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Ah, my dear love, why do ye sleep thus long,
When meeter were that ye should now awake?
Hughes's Spen. V. p. 95.

It is singular that this passage should not be quoted in
Johnson's and Steevens's Shakspeare.

There is a similarity in the following expressions of Shakspeare and Cowicy.

--that but this blow

Might be the be-all and the end-all here,
But here, on this bank and shoal of time-

Cowley, speaking of this world

Macbeth, scene 9.

Vain weak-built isthmus, which dost proudly rise
Up betwixt two eternities.

Cowley's Life and Fame.

What Dr. Johnson has said of Akenside, Life, p. 442, reminds us of the following passages:

The words are multiplied till the sense is hardly perceived; attention deserts the mind, and settles in the car. Johnson.

And call the listning soul into the car.

Oldham's Ode on St. Cecilia.

None was so marble, but, whilst him he hears,
His soul so long dwelt only in his ears.

Elégie on Dr. Donne, by Sir L. Cary.

And here a female atheist talks you dead.

Johnson's London.

Nay, fly to altars; there they'll talk you dead.

Pope's Essay on Crit.

Celestial themes confess'd his tuneful aid;
And heaven that lent him genius was repaid.

Goldsm. Epit. on Dr. Parnell.

This last line contains the same thought with a stanza in Dr. Johnson's Elegy on Levett:

His virtues walk'd their narrow round,

Nor made a pause, nor left a void;
And sure th' Eternal Master found
The single talent well employ'd.

Dr. Johnson has said, that gloriosus is never used in a good sense: we find it, however, used in a good sense by a very

old poet, if that is sufficient authority to justify such a
usage. See Nævius, quoted by Aulus Gellius:

Etiam qui res magnas manu sæpe gessit gloriose,
Cujus facta viva nunc vigent

There is probably no imitation in the following passages they express, however, somewhat the same sentiment:

Nor are our powers to perish immature,
But, after feeble effort here, beneath
A brighter sun, and in a nobler soil,
Transplanted from this sublunary bed,
Shall flourish fair, and put forth all their bloom.

Young's Complaint.

Believe the Muse: the wintry blast of death
Kills not the buds of virtue; no, they spread
Beneath the heavenly beams of brighter suns,
Through endless ages into higher powers.

Thomson's Summer, 1. 580.

Discord in parts makes harmony in the whole.

Daniel's Queen's Arcadia, sc. 3.

All discord harmony not understood.

Pope's Essay on Man. This is the ra Aos aguoniar of Eschylus. See Prometh. Vinct'

553.

1786, Sept.

XCI. On Pope's Imitations of our carly Poets.

MR. URBAN,

IF the following remarks on Pope are worth insertion in your
Magazine, they are much at your service.

O si sic omnia!

From the great merit of the Eloisa to Abelard, the Temple of Fame, part of the Windsor Forest, and the Elegy upon an Unfortunate Lady, it is much to be regretted that Pope's mind was so little accustomed to the simpler beauties and distinct imagery of our earlier models; they would have taught him a more frequent use of compound epithets, and, instead of that general cast which is too much the

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characteristic of many of his lines, we should have had juster personification, and imagery more appropriate, of course more poetry and less versification-that fastidious eye of correct judgment, with which he surveyed both men and manners, seduced him from the fablings of fancy, the picturesque scenes of animated nature, and the latent beauties of antiquity-perhaps his bodily infirmities, added to a considerable share of constitutional bile, might have had great influence in directing the pursuits of his mind; at least by embittering it, they led him to carping, satire, and dry morals-absit verbe invidia!-I would not be understood to detract from his great and almost superior merits as a moralist; but, I mean, dry as opposed to poetry addressed to the imagination-it must give concern to every feeling reader to find so large a portion of a valuable life given to translations and imitations, to the lavish abuse of his Dunciad, and the insipid, innocence of his pastorals; in adopting occasional phrases, from our older poets, it is curious to observe what art Pope has shewn in the selection; and in his imitations of passages, what improvement he has made on his originals. The ingenious Mr. T. Warton has before noticed his obligations, in this way, to Milton.-It appears from his letters that he was a reader of Crashaw; with what attention he read him, the following instances are sufficient to discover. It is to be lamented, that Mr. Phillips, in his late edition of Crashaw, has omitted the Poems upon Theological subjects; many of his beauties, by this means, are lost; and, unluckily, those passages which seem more immediately to have dwelt upon the mind of Pope: surely the whole volume might have been republished with great safety. Readers, who concern themselves with Crashaw, concern themselves with him not as a Divine, but as a Poet. See Crashaw, Edit. 1570, p. 204. Description of a religious house, and condition of life (from Barclay). Pope's mind seems to have caught many hints from this when he wrote his Eloisa to Abelard.

A hasty portion of prescribed sleep,
Obedient slumbers that can wake and weep.

Labour and rest that equal periods keep,
Obedient slumbers that can wake and weep.

CRASHAW.

POPE.

No roofs of gold o'er riotous tables shining,
Whole days and suns devoured with endless dining;

No sails of Tyrian silk proud pavements sweeping
&c. &c.

But walks and unshorn woods;

No weeping orphan saw his father's stores
Our shrines irradiate, or emblaze the floors,
No silver saints, by dying misers given,
Here bribe the rage of ill-requited heaven.
But such plain roofs as piety could raise.

In these lone walks,

CRASHAW.

POPE

POPE.

Crashaw, oddly describing the woods that surround the Religious House, says,

-the natural locks

Of these loose groves, rough as th' unpolished rocks

This is what Pope means when he

says,

Ye grots and caverns shagg'd with horrid thorn

The most tender circumstance in all l'ope's Epistle, is, perhaps, the idea beginning at the 347th line.

If ever chance two wandering lovers brings, &c. &c.

This is evidently suggested by a passage in the Alexias, the complaint of the forsaken wife of St. Alexis, 1st Elegy,

And sure where lovers make their watery graves,
The weeping mariner will augment the waves,
For who so hard, but passing by that way,
Will take acquaintance of my woes, and say,
Here 'twas the Roman Maid found a hard fate,

While through the world she sought her wand'ring mate,
Here perish'd she, poor heart! Heavens be my voWS
As true to me as she was to her spouse.-

CRASHAW.

If these lines are deficient in elegance, they make it up in sentiment and simplicity :

For thee I talk to trees, with silent groves
Expostulate my woes and much wrong'd loves,

Hills and relentless rocks, or if there be
Things that in hardness more allude to thee.
CRASHAW, 2 Elegy.

This epithet Pope has taken:

Relentless walks, whose darksome round contains, &c. &c. How sweet the mutual yoke of man and wife,

When holy fires maintain love's heavenly life!

CRASHAW, 3 Elegy.

Pope, though his idea is different, has an exclamation somewhat similar—

Oh happy state! when souls each other draw,
When love is liberty, and nature law.—

Crashaw says most beautifully of Hope what Pope has transferred to Faith

Fair Hope! our earlier Heaven, by thee

Young time is taster to eternity.

Fresh blooming Hope, gay daughter of the sky,
And Faith our early immortality.

POPE.

Whether Pope was a reader of the poetry of Phineas Fletcher, I know not; in his Eloisa to Abelard he has the following phrase, which we find likewise in Fletcher:

See my lips tremble and my eye-balls rall,
Suck my last breath, and catch my flying soul.

And by his side, sucking his fleeting breath,
His weeping spouse, Elisa.

POPE.

FLETCHER.

Where sprawl the saints of Verrio and Languerre,

is a line in Pope's Epistles, which Dr. Warton has noticed for the peculiar felicity of the word sprawl: it is used with the same felicity and force by Drayton, B. Warrs 6 B. XLII. where he describes the painted roof of the tower of

Mortimer

Where, as among the naked Cupids sprawl,
Some at the sundry-coloured birds do shoot,
Some swarming up to pick the purple fruit.

We find a passage in Drayton, B. Warrs 5 B. XLIII. not unlike lines from the 241 to the 244 Epist. Eloisa to Abelard.

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