This is flattened from the well-known passage in Comus.
Soon will savage Mars
Deform the lovely ringlets of thy shrubs.
A genteel improvement upon Milton's 'bush with frizzled hair implicit.' Then we have
——delicious to the sight
Soft dales meand'ring show their flowery laps
Among rude piles of nature,
spoiled from
——the flowery lap
Of some irriguous valley spread its store.
Thus does this poet shatter and dissolve the blooming sprays of another man's plantation, instead of pushing through them some new shoots of his own to crown them with fresh blossoms.
Milton himself borrowed as much as Glover. Aye, ten times more; yet every passage in his poetry is Miltonic,—more than anything else. On the other hand, his imitators Miltonize, yet produce nothing worthy of Milton, the important characteristic of whose writings my father well expressed, when he said 'The reader of Milton must be always on his duty: he is surrounded with sense.' A man must have his sense to imitate him worthily. How we look through his words at the Deluge, as he floods it upon us in Book xi. l. 738-53!—The Attic bees produce honey so flavoured with the thyme of Hymettus that it is scarcely eatable, though to smell the herb itself in a breezy walk upon that celebrated Mount would be an exceeding pleasure; thus certain epic poems are overpoweringly flavoured with herbs of Milton, while yet the fragrant balm and fresh breeze of his poetry is not to be found in them. S.C.
[227] The 'abrupt and laconic structure' of Glover's periods appears at the very commencement of Leonidas, which has something military in its movement, but rather the stiff gait of the drilled soldier than the proud march of the martial hero.
The virtuous Spartan who resign'd his life
To save his country at th' Oetaen straits,
Thermopylae, when all the peopled east
In arms with Xerxes filled the Grecian plains,
O Muse record! The Hellespont they passed
O'erpowering Thrace. The dreadful tidings swift
To Corinth flew. Her Isthmus was the seat
Of Grecian council. Orpheus thence returns
To Lacedaemon. In assembly full, &c.