another, to shew his contempt for action and the turmoils of
ambition, he says to someone, "Don't you remember Lords ------ and ------,
who are now great statesmen, little dirty boys playing at cricket? For
my part, I do not feel a bit wiser, or bigger, or older than I did
then." What an equivalent for not being wise or great, to be always
young! What a happiness never to lose or gain any thing in the game of
human life, by being never any thing more than a looker-on!

How different from Shenstone, who only wanted to be looked at: who
withdrew from the world to be followed by the crowd, and courted
popularity by affecting privacy! His Letters shew him to have lived in a
continual fever of petty vanity, and to have been a finished literary
coquet. He seems always to say, "You will find nothing in the world so
amiable as Nature and me: come, and admire us." His poems are
indifferent and tasteless, except his Pastoral Ballad, his Lines on
Jemmy Dawson, and his School-mistress, which last is a perfect piece of
writing.

Akenside had in him the materials of poetry, but he was hardly a
great poet. He improved his Pleasures of the Imagination in the
subsequent editions, by pruning away a great many redundances of style
and ornament. Armstrong is better, though he has not chosen a very
exhilarating subject--The Art of Preserving Health. Churchill's
Satires on the Scotch, and Characters of the Players, are as good as the
subjects deserved--they are strong, coarse, and full of an air of
hardened assurance. I ought not to pass over without mention Green's
Poem on the Spleen, or Dyer's Grongar Hill.

The principal name of the period we are now come to is that of
Goldsmith, than which few names stand higher or fairer in the annals of
modern literature. One should have his own pen to describe him as he
ought to be described--amiable, various, and bland, with careless
inimitable grace touching on every kind of excellence--with manners
unstudied, but a gentle heart--performing miracles of skill from pure
happiness of nature, and whose greatest fault was ignorance of his own
worth. As a poet, he is the most flowing and elegant of our versifiers
since Pope, with traits of artless nature which Pope had not, and with a
peculiar felicity in his turns upon words, which he constantly repeated
with delightful effect: such as--

"------His lot, though small,
He sees that little lot, the lot of all."

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