In two lines more, we are unluckily reminded that this is no living landscape.
Thither, my Sewold, go, or pitch thy tent
Near to thy ships, for they are near the scene.
Since the time of Mason, this rage for describing what is called scenery (and scenery indeed it often is, having little of nature in it) has infected many of our play-writers and novelists.
Argentile's intention of raising a rustic monument to the memory of his father, is taken from Shakspeare.
This grove my sighs shall consecrate; in shape
Of some fair tomb, here will I heap the turf
And call it Adelbright's. Yon aged yew,
Whose rifted trunk, rough bark, and gnarled roots
Give solemn proof of its high ancientry,
Shall canopy the shrine. There's not a flower,
That hangs the dewy head, and seems to weep,
As pallid blue-bells, crow-tyes and marsh lilies,
But I'll plant here, and if they chance to wither,
My tears shall water them; there's not a bird
That trails a sad soft note, as ringdoves do,
Or twitters painfully like the dun martlet,
But I will lure by my best art, to roost
And plain them in these branches. Larks and finches
Will I fright hence, nor aught shall dare approach
This pensive spot, save solitary things
That love to mourn as I do.
How cold and lifeless are these pretty lines, when compared to the "wench-like words," of the young princes, which suggested them.
If he be gone he'll make his grave a bed
With female fairies will his tomb be haunted,
And worms will not come to thee.
Arv. With fairest flow'rs,
Whilst summer lasts, and I live here, Fidele,
I'll sweeten thy sad grave. Thou shalt not lack
The flower that's like thy face, pale primrose; nor
The azured hare-bell, like thy veins; no, nor
The leaf of eglantine, whom not to slander,
Out-sweeten'd not thy breath: the ruddock would
With charitable bill (O bill, fore-shaming
The rich-left heirs, that let their fathers lie
Without a monument!) bring thee all this;
Yea, and furr'd moss besides, when flowers are none,
To winter-ground thy corse.
This is grief, seeking to relieve and forget itself in fiction and fancy; the other, though the occasion required an expression of deeper sorrow, is a mere pomp of feeling.
His blank verse in the English Garden has not the majesty of Akenside, the sweetness of Dyer, or the terseness of Armstrong. Its characteristic is delicacy; but it is a delicacy approaching nearer to weakness than to grace. It has more resemblance to the rill that trickles over its fretted channel, than to the stream that winds with a full tide, and "warbles as it flows." The practice of cutting it into dialogue had perhaps crippled him. As he has made the characters in his plays too attentive to the decorations of the scene-painter, so in the last book of the English Garden he has turned his landscape into a theatre, for the representation of a play. The story of Nerina is too long and too complicated for an episode in a didactic poem. He will seldom bear to be confronted with those writers whom he is found either by accident or design to resemble. His picture of the callow young in a bird's-nest is, I think, with some alteration, copied from Statius.