heads. You come at last to find it means a great crowd. How pretty and how genteel is the following! Nature's confectioner Whose suckets are moist alchemy: The still of his refining mould Minting the garden into gold.* What is this but a bee gathering honey? Little syren of the stage, Empty warbler, breathing lyre, Tuneful mischief, vocal spell. + Who would think this was only a poor gentlewo man, that sung finely? We may define amplification to be making the most of a thought: it is the spinning-wheel of the bathos, which draws out and spreads it into the finest thread. There are amplifiers, who can extend half a dozen thin thoughts over a whole folio; but for which, the tale of many a vast romance, and the substance of many a fair volume, might be reduced to the size of a primer. In the book of Job are these words, "Hast thou commanded the morning, and caused the day-spring to know his place?" How is this extended by the most celebrated amplifier of our age? Canst thou set forth the ethereal mines on high, Is the celestial furnace to thee known, * Cleveland + Ambrose Philips to Cuzzona. Job, p. 108. The same author has amplified a passage in the civth psalm: " He looks on the earth, and it trembles. He touches the hills, and they smoke."!! The hills forget they're fix'd, and in their fright You here see the hills not trembling, but shaking off woods from their backs, to run the faster; after this you are presented with a foot-race of mountains and woods, where the woods distance the mountains, that, like corpulent pursy fellows, come puffing and panting a vast way behind them. CHAP. IX. OF IMITATION, AND THE MANNER OF IMITATING. THAT the true authors of the profund are to imitate diligently the examples in their own way, is not to be questioned, and that divers have by this means attained to a depth, whereunto their own weight could never have carried them, is evident by sundry instances. Who sees not that De Foe was the poetical son of Withers, Tate of Ogilby, E. Ward of John Taylor, and Eusden of Blackmore? Therefore when we sit down to write, t let us bring some great author to our mind, and ask ourselves * Job, p. 267. + An admirable Parody on the Fourteenth Section of Longinus, when he advises the writer to ask himself, whilst he is composing any work, "How would Homer, Plato, or Demosthenes, have expressed themselves on this subject ?"-Dr WARTON. this question: "How would Sir Richard have said this? do I express myself as simply as Ambrose Philips? or flow my numbers with the quiet thoughtlessness of Mr Welsted ?"* But it may seem somewhat strange to assert, that our proficient should also read the works of those famous poets, who have excelled in the sublime : yet is not this a paradox. As Virgil is said to have read Ennius, out of his dunghill to draw gold; so may our author read Shakespeare, Milton, and Dryden, for the contrary end, to bury their gold in his own dunghill. A true genius, when he finds any thing lofty or shining in them, will have the skill to bring it down, take off the gloss, or quite discharge the colour, by some ingenious circumstance or periphrase, some addition or diminution, or by some of those figures, the use of which we shall shew in our next chapter. The book of Job is acknowledged to be infinite. ly sublime, and yet has not the father of the bathos reduced it in every page? Is there a passage in all Virgil more painted up and laboured than the description of Etna in the third Æneid? -Horrificis juxta tonat Ætna ruinis, Welsted was a man not absolutely devoid of fancy and poetical expression. But his poems were of that middling de. scription, which may indeed easily find defenders, because they contain nothing very absurd, but which hardly can gain readers, since they exhibit as little that is attractive. + These two words, after he had said "Attollitque globos flammarum," are perhaps the only two in Virgil that may be called bombast and supertragical, outpayıxa, says Longinus, but παρατραγωδα Interdum scopulos avulsaque viscera montis (I beg pardon of the gentle English reader, and such of our writers as understand not Latin.) Lo! how this is taken down by our British poet, by the single happy thought of throwing the mountain into a fit of the colic: Etna, and all the burning mountains, find Their kindled stores with inbred storms of wind Blown up to rage; and roaring out complain, As torn with inward gripes, and tort'ring pain: Lab'ring, they cast their dreadful vomit round, And with their melted bowels spread the ground. Horace, in search of the sublime, struck his head against the stars; † but Empedocles, to fathom the Perhaps we have not in our language a more striking example of a true turgid expression and genuine fustain and bombast, than in the following lines of Nat Lee's Alexander the Great, who is introduced saying, "When Glory, like the dazzling eagle, stood And I myself appeared the leading God!" Is it to be conceived that Dr Warburton affirmed, in a long note on the First Epistle of Horace, b. ii. that "these six lines contain not only the most sublime, but the most judicious imagery that poetry could conceive or paint?" I thought that a note which contained so outrageous a paradox, and so totally inconsistent with true taste and solid judgment, ought not to be retained. Dr WARTON. * Prince Arthur, p. 75. +"Sublimi feriam sidera vertice." And so did the writer of the following lines, in a well-known Tragedy: "Should the fierce North, upon his frozen wings, Thence should my fury drag him down to tortures," profund, threw himself into Etna. And who but would imagine our excellent modern had also been there from this description? Imitation is of two sorts; the first is, when we force to our own purposes the thought of others; the second consists in copying the imperfections or blemishes of celebrated authors. I have seen a play professedly writ in the style of Shakespeare, where in the resemblance lay in one single line. And so good morrow t'ye, good master lieutenant.* And sundry poems in imitation of Milton, where, with the utmost exactness, and not so much as one exception, nevertheless was constantly nathless, † embroidered was broidered, hermits were eremites, disdained 'sdeigned, shady umbrageous, enterprize emprize, pagan paynim, pinions pennons, sweet dulcet, orchards orchats, bridge-work pontifical; nay her was hir, and their was thir, through the whole poems. And in very deed, there is no other way, by which the true modern poet could read to any The line is from Rowe's tragedy of Lady Jane Gray. There is a peculiar absurdity in the play, the whole dramatic language of Bishop Gardiner being cast upon an antique mould, in imitation of the old dramatists, while the other characters speak the flowery fluttering sort of blank verse peculiar to Rowe and his period. The same incongruity may be remarked in Jane Shore, where Gloucester's dialect is approximated as nearly the language of Shakespeare, as the adoption of quaint and antiquated expressions, and the oath "by the holy Paul" could render it, whereas Hastings and all the others talk like courtiers of Louis XIV. + He alluded particularly to Philips's Cyder, of which he often expressed a strong disapprobation, and particularly on account of these antiquated words. He often quoted the following line as not English: "Administer their tepid genial airs." Cyder, b. ii. |