Men, first by verse, were taught Civilitie;
’Tis known and granted; yet would it behove
Mee, with the Ancient Singers, here to crowne
Some later Quills, some Makers of our owne.
Nor should we fail to thank the younger Evelyn, for such graphic sketches as he gives of Restoration-Dramatists, of Cowley, Dryden, Wycherley, “Sedley and easy Etherege;” a new world of wits, all of whose works we prize, without neglecting for their sakes the older Masters who “so did take Eliza, and our James.”
Something that we could gladly say, will come in befittingly on after-pages of this volume, in the “Additional Note on Sir John Suckling’s ‘Sessions of the Poets,’” as printed in our Merry Drollery, Compleat, page 72.
Are we stumbling at the threshold, absit omen! even amid our delight in perusing “the Time-Poets,” when we wonder at the precise meaning of the statement in our opening couplet?
One night the great Apollo, pleas’d with Ben,
Made the odd number of the Muses ten.
By whom additional? Who is the lady, thus elevated? We see only one solution: namely, that furnished by the conclusion of the poem. It was the Faerie Queene herself whom the God lifted thus, in honour of her English Poets, to rank as the Tenth Muse, an equal with Urania, Clio, Euterpe, and their sisterhood. Yet something seems wanting, next to it; for we never reach a full-stop until the end of the 39th (or query, the 40th) line; and all the confluent nominatives lack a common verbal-action. Our mind, it is true, accepts intelligibly the onward rush of each and all (but later, “with equal pace each of them softly creeps”). It may be only grammatical pedantry which craves some such phrase, absent from the text, as—