Why should the man, whose wit ne'er l.ad a stain,
Upon the public stage present his vein,

And make a thousand men in judgment sit,

To call in question his undoubted wit,

Scarce two of which can understand the laws

Which they should judge by, nor the party's cause?
Among the rout there is not one that hath
In his own censure an explicit faith.
One company, knowing they judgment lack,
Ground their belief on the next man in black;
Others, on him that makes signs, and is mute;
Some like as he does in the fairest suit;
He as his mistress doth, and she by chance:
Nor want there those, who as the boy doth dance
Between the acts, will censure the whole play;
Some if the wax-lights be not new that day:
But multitudes there are whose judgment goes
Headlong according to the actor's clothes.
For this, these public things and I, agree
So ill, that but to do a right for thee,
I had not been persuaded to have hurl'd
These few, ill-spoken lines, into the world,
Both to be read, and censured of, by those,

Whose very reading makes verse senseless prose.

One of the finest pieces of commendatory verse is Sir Walter Raleigh's upon the great poem of Spenser. He calls it "A Vision upon the Faery Queen."

Methought I saw the grave where Laura lay,
Within that temple where the vestal flame
Was wont to burn: and passing by that way
To see that buried dust of living fame,
Whose tomb fair Love, and fairer Virtue kept,
All suddenly I saw the Faery Queen :

At whose approach the soul of Petrarch wept,
And from thenceforth those graces were not seen
(For they this Queen attended); in whose stead
Oblivion laid him down on Laura's hearse,
Hereat the hardest stones were seen to bleed,
And groans of buried ghosts the heavens did perse,
Where Homer's sprite did tremble all for grief,
And curst th' access of that celestial thief.

This is highly imaginative and picturesque. We fancy our

All on a sudden, froin

selves in one of the most beautiful places of Italian sepulture— quiet and hushing-looking upon a tomb of animated sculpture. It is the tomb of the renowned Laura. We feel the spirit of Petrarch present, without being visible. The fair forms of Love and Virtue keep watch over the marble. out the dusk of the chapel door, the Faery Queen is beheld approaching the tomb. The soul of Petrarch is heard weeping ;an intense piece of fancy, which affects one like the collected tears and disappointment of living humanity. Oblivion lays him down on the tomb;

And from thenceforth those graces were not seen.

The other marbles bleed at this: the ghosts of the dead groan : and the very spirit of Homer is felt to tremble. It is a very grand and high sonnet, worthy of the dominant spirit of the writer. One of its beauties, however, is its defect; if defect it be, and not rather a fine instance of the wilful. Comparisons between great reputations are dangerous, and are apt to be made too much at the expense of one of them, precisely because the author knows he is begging the question. Oblivion has laid him down neither on Laura's hearse nor the Faery Queen's; and Raleigh knew he never would. But he wished to make out a case for his friend, in the same spirit in which he pushed his sword into a Spanish settlement and carried all before him. The verses of Andrew Marvell prefixed to Paradise Lost, be ginning,

Where I beheld the poet, blind, yet bold,

are well known to every reader of Milton, and justly admired by all who know what they read. We remember how delighted we were to find who Andrew Marvell was, and that he could be pleasant and lively as well as grave. Spirited and worthy as this panegyric is, the reader who is not thoroughly acquainted with Marvell's history, does not know all its spirit and worth. That true friend and excellent patriot stuck to his old acquaintance at a period when canters and time-servers had turned their backs upon him, and when they would have made the very

Knowledge of him, which they had had the honor of sharing, the ruin of those that put their desertion to the blush. There is a noble burst of indignation on this subject, in Marvell's prose works, against a fellow of the name of Parker, who succeeded in obtaining a bishopric. Parker seems to have thought that Marvell would have been afraid of acknowledging his ola acquaintance; but so far from resembling the bishop in that or any other particular, he not only publicly proclaimed and gloried in the friendship of the poet, but reminded Master Parker that he had once done the same.

We must be cautious how we go on quoting verses upon this agreeable subject; for they elbow one's prose out at a great rate. They sit in state, with a great vacancy on each side of them, like Henry the Eighth in a picture of Holbein's. The wits who flourished in the time of the Stuarts and Queen Anne were not behind the great poets of the age of Elizabeth, in doing justice to their contemporaries. Dryden hailed the appearance of Con. greve and Oldham. Congreve's merits were universally acknowledged except by the critics. We need not refer to the works of Pope, Gay, Steele, Prior, &c. If Swift abused Dryden (who is said to have told him he would never be a poet), he also abused in a most unwarrantable and outrageous manner Sir Richard Steele, for whose Tatler he had written. His abuse

was not a thing of literary jealousy, but of some personal or party spite. The union of all three was a perfection of consciousness, reserved for the present time. But Swift's very fondness vented itself, like Buonaparte's, in slaps of the cheek. He was morbid, and liked to create himself cause for pity or regret. "The Dean was a strange man." According to Mrs. Pilkington, he would give her a pretty hard thump now and then, of course to see how amiably she took it. Upon the same principle, he tells us in the verses on his death, that

Friend Pope will grieve a month, and Gay

A week, and Arbuthnot a day.

This was to vex them, and make them prove his words false by complaining of their injustice. He himself once kept a letter unopened for some days, because he was afraid it contained

news of a friend's death. See how he makes his very coarseness and irritability contribute to a panegyric :

We must finish our quotations with a part of some sprightly verses addressed to Garth on his Dispensary, by a friend of the name of Codrington. Codrington was one of those happilytempered spirits, who united the characters of the gentleman, the wit, and the man of business. He was, in the best sense of the word, "A person of wit and honor about town."

The courtier's, scholar's, soldier's, eye, tongue, sword.

He was born in Barbadoes, and after residing some time in England, and serving with great gallantry as an officer in various parts of the world, became Governor-General of the Leeward Islands. He resigned his government in the course of a few years, and died in Barbadoes in the midst of his favorite studies. Among the variety of his accomplishments he did not omit divi. nity; and he was accounted a master of metaphysics. His public life he had devoted to his country; his private he divided among his books and friends. If the verses before us are not so good as those of the old poets they are as good in their way, are as sincere and cordial, and smack of the champagne on his table. We like them on many accounts, for we like the panegyrist, and have an old liking for his friend-we like the taste they express in friendship and in beauty; and we like to fancy that our good. humored ancestors in Barbadoes enjoyed the Governor's society, and relished their wine with these identical triplets.

TO MY FRIEND THE AUTHOR, DESIRING MY OPINION OF HIS POEM.

Ask me not, friend, what I approve or blame;

Perhaps I know not what I like or damn;

I can be pleased, and I dare own I am.

I read thee over with a lover's eye;

Thou hast no faults, or I no faults can spy;
Thou art all beauty, or all blindness I.

Critics and aged beaux of fancy chaste,

Who ne'er had fire, or else whose fire is past,
Must judge by rules what they want force to taste.

The nymph has Grafton's, Cecil's, Churchill's charms,

If with resistless fires my soul she warms,

With balm upon her lips, and raptures in her arms.

It

Literary loves and jealousies were much the same in other ages as the present; but we have a great deal more of the loves than the reverse; because genius survives, and ignorance does not. The ancient philosophers had a delicate way of honor ing their favorites, by inscribing treatises with their names. is thought a strange thing to Xenophon that he never mentions Plato. The greater part of the miscellaneous poetry of the Greeks is lost; or we should doubtless see numerous evidences of the intercourse of their authors. The Greek poets of Sicily, Theocritus and Moschus, are affectionate in recording the merits of their contemporaries. Varius and Gallus, two eminent Roman poets, scarcely survive but in the panegyrics of their contemporaries. Dante notices his, and his predecessors. Petrarch and Boccaccio publicly honored, as they privately loved one another. Tasso, the greatest poet of his time, was also the greatest panegyrist; and so, as might be expected, was Ariosto. The latter has introduced a host of his friends by name, male and female, at the end of his great work, coming down to the shores of poetry to welcome him home after his voyage. There is a pleasant imitation of it by Gay, applied to Pope's conclusion of Homer. Montaigne, who had the most exalted notions of friendship, which he thought should have everything in common, took as much zeal in the literary reputation of his friends, as in everything else that concerned them. The wits of the time of Henry the Fourth, of Louis the Fourteenth, and of Louis the Fifteenth,-Malherbe, Racan, Corneille, Molière, Racine, Chaulieu, La Fare, D'Alembert, Voltaire, &c., not excepting Boileau, where he was personally intimate with a