His Imitation of Horace on Lucilius is not inelegant or unhappy. In the reign of Charles the second began that adaptation, which has since been very frequent, of ancient poetry to present times; and, perhaps, few will be found where the parallelism is better preserved than in this. The versification is, indeed, sometimes careless, but it is sometimes vigorous and weighty.
The strongest effort of his muse is his poem upon Nothing. He is not the first who has chosen this barren topick for the boast of his fertility. There is a poem called Nihil in Latin, by Passerat, a poet and critick of the sixteenth century, in France; who, in his own epitaph, expresses his zeal for good poetry thus:
Molliter ossa quiescent
Sint modo carminibus non onerata malis.
His works are not common, and, therefore, I shall subjoin his verses.
In examining this performance, Nothing must be considered as having not only a negative, but a kind of positive signification; as I need not fear thieves, I have nothing, and nothing is a very powerful protector. In the first part of the sentence it is taken negatively; in the second it is taken positively, as an agent. In one of Boileau's lines it was a question, whether he should use "à rien faire," or "à ne rien faire;" and the first was preferred, because it gave "rien" a sense in some sort positive. Nothing can be a subject only in its positive sense, and such a sense is given it in the first line:
Nothing, thou elder brother ev'n to shade.
In this line, I know not whether he does not allude to a curious book, De Umbra, by Wowerus, which, having told the qualities of shade, concludes with a poem, in which are these lines:
Jam primum terram validis circumspice claustris
Suspensam totam, decus admirabile mundi,
Terrasque, tractusque maris, camposque liquentes
Aeris, et vasti laqueata palatia coeli——
Omnibus UMBRA prior.
The positive sense is generally preserved, with great skill, through the whole poem; though, sometimes, in a subordinate sense, the negative nothing is injudiciously mingled. Passerat confounds the two senses.
Another of his most vigorous pieces is his lampoon on sir Car Scroop, who, in a poem called the Praise of Satire, had some lines like these[68]: