O how transform'd!
How much unlike that Hector, who return'd
Clad in Achilles' spoils!
And again:
From thence a thousand lesser poets sprung
Like petty princes from the fall of Rome.
Sometimes the weight of rhyme is laid upon a word too feeble to sustain it:
Troy confounded falls
From all her glories: if it might have stood
By any power, by this right hand it shou'd.
—And though my outward state misfortune hath
Deprest thus low, it cannot reach my faith.
—Thus, by his fraud and our own faith o'ercome,
A feigned tear destroys us, against whom
Tydides nor Achilles could prevail,
Nor ten years' conflict, nor a thousand sail.
He is not very careful to vary the ends of his verses; in one passage the word die rhymes three couplets in six.
Most of these petty faults are in his first productions, when he was less skilful, or, at least, less dexterous in the use of words; and though they had been more frequent, they could only have lessened the grace, not the strength of his composition. He is one of the writers that improved our taste, and advanced our language, and whom we ought, therefore, to read with gratitude, though, having done much, he left much to do.
[Footnote 22: In Hamilton's memoirs of count Grammont, sir John Denham is said to have been seventy-nine, when he married Miss Brook, about the year 1664; according to which statement he was born in 1585. But Dr. Johnson, who has followed Wood, is right. He entered Trinity college, Oxford, at the age of sixteen, in 1631, as appears by the following entry, which I copied from the matriculation book.