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and is so free from manner, that it might rather pass

for his than for Dr. Johnson's.

ON THE DEATH OF ROBERT LEVETT.

Condemned to Hope's delusive mine,
As on we toil from day to day,
By sudden blast or slow decline
Our social comforts drop away.

Well tried through many a varying year,
See Levett to the grave descend
Officious, innocent, sincere,

Of every friendless name the friend.

Yet still he fills Affection's eye
Obscurely wise and coarsely kind,
Nor lettered arrogance deny
Thy praise to merit undefined.

When fainting Nature called for aid,

And hovering Death prepared the blow,

His vigorous remedy displayed

The power of Art without the show.

In misery's darkest caverns known,
His ready help was ever nigh,
Where helpless anguish poured his groan,
And lonely want retired to die.

No summons mocked by chill delay,
No petty gains disdained by pride;

The modest wants of every day,

The toil of every day supplied.

His virtues walked their narrow round,
Nor made a pause nor left a void;
And sure the Eternal Master found,
His single talent well employed.

The busy day, the peaceful night,
Unfelt, uncounted, glided by;

His frame was firm, his powers were bright,
Though now his eightieth year was nigh.

Then with no throbs of fiery pain,
No cold gradations of decay;
Death broke at once the vital chain,
And freed his soul the nearest way.

XII.

OLD POETS.

ROBERT HERRICK-GEORGE WITHERS.

NOTHING seems stranger in the critics of the last century than their ignorance of the charming lyrical poetry of the times of the early Stuarts and the Commonwealth. One should think that the songs of the great dramatists, whose genius they did acknowledge-Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Ben Jonson-might have prepared them to recognise the kindred melodies of such versifiers as Marlowe and Raleigh and Wither and Marvell. His Jacobite prejudices might have predisposed Dr. Johnson in particular to find some harmonious stanzas in the minstrels of the cavaliers, Lovelace and the Marquis of Montrose. But so complete is the silence in which the writers of that day pass over these glorious songsters, that it seems only

charitable to suppose that these arbiters of taste had never met with their works. With the honourable exceptions of Thomas Warton and Bishop Percy, there is not a critic from Johnson downward who does not cite Waller as the first poet who smoothed our rugged tongue into harmonious verse. And the prejudice lingers still in places where one does not expect to find it. The parish clerk of Beaconsfield is by no means the only, although by far the most excusable authority who, standing bareheaded before his pyramidal tomb in the churchyard, assured me with the most honest conviction that Waller was the earliest and finest versifier in the language.

Herrick is one of the many whose lyrics might be called into court to overturn this verdict. Originally bred to the bar, he took orders at a comparatively late period, and obtained a living in Devonshire, from which he fled during the strict rule of the Lord Protector, concealing himself under a lay habit in London, and returning to his parsonage with the return of the monarch, whose birth had formed the subject of one of his earliest pastorals.

More than any eminent writer of that day Herrick's collection requires careful sifting; but there is so much fancy, so much delicacy, so much grace, that a good selection would well repay the publisher. Bits there are that are exquisite: as when

in enumerating the cates composing "Oberon's Feast" in his "Fairyland," he includes, amongst a strange farrago of unimaginable dishes,

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Some of his pieces, too, contain curious illustrations of the customs, manners, and prejudices of our ancestors. I shall quote one or two from the division of the Hesperides that he calls "charms and ceremonies," beginning with the motto:

DIVINATION BY A DAFFODIL

When a daffodil I see,

Hanging down his head toward me,
Guess I may what I may be:

First, I shall decline my head,
Secondly, I shall be dead;
Lastly, safely buried.

The adorning the houses with evergreens seems then to have been as common as our own habit of decking them with flowers.

CEREMONIES FOR CANDLEMAS EVE.

Down with rosemary and bays,

Down with the mistletoe,
Instead of holly now upraise

The greener box for show.

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