Local circumstances favoured this tendency to political indifference. It was observed in the 34th Chapter of this Opus that one of the many reasons for which our Philosopher thought Doncaster a very likeable place of residence was that it sent no Members to Parliament. And Yorkshire being too large a county for any of its great families to engage lightly in contesting it, the Election fever however it might rage in other towns or other parts of the county, never prevailed there. But the constitution of the Doctor's mind secured him from all excitement of this nature. Even in the days of Wilkes and Liberty, when not a town in England escaped the general Influenza, he was not in the slightest degree affected by it, nor did he ever take up the Public Advertiser for the sake of one of Junius's Letters.
CHAPTER CCXXXVIII.
SIMONIDES.—FUNERAL POEMS.—UNFEELING OPINION IMPUTED TO THE GREEK POET, AND EXPRESSED BY MALHERBE.—SENECA.—JEREMY TAYLOR AND THE DOCTOR ON WHAT DEATH MIGHT HAVE BEEN, AND WERE MEN WHAT CHRISTIANITY WOULD MAKE THEM, MIGHT BE.
Intendale chi può; che non è stretto
Alcuno a creder pïu di quel che vuole.
ORLANDO INNAMORATO.
Among the lost works of antiquity, there are few poems which I should so much rejoice in recovering, as those of Simonides. Landor has said of him that he and Pindar wrote nothing bad; that his characteristics were simplicity, brevity, tenderness, and an assiduous accuracy of description. “If I were to mention,” he adds “what I fancy would give an English reader the best idea of his manner, I should say, the book of Ruth.”
One species of composition wherein he excelled was that which the Dutch in their straight-forward way call Lykzangen or Lykdichten, but for which we have no appropriate name,—poems in commemoration of the dead. Beautiful specimens are to be found in the poetry of all countries, and this might be expected, threnodial being as natural as amatory verse; and as the characteristic of the latter is passion with little reflection, that of the former is, as naturally, to be at the same time passionate and thoughtful.
Our own language was rich in such poems during the Elizabethan age, and that which followed it. Of foreign poets none has in this department exceeded Chiabrera.