60He seem'd as if at Gath he still had bin
As once before proud Achish he appear'd,
His face besmear'd,
With spittle on his sacred beard,
A laughing-stock to the insulting Philistine.
Drest in their rhymes, he look'd as he were mad,
In tissue you, and Tyrian purple have him clad.
To Dr. Sam. Woodford.] First printed in A Paraphrase upon the Psalms of David, 1668. A MS. version is in Rawlinson D. 260 (fol. 27) of the Bodleian. Woodford (1636-1700) though much forgotten now, must have been something more than an ordinary person. As such he might have been, as he was, a St. Paul's boy and an Oxford (Wadham) man, a member of the Inner Temple, an early F.R.S., and later a Canon of Chichester and Winchester. But as such merely he would hardly have been, in the Preface to his Paraphrases of the Canticles (v. inf., [p. 366]), the first, and for a long time the only, 'ingoing' critic of Milton's blank verse. He does not take quite the right view of it, but it is noteworthy that he should have taken any view of an intelligent character.
12 soar'd] tow'red MS.
16 a om. MS.