Salutantur vivi.
Of the late and the present holders of the Chair we are happily precluded from speaking critically. May the bar not soon be lifted!
[1105]. Of Whitfield (or Whitfeld, as some write) I have found nothing but that he wrote some Latin verses on William the Third. The second volume of William Hawkins’s Tracts (1758) contains, besides a ridiculous tragedy, Henry and Rosamond, an Essay on Drama, principally occupied by carpings at Mason’s Elfrida, and some Letters on Pope’s Commentary on Homer—very small critical beer. About Wheeler I find less even than about Whitfield. The piety of his son published—long after date and in our own times—1870—the Prælections of John Randolph, a man who, besides holding several other professorships at Oxford, attained to eminence in the Church, and died Bishop of London in 1813. They are very sober and respectable. There is in poetry a non contemnenda proprietas quod imitando præcipiat; and the warning, non aliunde artis suæ rudimenta desumet Criticus nisi ex sanæ Logices præceptis, might with advantage have been observed oftener than it has been. But Randolph sticks in the bark and the letter. Holmes, a poet after a fashion, a theologian, and what not, seems to have written more freely on anything than on criticism.
[1106]. He complies with the requirements of method and fashion by dealing generally with the End and Usefulness of Poetry, its Kinds and so forth. But all this we have had a thousand times. What we have here specially is a comparison, and a new comparison.
[1107]. Vol. i. p. 57 sq.
[1108]. Southey, himself a proper moral man in all conscience, but a sensible one withal, somewhere remarks, “said well but not wisely” on Hurdis’s
“Give me the steed
Whose generous efforts bore the prize away,