deal of entertaining matter about Boccaccio and Chaucer, and Rabelais and La Fontaine *.. It is from this part I have chose to extract a specimen of our author's mode of writing, which shall be a digreffion on Dryden. I should have preferred indeed a still more splendid pafsage (if any one part of fuch a work can be called more splendid than another) on the excellency of circumstantial imagery in poetry, if I had not been afraid the various languages from which the examples are taken might not 'be equally familiar to all readers; but this will do to shew with what words Tully, Longinus, and Quintilian, used to praise the masters of the human mind, at the same time that it will teach us how a poet is to be praised.

"The tale to which this is the Prologue, has been versified by Dryden; and is supposed to have been of Chaucer's own contrivance: as is also the elegant VISION of the flour and the leaf, which has received new graces from the spirited and harmonious Dryden. It is to his fables, though wrote in his old age †, that Dryden will owe his immortality, and among them particularly to Palamon and Arcite, Sigismunda and Guiscardo, Theodore and Honoria; and to his Music ode. The warmth and melody of these pieces, has never been excelled in our lan guaged, I mean in rhyme. As general and unexemplified criticilm is always uselefs and absurd, I must beg leave to select a few passages from these three poems, and the reader must not think any observations on the character of Dryden, the constant pattern of POPE, unconnected with the main subject of this work. The picture of Arcite in the absence of Emilia, is highly expressive of the deepest distress, and a compleat image of anguifh.

i

He rav'd with all the madness of despair,
He roar'd, he beat his breast, he tore his hair.

* Dr. Warton wishes with reafon, that, instead of The Wife of Bath, the choice of which nothing but his youth could excufe, Pope had ercifed his pencil on the pathetic story of The Patience of Grifelda, Troilus and Cressida, or the Complaint of the Black Knight, or, above all, on Canbuscan and Canace.

P. 222.

:

† The falling off of his hair, faid a man of wit, had no other consequence, than to make his laurels to be seen the more. A person who tranflated fome pieces after Dryden used to say,

Experto credite, quantus

In clypeum assurgat, quo turbine torqueat haftam.

Crebillon was ninety when he brought his Catiline on the stage.

Dry

Dry forrow in his ftupid eyes appears,

For, wanting nourishment, he wanted tears:
His eye-balls in their hollow fockets fink,
Bereft of fleep he loaths his meat and drink;
He withers at his heart, and looks as wan,
As the pale spectre of a murder'd man *.

"The image of the Suicide is equally picturesque and pathetic..

The flayer of himself yet saw I there
The gore congeal'd was clotted in his hair:
With eyes half-clos'd and gaping month he lay,

And grim, as when he breath'd his fullen foul away.

This reminds me of that forcible defeription in a writer whose fancy was eminently strong. "Catilina vero, longe a fuis, in"ter hoftium cadavera repertus est, paululum etiam spirans; " ferociamque animi, quam habuerat vivus, in vultu retinens." Nor must i onit that affecting image in Spenser, who ever excels in the pathetic,

And him befides there lay upon the grass

A dreary corse, whose life away did pass,
All wallow'd in his own, yet lukewarm, blood,
That from his wound yet welled fresh, alas;
In which a rusty knife faft fixed food,
And made an open passage for the gushing flood t.

When Palamon perceived his rival had efcaped,

- Heftares, he stamps the ground;
The hollow tower with clamour rings around :
With briny tears he bath'd his fetter'd feet,
And dropp'd all o'er with agony of weat.

Nor are the feelings of Palamon less strongly impressed on the reader, where he fays,

The rage of Jealousy then fir'd his foul,
And his face kindled like a burning coal:
Now cold despair succeeding in her stead,
To livid paleness turn'd the glowing red 1.

"If we pass on from descriptions of persons to those of things, we shall find this poem equally excellent. The temple of Mars,

* Palamon and Arcite, Book I.

+ Fairy Queen, Book I. Canto 9. Stanza 36.

These passages are chiefly of the pathetic fort; for which Dryden in his tragedies is far from being remarkable. But it is not unusual for the fame person to succeed in describing externally a distressful character, who may miferably fail in putting proper words in the mouth of such a character. In a word, fo much more difficult is DRAMATIC than DESCRIPTIVE poetry!

VOL. I.

B

is

: i

is fituated with propriety, in a country defolate and joyless;
all around it,

The landscape was a forest wide and bare;
Where neither beast nor human kind repair;
The fowl, that scent afar, the borders fly,
And shun the bitter blast, and wheel about the sky.
A cake of scurf lies wheeling on the ground,
And prickly stubs instead of trees are found.

"The temple itself is nobly and magnificently studied; and, at the same time, adapted to the furious nature of the God to whom it belonged; and carries with it a barbarous and tremendous idea.

1

The frame of burnish'd steel that cast a glare
From far, and feem'd to thaw the freezing air.
A strait long entry to the temple led,
Blind with high walls and horror over-head:
Thence ifssued such a blast and hollow roar,

That threaten'd from the hinge to heave the door,
In through the door a northern light there shone,
'Twas all it had, for windows there were none.
The gate of adamant, eternal frame,

Which hew'd by Mars himself from Indian quarries came.
This scene of terror is judiciously contrasted by the pleafing
and joyous imagery of the temples of Venus and Diana. The
figure of the last goddess is a design fit for GUIDO to execute..
The graceful Goddess was array'd in green;
About her feet were little beagles feen,

That watch'd with UPWARD eyes the motions of their queen. But above all, the whole description of the entering the lifts *, and of the ensuing combat, which is told at length, in the middle of the third book, is marvellously spirited; and so lively, as to make us spectators of that interesting and magnificent tournament. Even the absurdity of feigning ancient heroes, fuch as Theseus and Lycurgus, present at the lifts and a modern combat, is overwhelmed and obliterated amidst the blaze, the pomp, and the profufion of fuch animated poetry. Frigid and phlegmatic must be the critic, who could have leisure dully and foberly to attend to the anachronism on so striking an occafion. The mind is whirled away by a torrent of rapid imagery, and propriety is forgot.

** The reader is defired all along to remember, that the first delinea tion of all these images is in Chaucer, and it might be worth examining how much Dryden has added purely from his own stock.

" The

"The tale of Sigismonda and Guiscardo is heightened with many new and affecting touches by Dryden. I shall select only the following picture of Sigifmonda, as it has the fame attitude in which the appears in a famous piece of Correggio. Mute, folemn forrow, free from female noise, Such as the Majesty of grief destroys: For bending o'er the cup, the tears she shed Seem'd by the posture to discharge her head, O'erfill'd before; and oft (her mouth apply'd

To the cold heart) she kiss'd at once and cry'd. "There is an incomparable wildness in the vision of Theodore and Honoria*, that represents the furious picture of " the horseman ghost that came thundering for his prey," and of the gaunt mastiffs that tore the fides of the shrieking damfel he pursued; which is a subject worthy the pencil of Spagnoletti, as it partakes of that savageness which is fo ftriking to the imagination. I shall confine myself to point out only two pafsages, which relate the two appearances of this formidable figure: and I place them last, as I think them the most lofty of any part of Dryden's works.

Whilft lift'ning to the murm'ring leaves he stood,
More than a mile immers'd within the wood,
At once the wind was laid the whisp'ring found
Was dumb-a rifing earthquake rock'd the ground:
With deeper brown the grove was overspread,
And his ears tingled, and his colour fled.

The fenfations of a man upon the approach of some strange and fupernatural danger, can scarcely be represented more feelingly. All nature is thus said to sympathize at the second appearance

of

Arm'd with his naked sword that urg'd his dogs to speed. Thus it runs

The fiend's alarm began; the hollow found
Sung in the leaves, the forest shook around,
Air blacken'd, roll'd the thunder, groan'd the ground.

1

!

"But to conclude this digression on Dryden. It must be owned, that this ode on the power of music, which is the chief ornament of this volume, is the most unrivalled of his compofitions. By that strange fatality which seeins to disqualify au thors from judging of their own works, he does not appear to have valued this piece, because he totally omits it in the enumeration and criticism he has given, of the rest, in his preface to the volume. I shall add nothing to what I have already faid on this subject *; but only sell the occafion and manner of his writing it. Mr. St. John, afterwards Lord Bolingbroke, happening to pay a morning vifit to Dryden, whom he always respected †, found him in an unusual agitation of spirits, even to a trembling. On enquiring the cause, " I have been up all night, replied the old bard; my musical friends made me promise to write them an ode for their feast of St. Cæcilia: I have been so ftruck with the subject which occurred to me, that I could not leave it till I had completed it; here it is, finished at one fitting." And immediately he shewed him this ode, which places the British lyric poetry above that of any other nation. This anecdote, as true as it is curious, was imparted by Lord Bolingbroke to Mr. Pope, by Pope to Mr. Gilbert West, by him to the ingenious friend who communicated it to me. The rapidity, and yet the perfpicuity of the thoughts, the glow and the expreffiveness of the images, those certain marks of the first sketch of a master, conspire to corroborate the truth of the

fact."

In speaking of the translations, wihch come next, Dr. W. treats Statius and Ovid with great, and the former certainly, with just, severity; but though the latter has many and great faults, the cause of which are well ascribed by Vavassfor, (who is quoted,) to his having been first intended for an orator, in an age when pointed and florid sentences began to be preferred to the founder beauties of a more mafculine composition; which wretched taste he carried away with him from the schools, and spoilt his poetry by it, still I cannot think

* Vol. I. page go.

† See his verses to Dryden, prefixed to the tranflation of Virgil. Lord Bolingbroke assured Pope, that Dryden often declared to him, that he got more from the Spanish critics alone, than from the Italian, French, and all other critics put together. This appears strange. Lord Bolingbroke learned Spanish in less than three weeks. Richard Berenger, Efq,

but