[40] Its taste for verbal affectations is to be found in the Roman de la Rose, and (yet more absurdly forced) in Gauthier de Coinsy; but in Du Bartas the research of effect not seldom subjugates the thought as well as the phrase.
[41] Barclaii Satyricon, p. 382. Barclay had lived in France.
[42] Usually printed arms, but Dryden certainly wrote arm, to correspond with dint, which he used in its old meaning of a downright blow.
[43] Morgante, xviii. 115.
[44] Elegie on Doctor Wilson. But if Quarles had been led astray by the vices of Donne’s manner, he had good company in Herbert and Vaughan. In common with them, too, he had that luck of simpleness which is even more delightful than wit. In the same poem he says,—
“Go, glorious soul, and lay thy temples down
In Abram’s bosom, in the sacred down
Of soft eternity.”
[45] Preface to the Theatrum.
[46] Bowles’s Sonnets, wellnigh forgotten now, did more than his controversial writings for the cause he advocated. Their influence upon the coming generation was great (greater than we can well account for) and beneficial. Coleridge tells us that he made forty copies of them while at Christ’s Hospital. Wordsworth’s prefaces first made imagination the true test of poetry, in its more modern sense. But they drew little notice till later.
[47] Briefe die neueste Litteratur betreffend, 1759, II. Brief. See also his more elaborate criticism of the “Essay on Man” (Pope ein Metaphysiker), 1755.