While he the bottom, not his face had seen.
Scott
The last two lines have more music than Denham's can possibly boast.
Ritson
May I have leave to conjecture, that in the very last line of all, the word "the" has erroneously crept in? I am persuaded that the poet wrote "his." To my mind, at least, this reading, in a surprising degree, heightens the idea of the extreme clearness and transparency of the stream, where a man might see more than his face (as it were) in it.
COLLINS'S ORIENTAL ECLOGUES
Scott
The second of these little pieces, called Hassan, or the Camel Driver, is of superior character. This poem contradicts history in one principal instance; the merchants of the east travel in numerous caravans, but Hassan is introduced travelling alone in the desart. But this circumstance detracts little from our author's merit; adherence to historical fact is seldom required in poetry.
Ritson
It is always, where the poet unnecessarily transports you to the ends of the world. If he must plague you with exotic scenery, you have a right to exact strict local imagery and costume. Why must I learn Arabic, to read nothing after all but Gay's Fables in another language?
Scott
Abra is introduced in a grove, wreathing a flowery chaplet for her hair. Shakspeare himself could not have devised a more natural and pleasing incident, than that of the monarch's attention being attracted by her song:
Great Abbas chanced that fated morn to stray,
By love conducted from the chace away.
Among the vocal vales he heard her song——
Ritson
Ch—t?
O stay thee, Agib, for my feet deny,
No longer friendly to my life, to fly——
Scott
From the pen of Cowley, such an observation as Secander's, "that his feet were no longer friendly to his life," might have been expected; but Collins rarely committed such violations of simplicity.
Ritson
Pen of Cowley! impudent goose-quill, how darest thou guess what Cowley would have written?
GRAY'S CHURCH-YARD ELEGY
Save where the beetle wheels——
Scott
The beetle was introduced in poetry by Shakspeare * * *. Shakspeare has made the most of his description; indeed, far too much, considering the occasion:
——to black Hecate's summons
The shard-born beetle with his drowsy hum
Hath rung night's yawning peal.——
The imagination must be indeed fertile, which could produce this ill-placed exuberance of imagery. The poet, when composing this passage, must have had in his mind all the remote ideas of Hecate, a heathen Goddess, of a beetle, of night, of a peal of bells, and of that action of the muscles, commonly called a gape or yawn.
Ritson
Numbscull! that would limit an infinite head by the square contents of thy own numbscull.
Scott
The great merit of a poet is not, like Cowley, Donne, and Denham, to say what no man but himself has thought, but what every man besides himself has thought; but no man expressed, or, at least, expressed so well.
Ritson
In other words, all that is poetry, which Mr. Scott has thought, as well as the poet; but that cannot be poetry, which was not obvious to Mr. Scott, as well as to Cowley, Donne, and Denham.
Scott
Mr. Mason observes of the language in this part [the Epitaph], that it has a Doric delicacy. It has, indeed, what I should rather term a happy rusticity.
Ritson
Come, see
Rural felicity.
GOLDSMITH'S DESERTED VILLAGE
No busy steps the grass-grown footway tread,
But all the bloomy flush of life is fled—
All but yon widow'd solitary thing,
That feebly bends beside the plashy spring;
She, wretched matron, forced, in age, for bread,
To strip the brook with mantling cresses spread,
Scott
Our author's language, in this place, is very defective in correctness. After mentioning the general privation of the "bloomy flush of life," the exceptionary "all but" includes, as part of that "bloomy flush," an aged decrepit matron; that is to say, in plain prose, "the bloomy flush of life is all fled but one old woman."
Ritson
Yet Milton could write:
Far from all resort of mirth,
Save the cricket on the hearth,
Or the bell-man's drowsy charm—
and I dare say he was right. O never let a quaker, or a woman, try their hand at being witty, any more than a Tom Brown affect to speak by the spirit!
Scott
——Aaron Hill, who, although, in general, a bombastic writer, produced some pieces of merit, particularly the Caveat, an allegorical satire on Pope.
Ritson
Say rather his verses on John Dennis, beginning "Adieu, unsocial excellence!" which are implicitly a finer satire on Pope than twenty Caveats. All that Pope could or did say against Dennis, is there condensed; and what he should have said, and did not, for him, is there too.[44]
ON THE DEATH OF MR. DENNIS
Adieu, unsocial excellence! at last
Thy foes are vanquish'd,
