It will not be fuppofed that a man of this character attained high digni ties in the church; but he ftill retained the friendship, and frequented the conversation, of a very numerous and splendid body of acquaintance. He died July 16, 1736, in the 66th year of his age.

A

Of his poems, many are of that irregular kind, which, when he formed his poetical character, was fuppofed to be Pindarick. Having fixed his attention on Cowley as a model, he has attempted in some fort to rival him, and has written a Hymn to Darkness, evidently as a counter-part to Cowley's Hymn to Light and mo

enjoined to explain them. Thus preffed, he told them that the words had lain unheeded in his pocket-book from the time of queen Anne, and that he was afhamed to give an account of them; but the truth was, that he had gratified his curiofity one day, by hearing Daniel Burgess in the pulpit, and those words was a memorial hint of a remarkable fentence by which he warned his congregation to beware of thorough-paced doctrine, that doctrine, which, coming in atstone at one ear, paces through the head, and goes out at the other.

Nothing worfe than this appearing in

papers, and no evide

against him, he was fet at

fing

4

This hymn feems to be his beft per-formance, and is, for the moft part, imagined with great vigour, and expreffed with great propriety. I will not tranfcribe it. The feven firft ftanzas are good, but the third, fourth, and feventh are the beft: the eighth seems to involve a contradiction; the tenth is exquifitely beautiful; the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth, are partly mythological, and partly religious, and therefore not fuitable to each other: he might better have made the whole merely philofophical.

There are two ftanzas in this poem where Yalden may be suspected, be fufpected, though hardly convicted, of having confulted the Hymnus ad Umbram of Wowerus, in

the

the fixth ftanza, which answers in fome

fort to thefe lines:

Illa fuo præeft nocturnis numine facris-
Perque vias errare novis dat spectra figuris,
Manefque excitos medios ululare per agros
Sub noctem, & queftu notos complere penates.

And again, at the conclufion;

Illa fuo fenium fecludit corpore toto
Haud numerans jugi fugientia fecula lapfu,
Ergo ubi poftremum mundi compage folutâ
Hanc rerum molem fuprema abfumpferit hora
Ipfa leves cineres nube amplectetur opacâ,
Ea prifes imperio rurfus dominabitur UMBRA.

His Hymn to Light is not equal to the other. He feems to think that there is an Eaft abfolute and pofitive where the Morning rifes.