PAGE "Love, sweetness, goodness, in her person shine So clear, as in no face with more delight." 72-77-CXLIII-CLIII. These, with the exception of CXLV and the three specified under it (p. 343), are given from Poems, &c., Upon Several Occasions. By Mr. John Milton: Both English and Latin, &c. Composed at several times. With a small Tractate of Education To Mr. Hartlib. 1673: where they first appeared. Thomas Edwards. 79 CLIV. The author of The Canons of Criticism, at whom Pope made an impotent thrust in the Dunciad for his Shakspearian studies, excelled much more as a critic than as a poet; yet he shares with Gray and Stillingfleet the honour of having preserved the tradition of the Sonnet at a time when it seemed threatened with absolute extinction. His experiments belong to that class of verse, usually the production of thoughtful and highly-cultivated minds, in which the lack of poetry's diviner attributes is in some measure compensated by what Coleridge calls 'weighty bullion sense.' In this instance must be added much practical wisdom, patriotism, and a manly, unaffected piety. Dyce, who takes five of his sonnets nevertheless, denies Edwards genius; nor perhaps does he possess genius in the strict sense; but, like Stillingfleet, he was a true disciple of Milton, and it really argues something akin to genius to have had in his day the sagacity to choose and the ability to echo such a master. His Sonnets, numbering about fifty in all, a moiety of which had apppeared in different editions of Dodsley's Collection of Poems (3rd ed., 1751), were collected and appended to The Canons of Criticism, 6th ed., with Additions, 1758, from which I select other two examples, in the former of which, Dyce remarks, Edwards ‘rises to pathos and grandeur.' ON A FAMILY-PICTURE. When pensive on that Portraiture I gaze, Where my four Brothers round about me stand, The tottering remnant of some splendid Fane, Single, unpropp'd, and nodding to my fall. Thomas Edwards. TO THE AUTHOR OF OBSERVATIONS ON THE O Lyttleton, great meed shalt thou receive, His glorious truth, such He will crown with praise, The person to whom the sonnet in the text is addressed was the author of The Scribleriad (1751), of whom see a notice in Cary's Lives of English Poets, from Johnson to Kirke White. Designed as a Continuation of Johnson's Lives. 1846. Cambridge retired about 1750 to his villa at Twickenham, where he died in 1802. PAGE Benjamin Stillingfleet. 80-CLV, 14. echoes: tidings' (Coxe). This noble sonnet, by much the best of the few written by 'Blue Stocking' Stillingfleet, grandson of the Bishop, was first printed by Todd in his edition of Milton's Poetical Works (1801, v, p. 445), where it is dated 1746. From the Literary Life by Coxe prefixed to Stillingfleet's Select Works, 1811, we learn that the amiable and eccentric person commemorated in it was the Rev. John Williamson, a man of great learning and varied accomplishments, whose extreme simplicity of character and ignorance of the world hindered his preferment. By the departure from Scotland of Lord Haddington and his brother Mr. Baillie, to whom he had formerly been travelling companion, Williamson was thrown out of employment; and Stillingfleet, his congenial and attached friend, amid many troubles of his own, made unceasing efforts to procure him some permanent establishment, but without much or any immediate success. Ultimately, however, Williamson received the appointment of Chaplain to the Factory at Lisbon. Coxe further informs us that among the memoranda for his History of Husbandry, Stillingfleet has an affectionate tribute to his friend's memory in which he compares him with--Xenophon: 'He was not inferior to the Grecian in simplicity, parts, or knowledge, as he might have shewn, PAGE had not a general calamity [the Earthquake at Lisbon, on which Stillingfleet published a small quarto of moral reflections in verse, 1750] deprived the world of his ingenious writings.' He seems to have been universally beloved. Neville, one of his friends, thus records his death: Early in the year 1763, this godlike man was, about his 50th year, relieved from all his infirmities, and gathered to his kindred angels. He left just enough to bury him, and would have left no more if he had been Archbishop of Canterbury.' Capel Lofft inserted the sonnet in his Laura (5 vols., 1813-14), with the remark that had Stillingfleet left nothing else behind him, it would have been sufficient to immortalize his name. Todd justly observes that it proves how attentively and how successfully Milton was studied at this time. So also, in its degree, does his sonnet (Select Works, ii, 163) TO DAMPIER. Thrice worthy guardian of that sacred spring, Till Fashion, stealing with unheeded wing Yet shalt not thou be backward in thy sphere Thou know'st that every sceptre is from Heaven Thomas Gray. 80-CLVI. From The Poems of Mr. Gray. To which are prefixed Memoirs of his Life and Writings, by W. Mason, M.A. York: 1775. L. 2. 'I believe,' says Lowell (My Study Windows, Boston, 1871, p. 388), it has not been noticed that among the verses in Gray's "Sonnet on the Death of West," which Wordsworth condemns as of no value, the second is one of Gray's happy reminiscences from a poet in some respects greater than either of them (Lucret., iv, 405-6): Jamque rubrum tremulis jubar ignibus erigere alte 14. Park (Heliconia, 1815, ii, 154) notes the following parallel in 1' Rev. Dr. Dampier, then one of the upper masters of Eton School, and afterwards Dean of Durham, an intimate and much respected friend of Mr. Stillingfleet.'-Coxe. PAGE Thomas Gray. lished in 1596, and which,' he adds, ' from its rareness, it is very unlikely that Mr. Gray had ever seen: ' 'O therefore do we plaine, And therefore weepe, because we weepe in vaine.' 'Both Wordsworth and Coleridge have found fault with Gray's sonnet on Richard West, asserting that the diction is artificial, and the images incongruous. Leigh Hunt, on the contrary [Book of the Sonnet, i, 81-3], defends it on the same ground that he would defend the Lycidas of Milton, and avers that men so imbued with the classics can speak from their hearts in such language. Gray was a purist, but he never threw off entirely the conventional phraseology which was at one time regarded as the language of poetry. His odes, for example, abound with terms which a third-rate poet of our day would reject as turgid or artificial, but we think with Hunt, that this sonnet, the only one Gray ever produced, is very beautiful, and that the allusion in it to Phoebus may be justified. "We are too much in the habit," he writes, "of losing a living notion of the sun. . . . Phoebus in this instance, is not a word out of the dictionaries, but a living celestial presence.' John Dennis (English Sonnets: A Selection. 1873). William Mason. 81-CLVII. From his Poems. Now First Published. York: 1797. One of three sonnets, composed by Mason on his three last birthdays, of which Southey in The Doctor observes, that for their sentiment and their beauty they ought to be inserted in every volume of select poems for popular use. Here at least we have none of the falsetto of which Coleridge (Table Talk, p. 201, ed. 1851) came to detect so much in the Caractacus. Thomas Warton. One of the firstfruits of the revival of a taste for Italian and our own early literature was the resumption of the sonnet-form as a literary instrument. Like many other beautiful things this fair consummate flower' had died with Milton, and would not 'recover greenness' till the freezing-rod of France had been lifted from off the land.1 1 An amusing illustration of the contempt into which the depravity of the national taste had brought the Sonnet and things of that nature' during this inauspicious period, is furnished in the apologetic tone which it behoved Philip Ayres to adopt in submitting to the public his Lyric Poems, made in imitation of the Italians (1687), If any quarrel,' says this worthy in his Preface, at the Oeconomy, or Structure of It was gone Quite under ground; as flowers depart To see their mother-root, when they have blown; Where they together All the hard weather, Dead to the world, keep house unknown.' It rose, as we have seen, with Gray, Edwards, and Stillingfleet, midway in the century, and immediately thereafter we find it receiving express cultivation, just where one naturally seeks—in the Warton family. T. Warton's sonnets are constructed on the Italian or Provençal model; and Hazlitt, with whom they were eminent favourites, has described them as ' undoubtedly exquisite, both in style and matter: poetical and philosophical effusions of very delightful sentiment;' elsewhere declaring that he 'could not help preferring them to any in the language.' And Leight Hunt again: 'Some of them express real feelings with an elegance so scholarly, so simple, and so full of faith, that no universalist in the love of poetry who has once read them chooses to part with them.'? They were praised also by Coleridge, who, however, regarded the greater part of them as not strictly sonnets at all, but 'severe and masterly likenesses of the style of the Greek ɛлiу раμμarα.' 'But,' says Dyce on citing Coleridge's opinion, 'I must be allowed to think that they want the great charm of the ancient epigrams,-simplicity.'' PAGE 81-CLVIII. landscape's: 'landskip's' (1777). 3 "Landskip" is less divergent from the old Anglo-Saxon form of the word, “landscipe," than the “landscape” of our modern orthography.'-T. Arnold (Addison's Papers, Clar. Press, 1875, p. 489). Warton's editor, Bishop Mant, prints along with this a pleasing sonnet by old Dr. Warton, the poet's father, written after a visit to Windsor Castle with his sons in their early youth, which was evidently the germ from which the laureate's afterwards sprung. (Poetical Works, 1802, ii, 154). these Poems, many of them being Sonnets, Canzons, Madrigals, &c., objecting that none of our great Men, either Mr. Waller, Mr. Cowley, or Mr. Dryden, whom it was most proper to have followed, have ever stoop'd to any thing of this sort; I shall very readily acknowledge, that being sensible of my own Weakness and Inability of ever attaining to the performance of one thing equal to the worst piece of theirs, it easily disswaded me from that attempt, and put me on this; which is not without President; For many eminent Persons have published several things of this nature, and in this method, both Translations and Poems of their own; As the famous Mr. Spencer, Sir Philip Sidney, Sir Richard Fanshaw, Mr. Milton, and some few others; The success of all which, in these things, I must needs say, cannot much be boasted of; and though I have little reason after it, to expect Credit from these my slight Miscellanies, yet has it not discouraged me from adventuring on what my Genius prompted me to.' 1 Table Talk, p. 242, ed. 1869, and Select Poets, 1825, p. xv. Book of the Sonnet, i, 84. 3 Poems, 2nd ed., 1797. Intro, to the Sonnets, p. 72. Specimens of English Sonnets, p. 216. |