For what with joy thou didst obtain,
And I with more did give,

In time will make thee false and vain,
And me unfit to live.

Shepherd.

Frail angel, that would'st leave a heart forlorn,
With vain pretence Falsehood therein might lie,
Seek not to cast wild shadows o'er your scorn,
You cannot sooner change than I can die;
To tedious life I'll never fall,

Thrown from thy dear-lov'd breast;

He merits not to live at all,

Who cares to live unblest.

SONG.

When on those lovely looks I gaze,

To see a wretch pursuing,
In raptures of a blest amaze,

His pleasing happy ruin,

'Tis not for pity that I move;

His fate is too aspiring,

Whose heart, broke with a load of love,
Dies wishing and admiring.

But if this murder you'd forego,
Your slave from death removing,
Let me your art of charming know,
Or you learn mine of loving;
But whether life or death betide,
In love 'tis equal measure,
The victor lives with empty pride,

The vanquished dies with pleasure.

SONG.

Absent from thee I languish still,
Then ask me not, when I return?
The straying fool 'twill plainly kill

To wish all day, all night to mourn.

Dear, from thine arms then let me fly,
That my fantastic mind may prove
The torments it deserves to try,

That tears my fixed heart from my love.

When, wearied with a world of woe,

To thy safe bosom I retire,

Where love and peace and honour flow,
May I contented there expire.

Lest once more wandering from that heaven,
I fall on some base heart unblessed,

Faithless to thee, false, unforgiven,
And lose my everlasting rest.

EPITAPH ON CHARLES II.

Here lies our Sovereign Lord the King,
Whose word no man relies on,

Who never said a foolish thing,

Nor ever did a wise one.

THOMAS OTWAY.

[THOMAS OTWAY was born at Trottin, in Sussex, March 3, 1651, and died at Tower Hill, April 14, 1685, choked by a mouthful of bread ravenously eaten when he was at the brink of starvation. His most famous tragedies, The Orphan, and Venice Preserved, were printed respectively in 1680 and 1682.]

This is not the place to dwell on the splendid tragic genius of Otway, or to discuss his abject failure as a comedian. He claims our attention here on the score of two slender quartos of nondramatic verse, The Poet's Complaint of his Muse, 1680, and Windsor Castle, 1685. The latter is a political and descriptive piece in the heroic measure; it is modelled on Denham's Cooper's Hill, and betrays, notwithstanding some felicitous passages, the fatigue which was stealing over the dying author. But The Poet's Complaint of his Muse is a much more original and powerful poem; it is written in the irregular measure called 'Pindaric,' and contains a satirical portrait of the poet and of his times, drawn without charm or colour, but in firm, bold lines, like a harsh engraving. Otway displays more observation of nature than most of his contemporaries; but when he draws the world we live in, he is a draughtsman even sterner than Crabbe. We quote as an example of this important but rugged and unattractive poem the first strophe, which contains some picturesque and vivid lines. It should be remarked that Otway was absolutely unable to write even a fairly good song. EDMUND W. GOSSE.

FROM 'THE POET'S COMPLAINT OF HIS MUSE.'

To a high hill where never yet stood tree,
Where only heath, coarse fern, and furzes grow,
Where, nipped by piercing air,

The flocks in tattered fleeces hardly graze,
Led by uncouth thoughts and care,

Which did too much his pensive mind amaze,
A wandering bard, whose Muse was crazy grown,
Cloyed with the nauseous follies of the buzzing town,

Came, looked about him, sighed, and laid him down
'Twas far from any path, but where the earth
Was bare, and naked all as at her birth,

When by the Word it first was made,
Ere God had said :-

Let grass and herbs and every green thing grow,
With fruitful herbs after their kinds, and it was so.
The whistling winds blew fiercely round his head;
Cold was his lodging, hard his bed;

Aloft his eyes on the wide heavens he cast,
Where, we are told, peace only is found at last;
And as he did its hopeless distance see,

Sighed deep, and cried 'How far is peace from me!'

JOHN OLDHAM.

[BORN August 9, 1653, at Shipton, near Tedbury, in Gloucestershire; after taking his degree at Oxford, spent three years as usher at the Croydon Free School, and not long afterwards settled among the wits in London. He died December 9, 1683, on a visit to the Earl of Kingston at HolmesPierpont in Nottinghamshire.]

Certain features in the brief life of Oldham, as well as in the verse to which his name owes its celebrity, have very naturally engaged the attention of historical enquirers, while others have attracted the sympathy of literary students. He seems really to have valued that independence of which authors too often only prate; he left it to the leaders of fashionable society and of fashionable literature to seek him out in his obscurity; and when he ventured to publish his poems, he published them without a patron. But if he had a high spirit, he lacked the equally noble possession of an unfettered mind. Even a domestic chaplain in the Restoration days-such a one as Oldham has painted in one of the following extracts, and such as Macaulay, largely following Oldham, has repainted in a well-known passage of his History-may have in him more of human dignity and freedom than the flatterer of popular fury and the pandar to mob-prejudice. Oldham was the laureate of the Popish Plot frenzy; and his laurels are accordingly stained with much mire and with much blood.

To what lengths the fanaticism of excited popular feeling, together with an inborn love of strong language, can carry a bold and facile pen, the second of the following extracts will suffice to show. It illustrates the indignation which inspired Oldham's most sustained series of efforts, and the unreasoning violence and malignant exuberance of his invective, together with its frequent bad rhymes and occasional bad grammar. He has been repeatedly compared with Dryden, whose earlier and worse