and ending with these remarkable lines,
Illi mors gravis incubat,
Qui notus nimis omnibus
Ignotus moritur sibi,
seems to have had much attraction for moralists and poets in the seventeenth century. Beside this paraphrase of it by Sir Matthew Hale, prefixed to one of his Contemplations, there is a translation by Cowley, and a third, the best of all, by Marvell, of which these are the concluding lines:
‘Who exposed to others’ eyes,
Into his own heart never pries,
Death’s to him a strange surprise.’
[P. 130], No. cx.—I have detached these two stanzas from a longer poem of which they constitute the only valuable portion. George Wither (‘a most profuse pourer forth of English rhyme’ Phillips calls him) was indeed so intolerable a proser in verse, so overlaid his good with indifferent or bad, that one may easily forget how real a gift he possessed, and sometimes showed that he possessed.
[P. 131], No. cxii.—When Phillips, writing in 1675, styles Quarles ‘the darling of our plebeian judgments,’ he intimates the circle in which his popularity was highest, and helps us to understand the extreme contempt into which he afterwards fell, so that he who had a little earlier been hailed as