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TO LONDON.

OSEAS.

Look, London, look! with inward eyes behold,

What lessons the events do here unfold;

Sin, grown to Pride, to Misery is thrall;

The warning bell is rung, beware to fall!

Ye worldly men, whom wealth doth lift on high,
Beware and fear; for worldly men must die!

The time shall come, where least respect remains;

The sword shall light upon the wisest brains.

The head, that deems to overtop the sky,
Shall perish in his human policy.

Lo, I have said, when I have said the truth;
When will is law; when Folly guideth youth;
When shew of zeal is prank'd in robes of zeal;
When Ministers powl the pride of commonweal;
When Law is made a labyrinth of strife;

When Honour yields him friend to wicked life;
When Princes hear by other ears than folly;

When Usury is most accounted holy!

If these should hap, as would to God they might not;

The plague is near! I speak, although I write not.

TO LONDON.

OSEAS.

WHERE whoredom reigns, there murder follows fast,

As falling leaves before the winter blast;
A wicked life, train'd up in endless crime,
Hath no reward unto the latter time:

When Letchers shall be punish'd for their lust,
When Princes plagued, because they are unjust,
Foresee in time; the warning-bell doth toll;
Subdue the flesh, by prayer, to save the soul.
London, behold the cause of others' wreck,
And set the sword of Justice at thy back:
Defer not off! To-morrow is too late;

By night he comes perhaps to judge thy state!

SONG.

BEAUTY, alas! where wast thou born,

Thus to hold thyself in scorn,

When as Beauty kiss'd to woo thee,

Thou by Beauty dost undo me?
Heigho, despise me not!

I and thou in sooth are one;
Fairer thou; I, fairer none;

Wanton thou, and wilt thou, wanton,

Yield a cruel heart to plant on?

Do me right, and do me reason!
Cruelty is cursed treason.

Heigho, I love; Heigho, I love;
Heigho, and yet he eyes me not!

CRITICISM.

HESE Extracts from "The Looking-Glass for England," by Lodge and Greene, will probably not only

please, but astonish the Reader of Taste. The Address to London, which cominences in the first page of these EXCERPTA will lose little by a comparison with a celebrated passage of a similar tendency in "Cowper's Task," which must be familiar to every one, even without making allowances for the date of the composition.

Of the lives of Lodge and Greene, I have

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given some account in other places. All their works are scarce; and none seem to have been less ransacked in modern days for specimens than the above play. If there are those who think that these investigations are the useless impertinences of literature, he, who reflects more deeply, who knows how to value the study of the progress of language, who loves to investigate the changes of manners, and to trace the history of the improvements of the human mind, will form a very different opinion of them. If our poetical phraseology has altogether been enriched and refined since the days of Queen Elizabeth, it has lost something of its strength, and a great deal of its simplicity. It is now too often marked by an artificial sweetness, or an artificial splendour, which, if it catches for a moment, soon satiates, and then disgusts. The vigour of thought, the idea prevailing over the dress in which it is clothed, characterized the literature of those days far above the present.

If there were no other advantage in a grow

a See new editions of "Theatr. Poet. Angli."-'---" England's Helicon," and "Greene's Groats-worth of it."

ing familiarity with Elizabethan Literature, the increased taste which it will give us for all the varieties and all the beauties of Shakespeare's language will be an ample recompence: for I need not say, that in Shakespeare is to be found, above all uninspired writings, the most abundant and inexhaustible treasure of moral wisdom, fitted "to the bosom and business" of every human being, as well as of the most vivid and enchanting poetry.

But Shakespeare so far eclipsed his cotemporaries, that common and superficial readers are little aware how much merit is to be found even in them! Even Shakespeare's productions could not have existed without the aid of cotemporary literature, and the collision of other ingenious, though inferior intellects.

When Greene died at a premature age,(1592,) Shakespeare had just begun to attract notice; and we have seen in Greene's Address to his Companions, in the "Groats-worth of Wit," that

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pangs of envy and jealousy had begun their base operations in his bosom. If the superiority of another justifies jealousy, Greene had reason

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