Mam. Of the philosophers' stone, and in High Dutch.

Surly. Did Adam write, Sir, in High Dutch?

Do we succeed? Is our day come, and holds it?
Face. The evening will set red upon you, Sir;
You have colour for it, crimson; the red ferment
Has done his office: three hours hence prepare you
To see projection.

Mam. Pertinax, my Surly,

Again I say to thee aloud, Be rich.

This day thou shalt have ingots, and to-morrow

Give lords the affront. * * *

Face. At his prayers, Sir, he;

Good man, he's doing his devotions
For the success.

Mam. Lungs, I will set a period

Where's thy master?

To lose ourselves in; and my baths like pits
To fall into; from whence we will come forth
And roll us dry in gossamer and roses.
Is it arriv'd at ruby? Where I spy

A wealthy citizen, or a rich lawyer,

Have a sublimed pure wife, unto that fellow
I'll send a thousand pound to be my cuckold.
Face. And I shall carry it?

Mam. No. I'll have no bawds.

But fathers and mothers. They will do it best,
Best of all others. And my flatterers

Shall be the pure and gravest of divines

That I can get for money.

We will be brave, Puffe, now we have the medicine.
My meat shall all come in, in Indian shells,
Dishes of agate set in gold, and studded

With emeralds, sapphire, hyacinths, and rubies.
The tongues of carps, dormice, and camel's heels
Boil'd in the spirit of Sol, and dissolv'd pearl,
Apicius' diet, 'gainst the epilepsy;

And I will eat these broths with spoons of amber,
Headed with diamond and carbuncle.

My footboys shall eat pheasants, calver'd salmons,
Knots, godwits, lampreys; I myself will have
The beards of barbels serv'd instead of salads;
Oil'd mushrooms; and the swelling unctuous paps
Of a fat pregnant sow, newly cut off,

Dressed with an exquisite and poignant sauce;
For which I'll say unto my cook, There's gold,

Go forth and be a knight.

Face. Sir, I'll go look A little how it heightens.

Mam. Do. My shirts

I'll have of taffeta-sarsnet, soft and light
As cobwebs; and for all my other raiment,
It shall be such as might provoke the Persian,
Were he to teach the world riot anew.

My gloves of fishes and birds' skins, perfum'd
With gums of Paradise and eastern air.

Surly. And do you think to have the stone with this?
Mam. No, I do think t' have all this with the stone.

Surly. Why, I have heard he must be homo frugi,

A pious, holy, and religious man,

One free from mortal sin, a very virgin,—

Mam. That makes it, Sir, he is so ;-but I buy it.

My venture brings it me. He, honest wretch,

A notable, superstitious, good soul,

Has worn his knees bare, and his slippers bald,
With prayer and fasting for it, and, Sir, let him
Do it alone, for me, still; here he comes;
Not a profane word afore him: 'tis poison."

Act ii, scene 1.

I have only to add a few words on Beaumont and Fletcher. 'Rule a Wife and Have a Wife,' 'The Chances,' and 'The Wild Goose Chase,' the original of the 'Inconstant,' are superior in style and execution to anything of Ben Jonson's. They are, indeed, some of the best comedies on the stage; and one proof that they are so is, that they still hold possession of it. They show the utmost alacrity of invention in contriving ludicrous distresses, and the utmost spirit in bearing up against, or impatience and irritation under them. Don John, in 'The Chances,' is the heroic in comedy. Leon, in 'Rule a Wife and Have a Wife,' is a fine exhibition of the born gentleman and natural fool: the Copper Captain is sterling to this hour: his mistress, Estifania, only died the other day with Mrs. Jordan: and the two grotesque females in the same play, act better than the Witches in 'Macbeth.'

LECTURE III.

On Cowley, Butler, Suckling, Etherege, &c.

THE metaphysical poets or wits of the age of James and Charles I., whose style was adopted and carried to a more dazzling and fantastic excess by Cowley in the following reign, after which it declined, and gave place almost entirely to the poetry of observation and reasoning, are thus happily characterised by Dr. Johnson.

"The metaphysical poets were men of learning, and to show their learning was their whole endeavour: but unluckily resolving to show it in rhyme, instead of writing poetry, they only wrote verses, and very often such verses as stood the trial of the finger better than of the ear; for the modulation was so imperfect, that they were only found to be verses by counting the syllables.

"If the father of criticism has rightly denominated poetry Texvп μIμNTIKǹ, an imitative art, these writers will, without great wrong, lose their right to the name of poets, for they cannot be said to have imitated anything; they neither copied nature nor neither painted the forms of matter, nor represented the operations of intellect."

life;

The whole of the account is well worth reading; it was a subject for which Dr. Johnson's powers both of thought and ex•pression were better fitted than any other man's. If he had had the same capacity for following the flights of a truly poetic imagination, or for feeling the finer touches of nature, that he had felicity and force in detecting and exposing the aberrations from the broad and beaten path of propriety and common sense, he would have amply deserved the reputation he has acquired as a philosophical critic.

The writers here referred to (such as Donne, Davies, Cra

shaw, and others) not merely mistook learning for poetry-they thought anything was poetry that differed from ordinary prose and the natural impression of things, by being intricate, farfetched, and improbable. Their style was not so properly learned as metaphysical; that is to say, whenever, by any violence done to their ideas, they could make out an abstract likeness or possible ground of comparison, they forced the image, whether learned or vulgar, into the service of the Muses. Anything would do to "hitch into a rhyme," no matter whether striking or agreeable, or not, so that it would puzzle the reader to discover the meaning, and if there was the most remote circumstance, however trifling or vague, for the pretended comparison to hinge upon. They brought ideas together not the most, but the least like; and of which the collision produced not light, but obscurity-served not to strengthen, but to confound. Their mystical verses read like riddles or an allegory. They neither belong to the class of lively or severe poetry. They have not the force of the one, nor the gaiety of the other; but are an ill-assorted, unprofitable union of the two together, applying to serious subjects that quaint and partial style of allusion which fits only what is light and ludicrous, and building the most laboured conclusions on the most fantastical and slender premises. The object of the poetry of imagination is to raise or adorn one idea by another more striking or more beautiful: the object of these writers was to match any one idea with any other idea, for better for worse, as we say, and whether anything was gained by the change of condition or not. The object of the poetry of the passions, again, is to illustrate any strong feeling, by showing the same feeling as connected with objects or circumstances more palpable and touching; but here the object was to strain and distort the immediate feeling into some barely possible consequence or recondite analogy, in which it required the utmost stretch of misapplied ingenuity to trace the smallest connection with the original impression. In short, the poetry of this period was strictly the poetry not of ideas, but of definitions: it proceeded in mode and figure, by genus and specific difference; and was the logic of the schools, or an oblique and forced construction of dry, literal matter-of-fact, decked out