of Light;" they are forms fantastically lost under superfluity of
dress. Pars minima est ipsa puella sui. The words are multiplied till
the sense is hardly perceived; attention deserts the mind, and settles
in the ear. The reader wanders through the gay diffusion, sometimes
amazed, and sometimes delighted; but, after many turnings in the flowery
labyrinth, comes out as he went in. He remarked little, and laid hold on
nothing. To his versification justice requires that praise should not be
denied. In the general fabrication of his lines he is perhaps superior
to any other writer of blank verse; his flow is smooth, and his pauses
are musical; but the concatenation of his verses is commonly too long
continued, and the full close does not occur with sufficient frequency.
The sense is carried on through a long intertexture of complicated
clauses, and, as nothing is distinguished, nothing is remembered.

The exemption which blank verse affords from the necessity of closing
the sense with the couplet betrays luxuriant and active minds into such
self-indulgence that they pile image upon image, ornament upon ornament,
and are not easily persuaded to close the sense at all. Blank verse
will therefore, I fear, be too often found in description exuberant, in
argument loquacious, and in narration tiresome. His diction is certainly
poetical, as it is not prosaic; and elegant, as it is not vulgar. He is
to be commended as having fewer artifices of disgust than most of his
brethren of the blank song. He rarely either recalls old phrases, or
twists his metre into harsh inversions. The sense, however, of his words
is strained when "he views the Ganges from Alpine heights"--that is,
from mountains like the Alps. And the pedant surely intrudes (but when
was blank verse without pedantry?) when he tells how "Planets ABSOLVE
the stated round of Time."

It is generally known to the readers of poetry that he intended to
revise and augment this work, but died before he had completed his
design. The reformed work as he left it, and the additions which he had
made, are very properly retained in the late collection. He seems to
have somewhat contracted his diffusion; but I know not whether he has
gained in closeness what he has lost in splendour. In the additional
book the "Tale of Solon" is too long. One great defect of this poem
is very properly censured by Mr. Walker, unless it may be said in his
defence that what he has omitted was not properl