manners inspired it; and for this reason, and as possessing a brutal pungency which it would be hard to match outside the epigrams of Martial, it deserves to be cited :

Believe me, Cloe, the perfumes that cost

Such sums to sweeten thee are treasures lost.

Not all Arabia would sufficient be:

:

Thou smell'st not of thy sweets; they stink of thee.

William Walsh, the partner of Granville in Pope's panegyrical couplet, was his opponent in politics. He was the son of Joseph Walsh of Abberley in Worcestershire, and was born in 1673. Entering Wadham College, Oxford, in 1678, he left it without taking a degree, and appears to have entered early into courtly society, where, according to Dennis, he was noted for the splendour of his dress. On the 10th of August 1698 he was elected M.P. for Worcestershire, and when he began to correspond with Pope in 1705, he represented Richmond in Yorkshire. He was Gentleman of the Horse under the Duke of Somerset. A zealous partisan of the Whigs, he supported the war policy initiated by William III., and in his Golden Age Restored satirised the leaders of the Tory reaction of 1703; among others Granville, whom he apparently expected to be elected Speaker of the House of Commons.1 On the other hand, when the Whigs recovered their ascendency, he imitated with some felicity (1705) Horace's Ode beginning Justum et tenacem :

The man that's resolute and just,
Firm to his principles and trust,
Nor hopes nor fears can blind;
No passions his designs control,
Not Love, that tyrant of the soul,
Can shake his steady mind.

No parties for revenge engaged,
Nor threatening of a Court enraged,
Nor storms where fleets despair;

No thunder pointed at his head;
The shattered world may strike him dead,
Not touch his soul with fear.

1 "Granville shall seize the long-expected chair."

VOL. V

H

From this the Grecian glory rose;
By this the Romans awed their foes;
Of this their poets sing;

These were the paths their heroes trod ;
These arts made Hercules a god,

And great Nassau a king.

nearly than Granville to Dryden, in the Postscript

In the rest of the ode he goes on to prophesy the rich harvests the country will reap from a steady opposition to Louis XIV. He died in March 1707-8. Walsh attained much more the idea of "simplicity" in style. to the Æneis, speaks of him as the best critic in the nation hence Pope, who says that he owed to him the counsel to aim at "correctness," with his usual trenchant felicity of description, calls him "knowing Walsh." This epithet indeed Walsh scarcely deserved when he advised Pope to write a pastoral play in imitation of Tasso's Aminta. He was in fact blinded to the natural movement towards simplification of taste by his appreciation of late Italian poetry, just as Granville was misled by his admiration of Kings, and of Waller, their courtly flatterer. Walsh knew little of the world outside the Court, and would doubtless have taken for his motto Odi profanum vulgus still within the limited circle for which he wrote he aims at familiarity. The fastidiousness of his critical taste saved him from affectation. He had a natural turn for epigram; and though most of his poems are of the gallant character, which was supposed to be necessary for a man of fashion, he writes on love rather as a moralist than as a lover. Thus he gives an "Envoi" to his Book in the

spirit of an epigrammatist :

Go, little Book, and to the world impart,

The faithful image of an amorous heart.

Those who love's dear deluding pains have known

May in my fatal story read their own :

Those who have lived from all its torments free
May find the thing they never felt by me :
Perhaps, advised, avoid the gilded bait,
And, warned by my example, shun my fate;
While with calm joy, safe landed on the coast,
I view the waves on which I once was tost.

Love is a medley of endearments, jars,
Suspicions, quarrels, reconcilements, wars;
Then peace again. Oh! would it not be best
To chase the fatal poison from the breast?
But since so few can live from passion free,
Happy the man, and only happy he,
Who with such lucky stars begins his love,
That his cool judgment does his choice approve.
Ill-grounded passions quickly wear away;
What's built upon esteem can ne'er decay.

Walsh seems to have spoken from experience. Celinda, whom he celebrates, gave him, according to his own report, only a share of her heart, and he describes in his verse his fluctuations of feeling between his love for his mistress and his contempt for his rivals. In the following linesone of the early examples of anapæstic verse in English poetry-there is an anticipation of the light touch of Prior :

When I see the bright nymph whom my heart doth enthral,
When I view her soft eyes and her languishing air,

Her merit so great, my own merit so small,

It makes me adore, and it makes me despair.

But when I consider she squanders on fools

All those treasures of beauty with which she is stored,

My fancy it damps, my passion it cools,

And it makes me despise what before I adored.

Thus sometimes I despair, and sometimes I despise,
I love and I hate, but I never esteem:
The passion grows up when I view her bright eyes,
Which my rivals destroy when I look upon them!

How wisely doth Nature things different unite!

In such odd compositions our safety is found;
As the blood of a scorpion's a cure for the bite,

So her folly makes whole whom her beauty doth wound.

Walsh imitates the classics without slavishly copying them. He rejects the puerile mythology, which Granville adopts from Waller, and, in attempting to naturalise the classical form of the Eclogue, he sometimes infuses into it a certain amount of modern colour. Thus, in his fourth Pastoral Eclogue, he makes two shepherds contend with

each other in alternate verse about the contrasted dispositions of their respective mistresses, after which Lycon, the judge, decides in the following moral strain :—

Shepherds, enough; now cease your amorous war;

Or too much heat may carry both too far;

I well attended the dispute, and find

Both nymphs have charms, but each in different kind.
Flavia deserves more pains than she will cost,
As easily got, were she not easily lost.
Sylvia is much more difficult to gain,

But, once possessed, will well reward the pain.
We wish them Flavias all, when first we burn ;

But, once possessed, wish they would Sylvias turn.
And, by the different charms in each exprest,
One we should soonest love, the other best.

His most characteristic feature is epigrammatic neatness, a good example of which is furnished by a little poem called Phyllis's Resolution:

When slaves their liberty require,

They hope no more to gain;

But you not only that desire,

But ask the power to reign.

Think how unjust a suit you make,

Then you will soon decline;

Your freedom, when you please, pray take,

But trespass not on mine.

No more in vain, Alcander, crave;

I ne'er will grant the thing,

That he, who once has been my slave,

Should ever be my king.

But he now and then shows a mastery over a light rhythmical form of comic verse, for which it would be difficult to find a parallel in earlier English poetry. Such is his Despairing Lover:

Distracted with care

For Phyllis the fair,

Since nothing could move her,

Poor Damon, her lover,

Resolves in despair

No longer to languish,

Nor bear so much anguish ;

But, mad with his love,

To a precipice goes,
Where a leap from above
Would soon finish his woes.

When in rage he came there,
Beholding how steep
The sides did appear,

And the bottom how deep;
His torments projecting,
And sadly reflecting

That a lover forsaken

A new love may get,

But a neck when once broken

Can never be set;

And that he could die
Whenever he would,
But that he could live
But as long as he could:
How grievous soever
The torment might grow,
He scorned to endeavour
To finish it so :

But bold, unconcerned

At thoughts of the pain,
He calmly returned

To his cottage again.

The verses of Granville and Walsh give back many echoes of the Middle Ages, in the lingering notes of the Provençals, and in the pastoralism and mythology of the late Italian Renaissance. But new manners were at hand. In the last years of William III.'s reign a poem appeared which, both in its style and in the popularity it enjoyed through the whole of the eighteenth century, is a monument of the great change in the temper and taste of the nation wrought by the Revolution of 1688. "Perhaps," says Johnson, “no composition in our language has been oftener perused than Pomfret's Choice." When the Lives of the Poets were written this might have been true. First published in a separate form in 1700, this poem rapidly ran through four editions; in 1736 it had reached its tenth edition; and the last edition was published as late as 1790. But in the nineteenth century it gradually dropped out of memory, and since it is now never included