Tumble him headlong down the slippery stairs;
How shall I praise or prize your glorious ills,
Which are but poison hid in golden pills?’
[P. 108], No. xcix.—These spirited lines were found written in an old hand in a copy of Lovelace’s Lucasta, 1679. We have in them no doubt a Cavalier Song of our Civil Wars.
[P. 108], No. c.—Davenant is scarcely known except by his strong-thoughted but heavy poem of Gondibert; and very little known, I should suppose, by this. But three of his poems, this and Nos. cvii. and clii., show that in another vein, that of graceful half play, half earnest, few have surpassed him. I know nothing in its kind happier than clii., which by an oversight has been placed somewhat too late in this volume.
[P. 111], No. ci. l. 43-48: Cicero (De Nat. Deor. 3, 28, and elsewhere) refers to the remarkable story of Jason, tyrant of Pheræe, whom one would have stabbed, but did in fact only open a dangerous ulcer in his body.—l. 59: ‘Adamant’ is here used in the sense of loadstone; as in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, 2, i.
‘You draw me, you hard-hearted adamant,
And yet you draw not iron.’
[P. 112], No. cii.—I have dealt somewhat boldly with this poem, of its twenty-four triplets omitting all but ten, these ten seeming to me to constitute a fine poem, which the entire twenty-four altogether fail to do. Few, I think, will agree with Horace Walpole that ‘the poetry is most uncouth and inharmonious;’ so far from this, it has a very solemn and majestic flow. Nor do I doubt that these lines are what they profess to be, the composition of King Charles; their authenticity is stamped on every line. We are indebted to Burnet for their preservation. He gives them in his Memoirs of the Dukes of Hamilton, saying, ‘A very worthy gentleman who had the honour of waiting on him then [at Carisbrook Castle], and was much trusted by him, copied them out from the original, who avoucheth them to be a true copy.’—l. 2: A word has evidently dropped out here, which is manifestly wanted by the metre, and, as it seems to me, also by the sense. I have enclosed within brackets the ‘earthly’ with which I have ventured to supply the want.
[P. 113], No. ciii.—Marvell showed how well he understood what he was giving to the world in this ode, one of the least known but among the grandest which the English language possesses, when he called it ‘Horatian.’ In its whole treatment it reminds us of the highest to which the greatest Latin Artist in lyrical poetry did, when at his best, attain. To one unacquainted with Horace, this ode, not perhaps so perfect as his are in form, and with occasional obscurities of expression which Horace would not have left, will give a truer notion of the kind of greatness which he achieved than, so far as I know, could from any other poem in the language be obtained.