and found her
there. I cannot say, he is every where alike; were he so, I should do
him injury to compare him with the greatest of mankind. He is many times
flat, and insipid; his comic wit degenerating into clenches, his serious
swelling into bombast. But he is always great, when some great occasion
is presented to him. No man can say, he ever had a fit subject for his
wit, and did not then raise himself as high above the rest of poets,
_Quantum lenta solent inter Viburna Cupressi_."
___

It should appear, in tracing the history of our literature, that
poetry had, at the period of which we are speaking, in general declined,
by successive gradations, from the poetry of imagination, in the time of
Elizabeth, to the poetry of fancy (to adopt a modern distinction) in the
time of Charles I.; and again from the poetry of fancy to that of wit,
as in the reign of Charles II. and Queen Anne. It degenerated into the
poetry of mere common places, both in style and thought, in the
succeeding reigns: as in the latter part of the last century, it was
transformed, by means of the French Revolution, into the poetry of
paradox.

Of Donne I know nothing but some beautiful verses to his wife,
dissuading her from accompanying him on his travels abroad, and some
quaint riddles in verse, which the Sphinx could not unravel.

Waller still lives in the name of Sacharissa; and his lines on the
death of Oliver Cromwell shew that he was a man not without genius and
strength of thought.

Marvel is a writer of nearly the same period, and worthy of a better
age. Some of his verses are harsh, as the words of Mercury; others
musical, as is Apollo's lute. Of the latter kind are his boat-song, his
description of a fawn, and his lines to Lady Vere. His lines prefixed to
Paradise Lost are by no means the most favourable specimen of his
powers.

Butler's Hudibras is a poem of more wit than any other in the
language. The rhymes have as much genius in them as the thoughts; but
there is no story in it, and but little humour. Humour is the making
others act or talk absurdly and unconsciously: wit is the pointing out
and ridiculing that absurdity consciously, and with more or less
ill-nature. The fault of Butler's poem is not that it has too much wit,
but that it has not an equal quantity of other things. One would suppose
that the starched manners and sanctified grimace of the times in which
he lived, would of themselves have been suf