When the meadows next are seen,
Sweet enamel white and green,
When again the lambkins play,
Pretty sportlings full of May.

Then the neck so white and round,
(Little neck with brilliants bound)
And thy gentleness of mind,
(Gentle from a gentle kind), &c.
Happy thrice, and thrice again,
Happiest he of happy men, * &c.

and the rest of those excellent lullabies of his composition.

How prettily he asks the sheep to teach him to bleat?

Teach me to grieve with bleating moan, my sheep.+

Hear how a babe would reason on his nurse's death:

That ever she could die! O most unkind!
To die, and leave poor Colinet behind!
And yet,why blame I her? ‡

With no less simplicity does he suppose that shepherdesses tear their hair and beat their breasts at their own deaths:

Ye brighter maids, faint emblems of my fair,
With looks cast down, and with dishevell'd hair,
In bitter anguish beat your breasts, and moan
Her death untimely, as it were your own.

4. The INANITY, or NOTHINGNESS.

Of this the same author furnishes us with most beautiful instances.

Ambrose Philips on Miss Cuzzona.

Ibid.

Ibid.

+ Philips's Pastorals.

Ah silly I, more silly than my sheep,

(Which on the flow'ry plain I once did keep.)*

To the grave senate she could counsel give,
(Which with astonishment they did receive.)+

He whom loud cannon could not terrify,
Fall from the grandeur of his majesty.
Happy, merry as a king,

Sipping dew-you sip and sing.||

Where you easily perceive the nothingness of every second verse.

The noise returning with returning light,

What did it?

Dispersed the silence, and dispell'd the night. §

The glories of proud London to survey,
The sun himself shall rise-by break of day. I

5. The EXPletive,

admirably exemplified in the epithets of many

authors:

Th' umbrageous shadow, and the verdant green, **
The running current, and odorous fragrance,
Cheer my lone solitude with joyous gladness.

Or in pretty drawling words like these:

All men his tomb, all men his sons adore,
And his sons' sons, till there shall be no more. ††

** I am afraid he glanced at Thomson.-Dr WARTON. ++ T. Cook, Poems.

The rising sun our grief did see,
The setting sun did see the same;

While wretched we remember'd thee,
O Sion, Sion, lovely name! *

6. The MACROLOGY and PLEONASM

are as generally coupled, as a lean rabbit with a fat one; nor is it a wonder, the superfluity of words, and vacuity of sense, being just the same thing. I am pleased to see one of our greatest adversaries † employ this figure.

The growth of meadows, and the pride of fields,
The food of armies and support of wars,
Refuse of swords, and gleanings of a fight,
Lessen his numbers and contract his host,
Where'er his friends retire, or foes succeed,
Cover'd with tempests, and in oceans drown'd. ‡

Of all which the perfection is

The TAUTOLOGY.

Break through the billows, and-divide the main.§
In smoother numbers, and-in softer verse.
Divide and part-the sever'd world-in two.||

*T. Cook, Poems.

+ Even such poor writers as Catullus, Lucretius, and Horace, have sometimes been guilty of Pleonasms: of which there are examples in the Micellaneous Observations of Jortin, p. 37, vol. ii. Of this sort of style Quintilian, as usual, speaks elegantly: "Ut corpora non robore sed valetudine inflantur; et recto itinere lapsi, plerumque divertunt. Erit ergo obscurior, quo quisqui deterior." Again, Ut staturà breves in digitos eriguntur, et plura infirmi minantur.-Ne oneretur tamen verbis multis; nam sit longa et impedita oratio, ut eam judices similem agmini todidem lixas habenti quot milites; in quo et numerus est duplex, nec duplum virium." The six English lines here quoted are a severe stroke on Addison's Campaign.-Dr WARTON.

+ Camp. § Tonson's Miscellany, 12mo. vol. iv. p. 291, 4th edit. Tonson's Miscellany, vol. vi. p. 121.

With ten thousand others equally musical, and plentifully flowing through most of our celebrated modern poems.

CHAP. XII.

OF EXPRESSION, AND THE SEVERAL SORTS OF STYLE OF THE PRESENT AGE.

THE expression is adequate, when it is proportionably low to the profundity of the thought. It must not be always grammatical, lest it appear pedantic and ungentlemanly; nor too clear, for fear it become vulgar; for obscurity bestows a cast of the wonderful, and throws an oracular dignity upon a piece which hath no meaning.

For example, sometimes use the wrong number: The sword and pestilence at once devours,

instead of devour. *

Sometimes the wrong case;

And who more fit to soothe the god than thee? +

* Our author himself has more than once fallen into this fault, as hath been observed in the notes of this edition, and of which Dr Lowth in his Grammar mentions many instances.

+ Tickell, Homer, Il. f.

Dr WARTON.

Thetis saw Achilles weep,

she heard him weep.

We must be exceeding careful in two things; first, in the choice of low words: secondly, in the sober and orderly way of ranging them. Many of our poets are naturally blessed with this talent, insomuch that they are in the circumstance of that honest citizen, who had made prose all his life without knowing it.* Let verses run in this manner, just to be a vehicle to the words; I take them from my last cited author, who though otherwise by no means of our rank, seemed once in his life to have a mind to be simple :†

If not, a prize I will myself decree,

From him, or him, or else perhaps from thee.

-Full of days was he;

Two ages past, he lived the third to see.§

The king of forty kings, and honour'd more
By mighty Jove, than ee'r was king before.||
That I may know, if thou my pray'r deny,
The most despised of all the gods am I. I

Then let my mother once be rul'd by me,
Though much more wise than I pretend to be. **

Or these, of the same hand: ††

I leave the arts of poetry and verse

To them that practice them with more success.

* Jourdain, in Moliere's Bourgeois Gentilhomme.

+ This apology is certainly not offered to Tickell, the ostensible author of the version of the first Book of Homer, but to Addison, whom Pope believed to have really written it.

Tickell, Homer, P. 11.

**P. 38.

P. 17.

P. 19.

I P. 34.

++ Asserting plainly that the first book of the Iliad, published by Tickell, was really the work of Addison.-Dr WARTON.