O generous passion! 'tis yours to afford
The splendid assembly, the plentiful board;
To thee do I owe such a breakfast this morn,
As I ne'er saw before since the hour I was born;
"Twas you made my Lord Ragamuffin come here,
Who, they say, has been lately created a Peer,
And to-day with extreme complaisance and respect
ask'd

All the people at Bath to a general breakfast.

You've heard of my Lady Bunbutter, no doubt, How she loves an assembly, fandango, or rout; No lady in London is half so expert

At a snug private party her friends to divert ; But they say that, of late, she's grown sick of the town,

And often to Bath condescends to come down:
Her Ladyship's fav'rite house is the Bear:
Her chariot, and servants, and horses are there:
My Lady declares that retiring is good;
As all with a separate maintenance should:
For when you have put out the conjugal fire,
'Tis time for all sensible folk to retire ;
If Hymen no longer his fingers will scorch,
Little Cupid for others can whip in his torch,
So pert is he grown, since the custom began
To be married and parted as quick as you can.
Now my Lord had the honour of coming down post,
To pay his respects to so famous a toast;
In hopes he her Ladyship's favour might win,
By playing the part of a host at an inn.
I'm sure he's a person of great resolution,
Though delicate nerves, and a weak constitution;
For he carried us all to a place 'cross the river,
And vow'd that the rooms were too hot for his liver:
He said it would greatly our pleasure promote,
If we all for Spring-gardens set out in a boat:
I never as yet could his reason explain,
Why we all sallied forth in the wind and the rain;
For sure, such confusion was never yet known;
Here a cap and a hat, there a cardinal blown :
While his Lordship, embroider'd and powder'd

Besides many others, who all in the rain went,
On purpose to honour this great entertainment:
The company made a most brilliant appearance,
And ate bread-and-butter with great perseverance:
All the chocolate, too, that my Lord set before 'em,
The ladies despatch'd with the utmost decorum.
Soft musical numbers were heard all around,
The horns and the clarions echoing sound:

Sweet were the strains, as od❜rous gales that blow
O'er fragrant banks, where pinks and roses grow.
The Peer was quite ravish'd, while close to his side
Sat Lady Bunbutter, in beautiful pride!
Oft turning his eyes, he with rapture survey'd
All the powerful charms she so nobly display'd.
As when at the feast of the great Alexander,
Timotheus, the musical son of Thersander,
Breathed heavenly measures;
The prince was in pain,

And could not contain,
While Thais was sitting beside him ;
But, before all his peers,

Was for shaking the spheres,

Such goods the kind gods did provide him;
Grew bolder and bolder,

And cock'd up his shoulder,

Like the son of great Jupiter Ammon,
Till at length quite oppress'd,
He sunk on her breast,

And lay there as dead as a salmon.

O had I a voice that was stronger than steel, With twice fifty tongues to express what I feel, And as many good mouths, yet I never could utter All the speeches my Lord made to Lady Bunbutter!

So polite all the time, that he ne'er touch'd a bit, While she ate up his rolls and applauded his wit: For they tell me that men of true taste, when they

treat,

Should talk a great deal, but they never should eat:
And if that be the fashion, I never will give
Any grand entertainment as long as I live:
For I'm of opinion 'tis proper to cheer
The stomach and bowels, as well as the ear.
Nor me did the charming concerto of Abel
Regale like the breakfast I saw on the table:
I freely will own I the muffins preferr'd
To all the genteel conversation I heard,
E'en though I'd the honour of sitting between
My Lady Stuff-damask and Peggy Moreen,
Who both flew to Bath in the nightly machine.
Cries Peggy, "This place is enchantingly pretty;
We never can see such a thing in the city:
You may spend all your lifetime in Cateaton-street,
And never so civil a gentleman meet ;

You may talk what you please; you may search

London through;

You may go to Carlisle's, and to Almanac's too : And I'll give you my head if you find such a host, For coffee, tea, chocolate, butter, and toast:

How he welcomes at once all the world and his

wife,

And how civil to folk he ne'er saw in his life!"

"These horns," cries my Lady," so tickle one's ear, Lard! what would I give that Sir Simon was here! To the next public breakfast Sir Simon shall go, For I find here are folks one may venture to know: Sir Simon would gladly his Lordship attend, And my Lord would be pleased with so cheerful a friend."

So when we had wasted more bread at a breakfast Than the poor of our parish have ate for this week past,

I saw,
all at once, a prodigious great throng
Come bustling, and rustling, and jostling along :
For his Lordship was pleased that the company now
To my Lady Bunbutter should curt'sy and bow:
And my Lady was pleased too, and seem'd vastly
proud

At once to receive all the thanks of a crowd:
And when, like Chaldeans, we all had adored
This beautiful image set up by my Lord,
Some few insignificant folk went away,
Just to follow the employments and calls of the day;
But those who knew better their time how to spend,
The fiddling and dancing all chose to attend.
Miss Clunch and Sir Toby perform'd a Cotillion,
Just the same as our Susan and Bob the postillion;

All the while her mamma was expressing her joy, That her daughter the morning so well could employ.

-Now why should the Muse, my dear mother,

relate

The misfortunes that fall to the lot of the great?
As homeward we came-'tis with sorrow you'll hear
What a dreadful disaster attended the Peer:
For whether some envious god had decreed
That a Naiad should long to ennoble her breed ;
Or whether his Lordship was charm'd to behold
His face in the stream, like Narcissus of old;
In handing old Lady Bumfidget and daughter,
This obsequious Lord tumbled into the water;
But a nymph of the flood brought him safe to the
boat,

And I left all the ladies a cleaning his coat.

Thus the feast was concluded, as far as I hear, To the great satisfaction of all that were there. O may he give breakfasts as long as he stays, For I ne'er ate a better in all my born days. In haste I conclude, &c. &c. &c.

Bath, 1766.

SB-N—r—D.

As every poet distinguished for his cultivation of our couplet numbers that has touched upon the Art of Poetry, or made selections from our poets, has spoken of our heroics with rhyme as our only true poetic measure, indeed as if we had no other, and made Denham and Waller the fathers of our versification, a refutation of an absurdity perhaps unparalleled in the whole history of English literature will not be without its use. An assertion traceable in fifty places to Dryden, sanctioned in some way by Prior*, and confirmed by the whole scope and tendency of Dr. Johnson's writings: but not, it is right to add, without its other assistances; for when Goldsmith published his Select Beauties of British Poetry, he found no poet to cull a single flower from before Waller-a more contracted taste, or a slighter knowlege of the art he himself excelled in, it is impossible to imagine.

To say that Waller and Denham are the fathers of English versification is absurd-unless all versification is confined to the couplet. Who has improved, let us ask, on the versification of Spenser, or of any of the stanza measures of the reign of Elizabeth-has Prior, or has Thomson, or has Beattie, or has Burns? Who has improved upon the dramatic blank verse of Shakspeare, of Fletcher, or of Jonson-has Otway, has Southerne, or has Rowe? Has Jonson or Carew been excelled in lyrical ease by Waller or Lord Lansdowne? The Gondibert of Davenant or the Annus Mirabilis of Dryden or the Elegy of Gray are not more musical in their numbers than the quatrains of Davies, who never leaves the ear, as Johnson says, ungratified.

What did the blank verse of Milton gain in its most mellifluous passages from the rhymes of Denham or of Waller Nothing! Yet Dryden can be found to assert, with all the confidence of truth,

Prior says that Davenant and Waller improved our versification-not, as he is made to say by Johnson and others, Denham and Waller. Davenant's measure was the heroic with alternate rhyme.

that unless Waller had written, no one could have written in the age in which he wrote with anything like success, when the surpassing glory of Dryden's age was a poem setting at defiance, in its preface and its numbers, the very principle of versification that Denham and Waller adopted, and Dryden sanctioned and improved.

66

"Well-placing of words for the sweetness of pronunciation was not known," says Dryden, "till Mr. Waller introduced it."-" The excellence and dignity of rhyme were never fully known till Mr. Waller taught it in lyric and Sir John Denham in epic poesy." "Our numbers," he says, in another place and at a later period of life, “ were in their nonage till Waller and Denham appeared,” and that "the sweetness of English verse was never understood or practised by our fathers." But Dryden's criticisms are a series of contradictions: "Blank verse," he says, "is acknowledged to be too low for a poem, nay more, for a paper of verses;" yet he is an admirer of Paradise Lost :-Denham and Waller did everything for English versification-yet "Spenser and Fairfax were great masters of our language, and saw much farther into the beauties of our numbers than those who immediately followed them;" and "Many besides himself had heard our famous Waller own that he derived the harmony of his numbers from the Godfrey of Bulloigne, which was turned into English by Mr. Fairfax." He is now for the new way of writing scenes in rhyme, now without, now for couplets, and now for quatrains; whatever he had in hand was best; rhyme invigorated thought and now constrained it-suggested or cramped ideas as his fancy found it, when writing to exhibit his present performance to the greatest advantage.

Our ten-syllable rhymed verse, or heroic with rhyme, was used by Chaucer in his Palamon and Arcite, by Douglas in his translation of Virgil, and by Spenser in the tale of Mother Hubbard. Donne, Hall, and Marston used it in their Satires;

Ben Jonson occasionally in his Epigrams or Commendatory Poems; Beaumont in his Bosworth Field; Drummond in his Poem on Prince Henry, and his Forth Feasting; and Golding, Sandys, and May in their translations from Ovid, Virgil, and Lucan. Denham's first publication was in 1642, and Waller's Poems were not collectively in print before 1645. The following extracts are brought together to show by examples in what state, when they began to write, the reputed fathers of English verse found the cultivation of our couplet measure; how little they did; and how much they left to Dryden, to Prior, and Pope to do. "By knowing the state," says Johnson, "in which Waller found our poetry, the reader may judge how much he improved it."

The

Donne is always a rugged versifier, He has the restraint of rhyme without its emphasis; and the fetters which others wear like bracelets are on him inconvenient chains and incumbrances. lines which follow are in his most melodious flow. When I behold a stream, which from the spring Doth, with doubtful melodious murmuring, Or in a speechless slumber, calmly ride Her wedded channel's bosom, and there chide, And bend her brows, and swell, if any bough Do but stoop down to kiss her utmost brow: Yet if her often-gnawing kisses win

The traitorous banks to gape and let her in,
She rusheth violently and doth divorce

Her from her native and her long-kept course,
And roars and braves it, and in gallant scorn,
In flattering eddies promising return,

She flouts her channel, which thenceforth is dry;
Then say I," that is she, and this am I."-Elegy, vi.

Hall had a better ear than Donne-his words are better placed, and his pauses infinitely more select. What follows was printed in 1597. Time was, and that was term'd the time of gold, When world and time were young that now are old (When quiet Saturn sway'd the mace of lead, And pride was yet unborn, and yet unbred). Time was, that whiles the autumn-fall did last, Our hungry sires gaped for the falling mast Of the Dodonian oaks.

Could no unhusked acorn leave the tree,
But there was challenge made whose it might be.
Their royal plate was clay, or wood, or stone;
The vulgar, save his hand, else he had none.
Their only cellar was the neighbour brook;
None did for better care, for better look.
The king's pavilion was the grassy green
Under safe shelter of the shady treen.
Under each bank men laid their limbs along,
Not wishing any ease, not fearing wrong:
Clad with their own, as they were made of old,
Not fearing shame, not feeling any cold.

Satires, B. iii. Sat. i.

In the point, volubility, and vigour of Hall's numbers, says Mr. Campbell, we might frequently imagine ourselves perusing Dryden.

Another scorns the home-spun thread of rhymes,
Match'd with the lofty feet of elder times:

Give me the number'd verse that Virgil sung,
And Virgil's self shall speak the English tongue:
"Manhood and garboils shall he chant," with changed feet
And head-strong dactyls making music meet;
The nimble dactyl striving to out go,
The drawling spondees pacing it below;
The lingering spondees labouring to delay,
The breathless dactyls with a sudden stay.

Satires, B. i. Sat. vi.

"Hall's versification," says Warton, " is equally
energetic and elegant ; and the fabric of the e-
plets approaches to modern standard."
Great is the folly of a feeble brain,
O'erruled with love, and tyrannous disdain:
For love, however in the basest breast
It breeds high thoughts that feed the fancy best,
Yet is he blind, and leads poor fools awry,
While they hang gazing on their mistress' eye.
The lovesick poet, whose importune prayer
Repulsed is with resolute despair,
Hopeth to conquer his disdainful dame,
With public plaints of his conceived flame.
Then pours he forth in patched sonnettings,
His love, his lust, and loathsome flatterings:
As though the starving world hang'd on his sleeve,
When once he smiles to laugh, and when he sighs to gree
Careth the world, thou love, thou live or die?
Careth the world how fair thy fair one be?
Fond wit-wal, that wouldst load thy witless head
With timely horns, before thy bridal bed.
Then can he term his dirty ill-faced bride
Lady, and queen, and virgin deified:

Be she all sooty black, or berry brown,
She's white as morrow's milk, or flakes new blown.
And though she be some dunghill drudge at home.
Yet can he her resign some refuse room
Amidst the well-known stars; or if not there,
Sure will he saint her in his calendar.

Satires, B. i. Sat. vi

Marston is below Hall, and scarcely above Done. Ben Jonson, however, is vigorous at times, a though too frequently found carrying the sense an ungraceful way from one verse into another. is musical after a kind.

TO WILLIAM CAMDEN,
Camden! most reverend head, to whom I owe
All that I am in arts, all that I know;
(How nothing's that!) to whom my country owes
The great renown, and name wherewith she goes!
Than thee the age sees not that thing more grave,
More high, more holy, that she more would crave
What name, what skill, what faith hast thou in thine
What sight in searching the most antique springs!
What weight and what authority in thy speech!
Men scarce can make that doubt, but thou canst teac
Pardon free truth, and let thy modesty,

Which conquers all, be once o'ercome by thee.
Many of thine, this better could, than I;
But for their powers, accept my piety.

TO HEAVEN.

Good and great God! can I not think of Thee But it must straight my melancholy be?