Besides these works, Bishop Hall is author of Satires in Six Books, lately reprinted under the title of Virgidemiarum, of which we cannot give a better account than in the words of the ingenious authors of the Monthly Review, by which Bishop Hall's genius for that kind of poetical writing will fully appear.
He published these Satires in the twenty third year of his age, and was, as he himself asserts in the Prologue, the first satirist in the English language.
I first adventure, follow me who list,
And be the second English satyrist.
And, if we consider the difficulty of introducing so nice a poem as satire into a nation, we must allow it required the assistance of no common and ordinary genius. The Italians had their Ariosto, and the French their Regnier, who might have served him as models for imitation; but he copies after the ancients, and chiefly Juvenal and Persius; though he wants not many strokes of elegance and delicacy, which shew him perfectly acquainted with the manner of Horace. Among the several discouragements which attended his attempt in that kind, he mentions one peculiar to the language and nature of the English versification, which would appear in the translation of one of Persius's Satires: The difficulty and dissonance whereof, says he, shall make good my assertion; besides the plain experience thereof in the Satires of Ariosto; save which, and one base French satire, I could never attain the view of any for my direction. Yet we may pay him almost the same compliment which was given of old to Homer and Archilochus: for the improvements which have been made by succeeding poets bear no manner of proportion to the distance of time between him and them. The verses of bishop Hall are in general extremely musical and flowing, and are greatly preferable to Dr. Donne's, as being of a much smoother cadence; neither shall we find him deficient, if compared with his successor, in point of thought and wit; but he exceeds him with respect to his characters, which are more numerous, and wrought up with greater art and strength of colouring. Many of his lines would do honour to the most ingenious of our modern poets; and some of them have thought it worth their labour to imitate him, especially Mr. Oldham. Bishop Hall was not only our first satyrist, but was the first who brought epistolary writing to the view of the public; which was common in that age to other parts of Europe, but not practised in England, till he published his own epistles. It may be proper to take notice, that the Virgidemiarum are not printed with his other writings, and that an account of them is omitted by him, through his extreme modesty, in the Specialities of his Life, prefixed to the third volume of his works in folio.
The author's postscript to his satires is prefixed by the editor in the room of a preface, and without any apparent impropriety. It is not without some signatures of the bishop's good sense and taste; and, making a just allowance for the use of a few obsolete terms, and the puerile custom of that age in making affected repetitions and reiterations of the same word within the compass of a period, it would read like no bad prose at present. He had undoubtedly an excellent ear, and we must conclude he must have succeeded considerably in erotic or pastoral poetry, from the following stanza's, in his Defiance to Envy, which may be considered as an exordium to his poetical writings.
Witnesse, ye muses, how I wilful sung
These heady rhimes, withouten second care;
And wish'd them worse my guilty thoughts among;
The ruder satire should go ragg'd and bare,
And shew his rougher and his hairy hide,
Tho' mine be smooth, and deck'd in carelesse pride.
Would we but breathe within a wax-bound quill,
Pan's seven-fold pipe, some plaintive pastoral;
To teach each hollow grove, and shrubby hill,
Each murmuring brook, each solitary vale
To found our love, and to our song accord,
Wearying Echo with one changelesse word.
Or lift us make two striving shepherds sing,
With costly wagers for the victory,
Under Menalcas judge; while one doth bring
A carven bowl well wrought of beechen tree,
Praising it by the story; or the frame,
Or want of use, or skilful maker's name.
Another layeth a well-marked lamb,
Or spotted kid, or some more forward steere,
And from the paile doth praise their fertile dam;
So do they strive in doubt, in hope, in feare,
Awaiting for their trusty empire's doome,
Faulted as false by him that's overcome.
Whether so me lift my lovely thought to sing,
Come dance ye nimble Dryads by my side,
Ye gentle wood-nymphs come; and with you bring
The willing fawns that mought their music guide.
Come nymphs and fawns, that haunts those shady groves,
While I report my fortunes or my loves.
The first three books of satires are termed by the author Toothless satires, and the three last Biting satires. He has an animated idea of good poetry, and a just contempt of poetasters in the different species of it. He says of himself, in the first satire.