and is so free from manner, that it might rather pass for his than for Dr. Johnson's. ON THE DEATH OF ROBERT LEVETT. Condemned to Hope's delusive mine, Well tried through many a varying year, Of every friendless name the friend. Yet still he fills Affection's eye When fainting Nature called for aid, And hovering Death prepared the blow, His vigorous remedy displayed The power of Art without the show. In misery's darkest caverns known, No summons mocked by chill delay, The modest wants of every day, The toil of every day supplied. His virtues walked their narrow round, The busy day, the peaceful night, His frame was firm, his powers were bright, Then with no throbs of fiery pain, XII. OLD POETS. ROBERT HERRICK-GEORGE WITHERS. NOTHING seems stranger in the critics of the last century than their ignorance of the charming lyrical poetry of the times of the early Stuarts and the Commonwealth. One should think that the songs of the great dramatists, whose genius they did acknowledge-Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Ben Jonson-might have prepared them to recognise the kindred melodies of such versifiers as Marlowe and Raleigh and Wither and Marvell. His Jacobite prejudices might have predisposed Dr. Johnson in particular to find some harmonious stanzas in the minstrels of the cavaliers, Lovelace and the Marquis of Montrose. But so complete is the silence in which the writers of that day pass over these glorious songsters, that it seems only charitable to suppose that these arbiters of taste had never met with their works. With the honourable exceptions of Thomas Warton and Bishop Percy, there is not a critic from Johnson downward who does not cite Waller as the first poet who smoothed our rugged tongue into harmonious verse. And the prejudice lingers still in places where one does not expect to find it. The parish clerk of Beaconsfield is by no means the only, although by far the most excusable authority who, standing bareheaded before his pyramidal tomb in the churchyard, assured me with the most honest conviction that Waller was the earliest and finest versifier in the language. Herrick is one of the many whose lyrics might be called into court to overturn this verdict. Originally bred to the bar, he took orders at a comparatively late period, and obtained a living in Devonshire, from which he fled during the strict rule of the Lord Protector, concealing himself under a lay habit in London, and returning to his parsonage with the return of the monarch, whose birth had formed the subject of one of his earliest pastorals. More than any eminent writer of that day Herrick's collection requires careful sifting; but there is so much fancy, so much delicacy, so much grace, that a good selection would well repay the publisher. Bits there are that are exquisite: as when in enumerating the cates composing "Oberon's Feast" in his "Fairyland," he includes, amongst a strange farrago of unimaginable dishes, Some of his pieces, too, contain curious illustrations of the customs, manners, and prejudices of our ancestors. I shall quote one or two from the division of the Hesperides that he calls "charms and ceremonies," beginning with the motto: DIVINATION BY A DAFFODIL When a daffodil I see, Hanging down his head toward me, First, I shall decline my head, The adorning the houses with evergreens seems then to have been as common as our own habit of decking them with flowers. CEREMONIES FOR CANDLEMAS EVE. Down with rosemary and bays, Down with the mistletoe, The greener box for show. |