It will not be supposed that a man of this character attained high dignix ties in the church; but he still 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.

Of his poems, many are of that irregular kind, which, when he formed his poetical character, was supposed to be Pindariçk. 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.

FAS

This thynin seems to be his best per-formance, and is, for the moft pare, - imagined with great vigour, and ex-prefied with great propriety. I will not transcribe it. The seven firft ftanzas are good ; but the third, fourth, and seventh are the best : the eighth seems to involve a contradiction; the tenth is exquisitely beautiful; the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth, are partly my:thological, and partly religious, and therefore not suitable to each other: he might better have made the whole merely philosophical.

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

the

the sixth stanza, which answers in some fort to these lines :

Illa suo præeft nocturnis numine facris
Perque vias errare novis dat spectra figuris,
Maneique excitos medios ululare per agros
Sub noctem, & que tu notus complere penates.

And again, at the conclufion;

Illa suo senium fecludit corpore toto
Haud numerans jugi fugientia fecula lapsu,
Ergo ubi poftremum mundi compage folutâ
Hanc rerum molem fuprema abfumpferit 'hora
Ipfa leves cineres nube ample&tetur opacâ,
Ea prises imperio rursus dominabitur uMBRA,

His Hymn to Light is not equal to the other. He seems to think that there is an East absolute and positive where the Morning rises.

In the last stanza, having mentioned the sudden eruption of new created Light, he says,

Awhile th' Almighty wondering food.

He ought to have remembered that Infinite Knowledge can never wonder. All wonder is the effect of novelty upon ignorance.

Of his other poems it is sufficient to say that they deserve perusal, though they are not always exactly polished, and the rhymes are sometimes very ill forted, and though his faults seem rather the omiffions of idleness than the negligences of enthusiasm.

1

F-THOMAS OTWAY, one

of the first names in the English drana, little is known; nor is there any part of that little which his biographer can take pleasure in relating,

He was born at Trottin in Sussex, March 3, 1651, the son of Mr. Huinphry Otway, rector of Woolbeding. From Winchester-school, where he was educated, he was entered in 1669 a com

b

moner