[42] Let me here observe once for all that in adding the name of an author, which I shall often do, to a word, I do not mean to affirm the word in any way peculiar to him; although in some cases it may be so; but only to give one authority for its use. [Coleridge uses ‘eloign’.]
[43] Essay on English Poetry, p. 93.
[44] Dedication of the Translation of the Æneid.
[45] [i.e. the promoters of Classical learning.]
[46] We have notable evidence in some lines of Waller of the sense which in his time scholars had of the rapidity with which the language was changing under their hands. Looking back at what the last hundred years had wrought of alteration in it, and very naturally assuming that the next hundred would effect as much, he checked with misgivings such as these his own hope of immortality:
“Who can hope his lines should long
Last in a daily changing tongue?
While they are new, envy prevails,
And as that dies, our language fails.
“Poets that lasting marble seek,
Must carve in Latin or in Greek:
We write in sand; our language grows,
And like the tide our work o’erflows”.
Such were his misgivings as to the future, assuming that the rate of change would continue what it had been. How little they have been fulfilled, every one knows. In actual fact two centuries, which have elapsed since he wrote, have hardly antiquated a word or a phrase in his poems. If we care very little for them now, that is to be explained by quite other causes—by the absence of all moral earnestness from them.
[47] In his Art of English Poesy, London, 1589, republished in Haslewood’s Ancient Critical Essays upon English Poets and Poesy, London, 1811, vol. i. pp. 122, 123; [and in Arber’s English Reprints, 1869].
[48] London, 1601. Besides this work Holland translated the whole of Plutarch’s Moralia, the Cyropœdia of Xenophon, Livy, Suetonius, Ammianus Marcellinus, and Camden’s Britannia. His works make a part of the “library of dullness” in Pope’s Dunciad: