vassal to the will,
To do what she, howe'er unright, requires,
Which wit doth, though repiningly, fulfil.
Yet, as well pleased (O languishing wit!)
He seems to effect her pleasure willingly,
And all his reasons to her reach doth fit;
So like the world, gets love by flattery.
That this is true a thousand witnesses,
Impartial conscience, will directly prove;
Then if we would not willingly transgress,
Our will should swayed be by rules of love,
Which holds the multitude of sins because
Her sin morally to him his servants draws."

The defect of Davies, as of not a few of his contemporaries, is that,
having the power of saying things rememberable enough, he set himself to
wrap them up and merge them in vast heaps of things altogether
unrememberable. His successors have too often resembled him only in the
latter part of his gift. His longer works (_Mirum in Modum_, _Summa
Totalis_, _Microcosmus_, _The Holy Rood_, _Humours Heaven on Earth_, are
some of their eccentric titles) might move simple wonder if a century which
has welcomed _The Course of Time_, and _Yesterday, To-day, and For Ever_,
not to mention examples even more recent than these, had any great reason
to throw stones at its forerunners. But to deal with writers like Davies is
a little difficult in a book which aims both at being nothing if not
critical, and at doing justice to the minor as well as to the major
luminaries of the time: while the difficulty is complicated by the
necessity of _not_ saying ditto to the invaluable labourers who have
reintroduced him and others like him to readers. I am myself full of the
most unfeigned gratitude to my friend Dr. Grosart, to Professor Arber, and
to others, for sparing students, whose time is the least disposable thing
they have, visits to public libraries or begging at rich men's doors for
the sight of books. I should be very sorry both as a student and as a lover
of literature not to possess Davies, Breton, Sylvester, Quarles, and the
rest, and not to read them from time to time. But I cannot help warning
those who are not professed students of the subject that in such writers
they have little good to seek; I cannot help noting the difference between
them and other writers of a very different order, and above all I cannot
help raising a mild protest against the encomiums which are sometimes
passed on them. Southey, in that nearly best of modern books unclassified,
_The