receive pleasure from their consonance and

recurrence.

Of the first stanza the abrupt beginning has been celebrated; but technical beauties can give praise only to the inventor. It is in the power of any man to rush abruptly upon his subject, that has read the ballad of Johnny Armstrong,

Is there ever a man in all Scotland—

The initial resemblances, or alliterations, ruin, ruthless, helm or hauberk, are below the grandeur of a poem that endeavours at sublimity.

In the second stanza the Bard is well described; but in the third we have the puerilities of obsolete mythology. When we are told that Cadwallo hushed the stormy main, and that Modred made huge Plinlimmon bow his cloud-topped head, attention recoils from the repetition of a tale that, even when it was first heard, was heard with scorn.

The weaving of the winding sheet he borrowed, as he owns, from the northern bards; but their texture, however, was very properly the work of female powers, as the art of spinning the thread of life in another mythology. Theft is always dangerous; Gray has made weavers of his slaughtered bards by a fiction outrageous and incongruous. They are then called upon to weave the warp, and weave the woof, perhaps with no great propriety; for it is by crossing the woof with the warp that men weave the web or piece; and the first line was dearly bought by the admission of its wretched correspondent, Give ample room and verge enough'. He has, however, no other line as bad.

The third stanza of the second ternary is com

GRAY

mended, I think, beyond its merit. The personiì. cation is indistinct. Thirst and hunger are not alike; and their features, to make the imagery perfect, should have been discriminated. We are told, in the same stanza, how towers are fed. But I will no longer look for particular faults; yet let it be observed that the ode might have been concluded with an action of better example; but suicide is always to be had, without expense of thought.

These odes are marked by glittering accumulations of ungraceful ornaments; they strike, rather than please; the images are magnified by affectation; the language is laboured into harshness. The mind of the writer seems to work with unnatural violence. 'Double, double, toil and trouble'. He has a kind of strutting dignity, and is tall by walking on tiptoe. His art and his struggle are too visible, and there is too little appearance of ease and nature.

To say that he has no beauties would be unjust: a manlike him, of great learning and great industry, could not but produce something valuable. When he pleases least, it can only be said that a good design was ill directed.

His translations of Northern and Welsh poetry deserve praise; the imagery is preserved, perhaps often improved; but the language is unlike the language of other poets.

In the character of his Elegy I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers uncorrupted with literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtilty and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally decided all claim to poetical honours. The Churchyard

abounds with images which find a mirror in every mind, and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo. The four stanzas beginning' Yet even these bones', are to me original: I have never seen the notions in any other place; yet he that reads them here, persuades himself that he has always felt them. Had Gray written often thus, it had been vain to blame, and useless to praise him.

THOMAS WARTON

PREFACE TO MILTON'S MINOR POEMS

(1790)

THE poems which compose the present volume were published almost thirty years before the appearance of the Paradise Lost. During that interval, they were so totally disregarded, at least by the general reader, as scarcely to have conferred on their author the reputation of a writer of verses; much less the distinction and character of a true poet. After the publication of the Paradise Lost, whose acknowledged merit and increasing celebrity might have naturally contributed to call other pieces of the same author, and of a kindred excellence, into a more conspicuous point of view, they long continued to remain in their original state of neglect and obscurity. At the infancy of their circulation, and for some years afterwards, they were overwhelmed in the commotions of faction, the conflict of religious disputation, and the professional ignorance of fanaticism. In succeeding years, when tumults and usurpations were at an end, and leisure and literature returned, the times were still unpropitious, and the public taste was unprepared for their reception. It was late in the present century before they attained their just measure of esteem and popularity. Wit and rhyme, sentiment and satire, polished numbers, sparkling couplets, and pointed periods, having so long kept undisturbed possession in our poetry,

would not easily give way to fiction and fancy, to picturesque description, and romantic imagery.

When Sir Henry Wotton, 1637, had received from Milton the compliment of a present of Comus, at first separately printed by the care of Henry Lawes, he returned a panegyric on the performance in which real approbation undoubtedly concurred with the partiality of private friendship, and a grateful sense of this kind testimony of Milton's regard. But Wotton, a scholar and a poet, did not perceive the genuine graces of this exquisite masque, which yet he professes to have viewed with singular delight'. His conceptions did not reach to the higher poetry of Comus. He was rather struck with the pastoral mellifluence of its lyric measures, which he styles 'a certain Doric delicacy in the songs and odes', than with its grave and more majestic tones, with the solemnity and variety of its peculiar vein of original invention. This drama was not to be generally characterized by its songs and odes: nor do I know that softness and sweetness, although they want neither, are particularly characteristical of those passages, which are most commonly rough with strong and crowded images, and rich in personification. However, the Song to Echo, and the initial strains of Comus's invocation, are much in the style which Wotton describes.

The first edition of these poems, comprehending Comus already printed, and Lycidas, of which there was also a previous impression, is dated in 1645. But I do not recollect, that for seventy years afterwards, they are once mentioned in the whole succession of English literature. Perhaps almost the only instance on record in that period of time