80Stung her, 'cause sweeter than himself.
Sweetness and she are so allied
The bee committed parricide.
Fuscara. (1651.) Cleveland's most famous poem of the amatory, as The Rebel Scot is of the political, kind. In 1677 and since it has been set in the forefront of his Poems, and Johnson draws specially on it for his famous diatribe against the metaphysicals in the 'Life of Cowley'. It seems to me inferior both to The Muses' Festival and to The Antiplatonic, and, as was said in the Introduction, it betrays, to me, something of an intention to fool the lovers of a fashionable style to the top of their bent. But it has extremely pretty things in it; and Mr. Addison, who denounced and scorned 'false wit', never 'fair-sexed it' in half so poetical a manner.
2 'Suckets' or 'succades' should need interpretation to no reader of Robinson Crusoe: and no one who has not read Robinson Crusoe deserves to be taken into consideration.
13 tincture] Said to be used here in an alchemical sense for 'gold'. But the plain meaning is much better.
18 Although the sense is not quite the same as, it is much akin to, that of Browning's question—
'Who knows but the world may end to night?'
20 Cleveland of course uses the correct and not the modern and blundering sense of 'transpire'.
22 This 'jelly gloved' is not like 'mobled queen' or 'calcining flame'.