express, the ideas of Isaiah: the latter he has performed in many instances; but in none more strikingly than in the following, which magnifi cently represents the Messiah treading the winepress in his anger; and which an impartial judge, not blinded by the charms of antiquity, will think equal to many descriptions in Virgil, in point of elegance and energy:

Ille patris vires indutus et iram

Dira rubens graditur, per stragem et fracta potentum
Agmina, prona solo; prostratisque hostibus ultor
Insultat; ceu præla novo spumantia musto
Exercens, salit attritas calcator in uvas,

Congestamque struem subigit: cæde atra recenti

Crura madent, rorantque inspersæ sanguine vestes.*

*Prælect. vii. pag. 62.

SECTION

SECTION II.

OF WINDSOR-FOREST, AND LYRIC PIECES.

DESCRIPTIVE Poetry was by no means the shining talent of POPE. This assertion may be manifested by the few images introduced in the poem before us, which are not equally applicable to any place whatsoever. Rural beauty in general, and not the peculiar beauties of the Forest of Windsor, are here described. Nor are the sports of setting, shooting, and fishing, included between the ninety-third and one hundred and fortysixth verses, to which the reader is referred, at all more appropriated. The stag-chase, that immediately follows, although some of the lines are incomparably good,* is not so full, so animated, and so circumstantiated, as that of Somerville.

C 2

* See particularly, ver. 151.

The

The digression that describes the demolition of the thirty villages by William the Conqueror, is well imagined; particularly,

Round broken columns clasping ivy twin'd;
O'er heaps of ruin stalk'd the stately hind;
The fox obscene to gaping tombs retires,
And savage howlings fill the sacred quires.*

Though I cannot forbear thinking, that the following picture of the ruins of Godstow Nunnery, drawn, it should seem, on the spot, and worthy the hand of Paul Brill, is by no means excelled by the foregoing.

Qua nudo Rosamonda humilis sub culmine tecti
Marginis obscuri servat inane decus,

Rara intermissæ circum vestigia molis,
Et sola in vacuo tramite porta labat :
Sacræ olim sedes riguæ convallis in umbra,
Et veteri pavidum religione nemus.
Pallentes nocturna ciens campana sorores
Hinc matutinum sæpe monebat avem ;
Hinc procul in media tarde caliginis hora
Prodidit arcanas arcta fenestra faces :
Nunc muscosa extant sparsim de cespite saxa,
Nunc muro avellunt germen agreste boves.†

VOLTAIRE,

* Ver. 69. + Carmina Quadrages. Oxon. 1748.

VOLTAIRE, in the first volume of his entertaining and lively Essay on General History, is inclined to dispute the truth of this devastation imputed to William the Conqueror, but for a reason not very solid and conclusive. His objection consists in the improbability that any man in his senses, should think of depopulating a circuit of fifteen leagues, and of sowing and planting a forest therein, when he was now sixty-three years old, and could not reasonably hope to live long enough to have the pleasure of hunting in it after these trees were grown up. As if it were necessary to have only woods to hunt in, or that a forest should be laid out (as are some in France) in regular alleys and avenues of trees. All our old historians, Florence of Worcester, William of Malmesbury, Henry of Huntingdon, Simeon of Durham, Hoveden, Brompton, and Walter Mapes, join in charging William with this wanton act of cruelty and oppression. And yet those who have most accurately examined the New Forest, can discover no mark or footstep of any other place of habitation, parish, or church, or castle, than what at present remains. There is, indeed, some probability that the character of this Prince has C 3

been

been misrepresented, and his oppressions magnified. The law of the curfeu-bell, by which every inhabitant of England was obliged to extinguish his fire and candles at eight in the evening, has been usually alleged as the institution of a capricious tyrant. But this law, as Voltaire* rightly observes, was so far from being absurdly tyrannical, that it was an ancient custom established among all the monasteries of the north. Their houses were built of wood; and so cautious a method to prevent fire, was an object worthy a prudent legislator. A more amiable idea than POPE has here exhibited of the Conqueror, is given us of the same Prince, by that diligent enquirer into antiquity, the President Henault, in a passage that contains some curious particulars, characteristical of the manners of that age. "This Monarch protected letters, at a time when books were so rare and uncommon, that a Countess of Anjou gave for a collection of homilies, two hundred sheep, a measure of wheat, another of rye, a third of millet, and a certain number of the skins of

martens."

Abregé de l'Histoire Universelle, &c. tom. i. pag. 280.