the thing is a kind of a carnival of conceit, a fairy-tale of the fantastic. 'To Julia to expedite her Promise' is somewhat more laboured and so less happy: and the loss of the lyric form in 'The Hecatomb to his Mistress' is considerable. The heroic couplet squares ill with this sort of thing: but the octasyllabic admits it fairly, and so 'The Antiplatonic' with its greater part, and 'Upon Phillis walking' with the whole in this metre, are preferable. Yet it must be acknowledged that one heroic couplet in the former—
Like an ambassador that beds a queen
With the nice caution of a sword between,
is worthy of Dryden. Most of the other seria are but nugae: and the chief interest of the 'Edward King' epicede, besides its contrast with Lycidas, is its pretty certain position as model to Dryden's 'Lord Hastings'. But the two 'Mark Antony' pieces and 'Square-Cap' demand, both from the point of view of tone and from that of metre, more attention than was given to them above.
If any one not previously acquainted with the piece or the discussions about it will turn to the text of 'Mark Antony' and read it either aloud or to himself, I should say that, in the common phrase, it is a toss-up what scansion his voice will adopt supposing that he 'commences with the commencement'. The first stanza can run quite agreeably to the usual metrical arrangements of the time, thus:
When as | the night|ingale | chanted | her vespers
And the | wild for|ester | couched on | the ground,
Venus | invi|ted me | in th' eve|ning whispers
Unto | a fra|grant field | with ros|es crowned,