to please myself, I am at least sure I should please nobody else. In fact, I conceive that what I have undertaken to do in this and former cases, is merely to read over a set of authors with the audience, as I would do with a friend, to point out a favourite passage, to explain an objection; or if a remark or a theory occurs, to state it in illustration of the subject, but neither to tire him nor puzzle myself with pedantic rules and pragmatical formulas of criticism that can do no good to any body. I do not come to the task with a pair of compasses or a ruler in my pocket, to see whether a poem is round or square, or to measure its mechanical dimensions, like a meter and alnager of poetry: it is not in my bond to look after exciseable articles or contraband wares, or to exact severe penalties and forfeitures for trifling oversights, or to give formal notice of violent breaches of the three unities, of geography and chronology; or to distribute printed stamps and poetical licences (with blanks to be filled up) on Mount Parnassus. I do not come armed from top to toe with colons and semicolons, with glossaries and indexes, to adjust the spelling or reform the metre, or to prove by everlasting contradiction and querulous impatience, that former commentators did not know the meaning of their author, any more than I do, who am angry at them, only because I am out of humour with myself as if the genius of poetry lay buried

under the rubbish of the press; and the critic was the dwarf-enchanter who was to release its airy form from being stuck through with blundering points and misplaced commas; or to prevent its vital powers from being worm-eaten and consumed, letter by letter, in musty manuscripts and black-letter print. I do not think that is the way to learn "the gentle craft" of poesy or to teach it to others :-to imbibe or to communicate its spirit; which if it does not disentangle itself and soar above the obscure and trivial researches of antiquarianism is no longer itself, "a Phoenix gazed by all." At least, so it appeared to me (it is for others to judge whether I was right or wrong). In a word, I have endeavoured to feel what was good, and to "give a reason for the faith that was in me" when necessary, and when in my power. This is what I have done, and what I must continue to do.

To return to Drummond.-I cannot but think that his Sonnets come as near as almost any others to the perfection of this kind of writing, which should embody a sentiment and every shade of a sentiment, as it varies with time and place and humour, with the extravagance or lightness of a momentary impression, and should, when lengthened out into a series, form a history of the wayward moods of the poet's mind, the turns of his fate; and imprint the smile or

frown of his mistress in indelible characters on the scattered leaves. I will give the two following, and have done with this author.

"In vain I haunt the cold and silver springs,

1

To quench the fever burning in my veins :
In vain (love's pilgrim) mountains, dales, and plains
I over-run; vain help long absence brings.
In vain, my friends, your counsel me constrains
To fly, and place my thoughts on other things.
Ah, like the bird that fired hath her wings,
The more I move the greater are my pains.
Desire, alas! desire a Zeuxis new,

From the orient borrowing gold, from western skies
Heavenly cinnabar, sets before my eyes

In every place her hair, sweet look and hue;
That fly, run, rest I, all doth prove but vain;

My life lies in those eyes which have me slain."

The other is a direct imitation of Petrarch's

description of the bower where he first saw Laura.

"Alexis, bere she stay'd, among these pines,

Sweet hermitress, she did alone repair :

Here did she spread the treasure of her hair,
More rich than that brought from the Colchian mines;

Here sat she by these musked eglantines;

The happy flowers seem yet the print to bear:
Her voice did sweeten here thy sugar'd lines,

To which winds, trees, beasts, birds, did lend an ear.

She here ine first perceiv'd, and here a morn

Of bright carnations did o'erspread her face:
Here did she sigh, here first my hopes were born,
Here first I got a pledge of promised grace;

But ah! what serves to have been made happy so,
Sith passed pleasures double but new woe!"

I should, on the whole, prefer Drummond's Sonnets to Spenser's; and they leave Sidney's, picking their way through verbal intricacies and "thorny queaches*," at an immeasurable distance behind. Drummond's other poems have great, though not equal merit ; and he may be fairly set down as one of our old English classics.

Ben Jonson's detached poetry I like much, as indeed I do all about him, except when he degraded himself by "the laborious foolery" of some of his farcical characters, which he could not deal with sportively, and only made stupid and pedantic. I have been blamed for what I have said, more than once, in disparagement of Ben Jonson's comic humour; but I think he was himself aware of his infirmity, and has (not improbably) alluded to it in the following speech of Crites in Cynthia's Revels.

"Oh, how despised and base a thing is man,

If he not strive to erect his groveling thoughts
Above the strain of flesh! But how more cheap,
When even his best and understanding part
(The crown and strength of all his faculties)

* Chapman's Hymn to Pan.

Floats like a dead-drown'd body, on the stream
Of vulgar humour, mix'd with common'st dregs:
I suffer for their guilt now; and my soul
(Like one that looks on ill-affected eyes)

Is hurt with mere intention on their follies.

Why will I view them then? my sense might ask me:

Or is't a rarity or some new object

That strains my strict observance to this point:
But such is the perverseness of our nature,
That if we once but fancy levity,

(How antic and ridiculous soever

It suit with us) yet will our muffled thought
Chuse rather not to see it than avoid it, &c."

Ben Jonson had self-knowledge and self-reflection enough to apply this to himself. His tenaciousness on the score of critical objections does not prove that he was not conscious of them himself, but the contrary. The greatest egotists are those whom it is impossible to offend, because they are wholly and incurably blind to their own defects; or if they could be made to see them, would instantly convert them into so many beauty-spots and ornamental graces. Ben Jonson's fugitive and lighter pieces are not devoid of the characteristic merits of that class of composition; but still often in the happiest of them, there is a specific gravity in the author's pen, that sinks him to the bottom of his subject, though buoyed up for a time with art and painted plumes, and produces a strange mixture of the