his company. Mean and familiar
incidents and characters do not sort well with allegory, which requires
beings that are themselves somewhat removed from the common sphere of
human nature to meet and join it a little beyond the limits of this
world. Yet in this tale, incongruous and disjointed as the dream of a
sick man, velut aegri somnia, he has interspersed some lines, and even
whole stanzas, to which the poet or the painter may turn again and again
with delight, though the common reader will scarce find them sufficient
to redeem the want of interest that pervades the whole.

His elegy on Mary, Queen of Scots, is also a vision, but it is better
managed, at once mournful and sweet. He has thrown a pall of gorgeous
embroidery over the bloody hearse of Mary.

Wolfwold and Ella, of which the story was suggested by a picture of
Mortimer's, is itself a picture, in which the fine colouring and
spirited attitudes reconcile us to its horrors.

His tragedy is a tissue of love and intrigue, with sudden starts of
passion, and unprepared and improbable turns of resolution and temper.
Towards the conclusion, one of the female characters puts an end to
herself, for little apparent reason, except that it is the fifth act,
and some blood must therefore be shed; Garrick's refusal, in all
likelihood, spared him the worse mortification of seeing it rejected on
the stage. Yet there is here and there in it a masterly touch like the
following:

Either my mind has lost its energy,
Or the unbodied spirits of my fathers,
Beneath the night's dark wings, pass to and fro,
In doleful agitation hovering round me.
Methought my father, with a mournful look,
Beheld me. Sudden from unconscious pause
I wak'd, and but his marble bust was here.

Almada Hill has some just sentiments, and some pleasing imagery; but
both are involved in the mazes of an unskilful or ambitious phraseology,
from which it is a work of trouble to extricate them. It was about this
time, that the laboured style in poetry had reached its height. Not "to
loiter into prose," of which Lyttelton bade him beware, was the grand
aim; and in their eagerness to leave prose as far behind them as
possible, the poets were in danger of outstripping the understanding and
feelings of their readers. It was this want of ease and perspicuity in
his longer pieces, which prevented Mickle from being as much a favourite
with the public, as many who were far his inferiors in the other