| Silence in love bewrays more woe Than words, though ne'er so witty; A beggar that is dumb, you know, Deserveth double pity! |
was in the middle of last century boldly assigned to Lord Chesterfield. His compositions circulated from hand to hand at Court. They were read in polished coteries. So little did they ever become a national possession that, complete or incomplete, the most considerable of them has vanished, all but a fragment. Small as is the whole body of verse attributed to him, not all is clearly his. Dr. Hannah, and other ardent admirers of his muse, have been unable to satisfy themselves whether he really wrote False Love and True Love, with its shifting rhythm, and its bewitching scattered phrases; the Shepherd's fantastically witty Description of Love, or Anatomy of Love—
| It is a yea, it is a nay; |
or the perfect conceit, which Waller could not have bettered in wit or equalled in vivacity, with the refrain—
| What care I how fair she be! |
Twenty-seven other poems, among them, the bright sneering Invective against Women, have been put down to him on no other ground than that they cannot be traced to a different source. He might have been the author of the graceful Praise of his Sacred Diana. He might have sighed for a land devoid of envy,
| Unless among The birds, for prize of their sweet song. |
From him might have come the airy melody of the charming eclogue Phyllida's Love-call to her Corydon, which invites the genius of a Mendelssohn to frame it in music. He might have penned in his prison cell the knell for the tragedy of human life, De Morte. He might have been the shepherd minstrel of the flowers—
| You pretty daughters of the earth and sun. |