to thy growth, thee to this height to raise,
And now dost laugh and triumph on this bough,
Little think'st thou

That it will freeze anon, and that I shall
To-morrow find thee fall'n, or not at all."

This simple and delicate description is only intro

H

duced as a foundation for an elaborate metaphysical conceit as a parallel to it, in the next stanza.

"Little think'st thou (poor heart

That labour'st yet to nestle thee,

And think'st by hovering here to get a part
In a forbidden or forbidding tree,

And hop'st her stiffness by long siege to bow :)
Little think'st thou,

That thou to-morrow, ere the sun doth wake,
Must with this sun and me a journey take."

This is but a lame and impotent conclusion from so delightful a beginning. He thus notices the circumstance of his wearing his late wife's hair about his arm, in a little poem which is called the Funeral:

"Whoever comes to shroud me, do not harm

Nor question much

That subtle wreath of hair, about mine arm;

The mystery, the sign you must not touch."

The scholastic reason he gives quite dissolves the charm of tender and touching grace in the sentiment itself

"For 'tis my outward soul,

Viceroy to that, which unto heaven being gone,

Will leave this to control,

And keep these limbs, her provinces, from dissolution."

Again, the following lines, the title of which is Love's Deity, are highly characteristic of this author's manner, in which the thoughts are inlaid in a costly but imperfect mosaic-work.

"I long to talk with some old lover's ghost,
Who died before the God of Love was born:
I cannot think that he, who then lov'd most,
Sunk so low, as to love one which did scorn.
But since this God produc'd a destiny,
And that vice-nature, custom, lets it be;
I must love her that loves not me."

The stanza in the Epithalamion on a Count Palatine of the Rhine, has been often quoted against him, and is an almost irresistible illustration of the extravagances to which this kind of writing, which turns upon a pivot of words and possible allusions, is liable. Speaking of the bride and bridegroom he says, by way of serious compliment—

“ Here lies a she-Sun, and a he-Moon there,
She gives the best light to his sphere;

Or each is both and all, and so

They unto one another nothing owe."

His love-verses and epistles to his friends give the most favourable idea of Donne. His satires are too clerical. He shews, if I may so speak, too much disgust, and, at the same time, too much contempt for vice. His dogmatical invectives

hardly redeem the nauseousness of his descriptions, and compromise the imagination of his readers more than they assist their reason. The satirist does not write with the same authority as the divine, and should use his poetical privileges more sparingly. "To the pure all things are pure," is a maxim which a man like Dr. Donne may be justified in applying to himself; but he might have recollected that it could not be construed to extend to the generality of his readers, without benefit of clergy.

Bishop Hall's Satires are coarse railing in verse, and hardly that. Pope has, however, contrived to avail himself of them in some of his imitations.

Sir John Davies is the author of a poem on the Soul, and of one on Dancing. In both he shews great ingenuity, and sometimes terseness and vigour. In the last of these two poems his fancy pirouettes in a very lively and agreeable manner, but something too much in the style of a French opera-dancer, with sharp angular turns, and repeated deviations from the faultless line of simplicity and nature.

Crashaw was a writer of the same ambitious stamp, whose imagination was rendered still more

inflammable by the fervors of fanaticism, and who having been converted from Protestantism to Popery (a weakness to which the " seething brains" of the poets of this period were prone) by some visionary appearance of the Virgin Mary, poured out his devout raptures and zealous enthusiasm in a torrent of poetical hyperboles. The celebrated Latin Epigram on the miracle of our Saviour, "The water blushed into wine," is in his usual hectic manner. His translation of the contest between the Musician and the Nightingale is the best specimen of his powers.

Davenant's Gondibert is a tissue of stanzas, all aiming to be wise and witty, each containing something in itself, and the whole together amounting to nothing. The thoughts separately require so much attention to understand them, and arise so little out of the narrative, that they with difficulty sink into the mind, and have no common feeling of interest to recal or link them together afterwards. The general style may be judged of by these two memorable lines in the description of the skeleton-chamber.

"Yet on that wall hangs he too, who so thought,
And she dried by him whom that he obeyed."

Mr. Hobbes, in a prefatory discourse, has thrown