(For they this queen attended ;) in whose stead
Oblivion laid him down on Laura's hearse.
Hereat the hardest stones were seen to bleed,
And groans of buried ghosts the heavens did perse,
Where Homer's spright did tremble all for grief,
And curs'd th' access of that celestial thief."

This is highly imaginative and picturesque. We fancy ourselves in one of the most beautiful places of Italian sepulture--quiet and hushing-looking upon a tomb of animated sculpture. It is the tomb of the renowned Laura. We feel the spirit of Petrarch present without being visible. The fair forms of Love and Virtue keep affectionate watch over the marble. All on a sudden, from out the dusk of the chapel door, the Faery Queen is beheld approaching the tomb. The soul of Petrarch is heard weeping--a most intense imagination, which affects one like the collected tears and disappointment of living humanity. Oblivion lays him down on the tomb;

"And from thenceforth those graces were not seen."

The other marbles bleed at this: the ghosts of the dead groan; and the very spirit of Homer is felt to tremble. It is a very grand and high sonnet, worthy of the dominant spirit of the writer. One of its beauties, however, is its defect; if defect it be, and not rather a fine instance of the wilful. Comparisons between great reputations are dangerous, and are apt to be made too much at the expense of one of them, precisely because the author knows he is begging the question. Oblivion has laid him down neither on Laura's hearse nor the Faery Queen's; and Raleigh knew he never would. But he wished to make out a triumphant case for his friend, in the same spirit in which he pushed his sword into a Spanish settlement, and carried all before him.

The verses of Andrew Marvell prefixed to beginning,

"Paradise Lost,"

"When I beheld the poet, blind yet bold,"

are well known to every reader of Milton, and justly admired by all who know what they read. We remember how delighted we

were to find who Andrew Marvell was, and that he could be so pleasant and lively as well as grave. Spirited and worthy as this panegyric is, the reader who is not thoroughly acquainted with Marvell's history does not know all its spirit and worth. That true friend and excellent patriot stuck to his old acquaintance, at a period when all canters and time-servers turned their backs upon him, and would have made the very knowledge of him, which they themselves had had the honour of sharing, the ruin of those that put their desertion to the blush. There is a noble burst of indignation on this subject, in one of Marvell's prose works, against one Parker, who succeeded in getting made a bishop. Parker seems to have thought that Marvell would have been afraid of acknowledging his old acquaintance; but, so far from resembling the bishop in that or any other particular, he not only publicly proclaimed and gloried in the friendship of the overshadowed poet, but reminded Master Parker that he had once done the same.

We must be cautious how we go on quoting verses upon this agreeable subject; for they elbow one's prose out at a great rate. They sit in state, with a great vacancy on each side of them, like Henry VIII. in a picture of Holbein's. The wits who flourished after the time of the Stuarts were not behind the great poets of the age of Elizabeth in doing justice to their contemporaries. Dryden hailed the appearance of Congreve and Oldham. Congreve's merits were universally acknowledged, except by the critics. We need not refer to the works of Pope, Gay, Steele, Prior, &c. If Swift abused Dryden (who is said to have told him he would never be a poet), he also abused in a most unwarrantable and outrageous manner Sir Richard Steele, for whose Tatler he had written. His abuse was not a thing of literary jealousy, but of some personal or party spite. The union of all three was a quintessence of consciousness, reserved for the present times. But Swift's very fondness vented itself, like Bonaparte's, in slaps of the cheek. He was morbid, and liked to create himself cause for pity or regret. "The Dean

was a strange man." According to Mrs Pilkington's account, he used to give her a pretty hard thump now and then, of course to see how amiably she took it. Upon the same principle, he tells us in the verses on his death that

"Friend Pope will grieve a month, and Gay

A week, and Arbuthnot a day."

This was to vex them, and make them prove his words false by complaining of their injustice. He himself once kept a letter unopened for some days, because he was afraid it would contain news of a friend's death. See how he makes his very coarseness and irritability contribute to a panegyric:

"When Pope shall in one couplet fix

More sense than I can do in six,

It gives me such a jealous fit,

I cry, 'Pox, take him and his wit!'"

We must finish our quotations with a part of some sprightly verses addressed to Garth on his Dispensary by a friend of the name of Codrington. Codrington was one of those happilytempered spirits, who united in high style the characters of the gentleman the wit, and the man of business. He was in the best sense of the words, about town,”

a person of wit and honour

"The courtier's, scholar's, soldier's, eye, tongue, sword."

He was born in Barbadoes, where, after residing some time in England, and serving with great gallantry as an officer in various parts of the world, he was appointed Governor-General of the Leeward Islands. He resigned his government in the course of a few years, and died in the same place in the midst of his favourite studies. Among the variety of his accomplishments he did not omit even divinity, and was accounted a special master of metaphysics. His public life he had devoted to his country; his private he divided among his books and friends. If the verses before us are not so good as those of the old poets, they are as good in their way, are as sincere and cordial, and smack of the champagne on his table. We like

them on many accounts, for we like the panegyrist, and have an old liking for his friend :-we like the taste they express in friendship and in beauty; and we like to fancy that our goodhumoured ancestors in Barbadoes enjoyed the governor's society, and relished their wine with these identical triplets.

TO MY FRIEND THE AUTHOR, DESIRING MY OPINION OF HIS

POEM.

Ask me not, friend, what I approve or blame;

Perhaps I know not what I like or damn;

I can be pleased, and I dare own I am.

I read thee over with a lover's eye;
Thou hast no faults, or I no faults can spy
Thou art all beauty, or all blindness I.

Critics and aged beaux of fancy chaste,

Who ne'er had fire, or else whose fire is past,

Must judge by rules what they want force to taste.

I would a poet, like a mistress, try,

Not by her hair, her hand, her nose, her eye;
But by some nameless power to give me joy.

The nymph has Grafton's, Cecil's, Churchill's charms,
If with resistless fires my soul she warms,

With balm upon her lips, and raptures in her arms.

Literary loves and jealousies were much the same in the ancient and middle ages as the present; but we hear a great deal more of the loves than the reverse; because genius survives and ignorance does not. The ancient philosophers had a delicate way of honouring their favourites, by inscribing treatises with their names. It is thought a strange thing in Xenophon that he never once mentions Plato. The greater part of the miscellaneous poetry of the Greeks is lost; or we should doubtless see numerous evidences of the intercourse of their authors. The Greek poets of Sicily, Theocritus and Moschus, are very affectionate in recording the merits of their contemporaries. Varius and Gallus, two eminent Roman poets, scarcely survive but in the panegyrics of Horace, Virgil, and Ovid; all of whom