With silent wonder but new wonders rise.’
[P. 96], No. lxxxix.—It is evident that in this Prologue and in that which follows Dryden is on his good behaviour; he has indeed so much respect for his audience that in all the eighty-five lines which compose them he has not one profane, and, still more remarkable, not one indecent allusion. Neither are the compliments which he pays his hearers, as is too often the case, fulsome and from their exaggeration offensive, but such as became him to pay and them to receive, and there is an eminent appropriateness to the time and place in them all. Though no very accurate scholar, he is yet quite scholar enough to talk with scholars on no very unequal footing; while the most eminent of those who heard him must have felt that in strength and opulence of thought, and in power of clothing this thought in appropriate forms, he immeasurably surpassed them all.
[P. 99], No. xci.—Barten Holyday, Archdeacon of Oxford, and translator of Juvenal, published in 1661 his Survey of the World, which contains a thousand independent distiches, of which these are a favourable sample. Nearly all which I have quoted have more or less point—to my mind the distinction between the two chief historians of Greece has never been more happily drawn—and some of them have poetry as well. Yet for all this the devout prayer of the author in his concluding distich,
‘Father of gifts, who to the dust didst give
Life, say to these my meditations, Live,’
has not been, and will scarcely now, be fulfilled.
[P. 103], No. xcv.—This is nothing more than a broad-sheet ballad published in 1641, the year of Strafford’s execution, with the title Verses lately written by Thomas Earl of Strafford. Two copies, of different issues, but of the same date, and identical in text, exist in the British Museum, while in The Topographer, vol. ii. p. 234, there is printed another, and in some respects an improved text. The fall of the great statesman from his pride of place has here kindled one with perhaps but ordinary gifts for ordinary occasions to a truly poetical treatment of his theme; as to a certain extent it has roused another, whose less original ballad in the same year and on the same theme, bearing the title, The Ultimum Vale or Last Farewell of Thomas Earl of Strafford, yields as its second stanza these nervous lines:
‘Farewell, you fading honours which do blind
By your false mists the sharpest-sighted mind;
And having raised him to his height of cares,