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Auction: but gold may be fo concealed in bafer mat ter, that only a chymift can recover it; fense may be fo hidden in unrefined and plebeian words, that none but philofophers can distinguish it; and both may be fo buried in impurities, as not to pay the cost of their extraction.

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The diction, being the vehicle of the thoughts, firft prefents itself to the intellectual eye: and if the first appearance offends, a further knowledge is not often fought. Whatever profeffes to benefit by pleasing, muft please at once. The pleafures of the mind imply fomething fudden and unexpected; that which elevates must always furprife. What is perceived by flow degrees may gratify us with confciousness of improvement, but will never ftrike with the fenfe of pleafure.

Of all this, Cowley appears to have been without knowledge, or without care. He makes no felection of words, nor feeks any neatnefs of phrafe: he has no elegances either lucky or elaborate; as his endeavours were rather to imprefs fentences upon the underftanding than images on the fancy, he has few epithets, and thofe fcattered without peculiar propriety of nice adaptation. It feems to follow from the neceffity of the fubject, rather than the care of the writer, that the diction of his heroick poem is lefs familiar than that of his flightest writings. He has given not the fame numbers, but the fame diction, to the gentle Anacreon and the tempeftuous Pindar.

His verification feems to have had very little of his care; and if what he thinks be true, that his numbers are unmufical only when they are ill read, the art of reading them is at prefent loft; for they are commonly VOL. II.

F

harsh

harsh to modern ears. He has indeed many noble lines, fuch as the feeble care of Waller never could produce. The bulk of his thoughts fometimes fwelled his verse to unexpected and inevitable grandeur; but his excellence of this kind is merely fortuitous: he finks willingly down to his general careleffnefs, and avoids with very little care either meannefs or af perity.

His contractions are often rugged and harsh

One flings a mountain, and its rivers too

Torn up with't.

His rhymes are very often made by pronouns or particles, or the like unimportant words, which disappoint the ear, and destroy the energy of the line.

His combination of different measures is fometimes diffonate and unpleafing; he joins verfes together, of which the former does not flide easily into the latter.

The words do and did, which fo much degrade in prefent estimation the line that admits thein, were in the time of Cowley little cenfured or avoided; how often he used them, and with how bad an effect, at least to our ears, will appear by a paffage, in which every reader will lament to fee juft and noble thoughts defrauded of their praife by inelegance of language:

Where honour or where confcience does not blind,

No other law fhall fhackle me;

Slave to myself I ne'er will be;

Nor fhall my future actions be confin'd

By my own prefent mind.

Who by refolves and vows engag'd does stand

For days, that yet belong to fate,

Does like an unthrift mortgage his eftate,

Beford

Before it falls into his hand,

The bondman of the cloifter fo

All that he does receive does always owe.

And fill as Time comes in; it goes away,
Not to enjoy, but debts to pay !

Unhappy flave, and pupil to a bell!

Which his hours' work as well as hours does tell
Unhappy till the last, the kind releafing knell.

His heroick lines are often formed of monofyllables; 263 but yet they are sometimes sweet and fonorous.

He fays of the Messiah,

Round the whole earth his dreaded name fhall found,
And reach to worlds that must not yet be found.

In another place, of David,

Yet bid him go fecurely, when he fends ;
'Tis Saul that is his foe, and we his friends.
The man who has his God, no aid can lack;

And we who bid him go, will bring him back.

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Yet amidst his negligence he fometimes attempted an improved and fcientifick verfification; of which it will be beft to give his own account fubjoined to this line,

Nor can the glory contain itself in th' endless space. "I am forry that it is neceffary to admonish the most part of readers, that it is not by negligence that this "verfe is fo loofe, long, and, as is were; vaft; it is to "paint in the number the nature of the thing which it "defcribes, which I would have obferved in divers "other places of this poem, that elfe will pafs for very carlefs verfes: as before,

And over-runs the neighb'ring fields with violent courfe.

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"In the fecond book;

Down a precipice deep, down he cafts them all.

"-And,

And fell a-down his shoulders with loofe care. "In the third,

Brafs was his helmet, his boots brass, and o'er
His breaft a thick plate of strong brass he wore.
In the fourth,

Like fome fair pine-o'er-looking all th' ignobler wood. "And,

Some from the rocks caft themselves down beadlong. "And many more: but it is enough to instance in a few. "The thing is, that the difpofition of words and num"bers fhould be fuch, as that, out of the order and found "of them, the things themselves may be reprefented. "This the Greeks were not fo accurate as to bind them"felves to; neither have our English poets obferved it, "for aught I can find. The Latins (qui mufas colunt

feveriores) fometimes did it, and their prince, Virgil, "always: in whom the examples are innumerable, and "taken notice of by all judicious men, fo that it is fuper"Auous to collect them."

I know not whether he has, in many of these instances, attained the representation or resemblance that he purpofes. Verfe can imitate only found and motion. A boundless verfe, a headlong verfe, and a verse of brass or of firong brass, fecm to comprife very incongruous and unfociable ideas. What there is peculiar in the found of the line expreffing loofe care, I cannot difcover; nor why the pine is taller in an Alexandrine than in ten fyllables.

But,

But, not to defraud him of his due praise, he has 20 given one example of reprefentative verfification, which perhaps no other English line can equal;

Begin, be bold, and venture to be wife,

He who defers this work from day to day,
Does on a river's bank expecting stay

Till the whole ftream that stopp'd him shall be gone,
Which runs, and as it runs, for ever shall run on.

Cowley was, I believe, the first poet that mingled Alexandrines at pleasure with the common heroick of ten fyllables, and from him Dryden borrowed the practice, whether ornamental or licentious. He confidered the verfe of twelve fyllables as elevated and majeftick, and has therefore deviated into that measure when he supposes the voice heard of the Supreme Being.

The Author of the Davideis is commended by Dryden for having written it in couplets, because he discovered that any staff was too lyrical for an heroick poem; but this feems to have been known before by May and Sandys, the tranflators of the Pharfalia and the Metamorphofes.

In the Davideis are some hemiftichs, or verfes left imperfect by the author, in imitation of Virgil, whom he supposes not to have intended to complete them: that this opinion is erroneous, may be probably concluded, because this truncation is imitated by no fubfequent Roman poet; because Virgil himself filled up one braken line in the heat of recitation; because in one the fenfe is now unfinished; and because all that can be done by a broken verfe, a line interfected by a cafura and a full ftop will equally effect.

Of triplets in his Davideis he makes no ufe, and perhaps did not at first think them allowable; but he ap

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