nd chiefly Juvenal and
Persius; though he wants not many strokes of elegance and delicacy,
which shew him perfectly acquainted with the manner of Horace. Among
the several discouragements which attended his attempt in that kind,
he mentions one peculiar to the language and nature of the English
versification, which would appear in the translation of one of
Persius's Satires: The difficulty and dissonance whereof, says he,
shall make good my assertion; besides the plain experience thereof
in the Satires of Ariosto; save which, and one base French satire, I
could never attain the view of any for my direction. Yet we may pay
him almost the same compliment which was given of old to Homer and
Archilochus: for the improvements which have been made by succeeding
poets bear no manner of proportion to the distance of time between him
and them. The verses of bishop Hall are in general extremely musical
and flowing, and are greatly preferable to Dr. Donne's, as being of
a much smoother cadence; neither shall we find him deficient, if
compared with his successor, in point of thought and wit; but he
exceeds him with respect to his characters, which are more numerous,
and wrought up with greater art and strength of colouring. Many of his
lines would do honour to the most ingenious of our modern poets;
and some of them have thought it worth their labour to imitate him,
especially Mr. Oldham. Bishop Hall was not only our first satyrist,
but was the first who brought epistolary writing to the view of the
public; which was common in that age to other parts of Europe, but not
practised in England, till he published his own epistles. It may be
proper to take notice, that the Virgidemiarum are not printed with his
other writings, and that an account of them is omitted by him, through
his extreme modesty, in the Specialities of his Life, prefixed to the
third volume of his works in folio.

The author's postscript to his satires is prefixed by the editor in
the room of a preface, and without any apparent impropriety. It is not
without some signatures of the bishop's good sense and taste; and,
making a just allowance for the use of a few obsolete terms, and
the puerile custom of that age in making affected repetitions and
reiterations of the same word within the compass of a period, it would
read like no bad prose at present. He had undoubtedly an excellent
ear, and we must conclude he must have succeeded considerably in
erotic or pastoral po