But myrtle for stout spears, and, good for A ready diet! If no mighty tide war, The cornel; into Iturean bows The yews are bent. Nor do the glossy limes, Or box that takes a polish in the lathe, 620 No shape receive, or by the sharpened tool Are grooved, Nor less, too, swims the seething wave The buoyant alder, launched upon the Po; Nor less, too, do the bees their swarms ensconce As well within the vaulted [hives of] bark, As in the hollow of the cankered holm. What to be named alike have Bacchus' gifts Bestowed? E'en Bacchus hath for crime supplied Occasions. He the Centaurs in their rage With death o'erpowered,-Rhœtus both, and Pholus, 630 Hylæus, too, with mighty wassail-bowl Of her own self, afar from wrangling arms, 621. See note on Geo. i. 115. 628. Spenser thus alludes to the fight: "And there the relicks of the drunken fray, The which amongst the Lapithees befell; And of the bloodie feast, which sent away So many Centaures drunken soules to hell, That under great Alcides furie fell." Faerie Queene, iv. 1, 23. "All now was turned to jollity and game, To luxury and riot, feast and dance; thence from cups to civil broils." Milton, P. L., b. xi. Milton also makes Samson say: "Nor envied them the grape, Whose heads that turbulent liquor fills with fumes." "Nor the Centaurs' tale Be here repeated, how with lust and wine Gay, however, is rather jealous of the reputation of Bacchus : "Drive hence the rude and barbarous dissonance Beaumont, The Scornful Lady, ii. 2. 633. Thomson finely imitates this whole passage, verses 458-540, in his Autumn, 1235-1373; but it is too long to quote. doors, A stately mansion forth from all its halls In Ephyr's bronze; nor is their snowy wool Rich in a varied wealth; yet hours of ease In fields extended, grots, and living meres; Yet Tempe cool, and lowings of the kine, And balmy slumbers underneath the tree,Keep not aloof. There woodlands and the lairs 651 Of savage beasts, and youth enduring toils, And used to scantness; holy rites of gods, 638. "Hast thou not seen my morning chambers filled With sceptred slaves, who waited to salute me?" Dryden, All for Love, iii. 1. 644. "Shall we seek Virtue in a satin gown, Embroidered Virtue? Faith in a well-curled feather?" 646. J. Fletcher, The Loyal Subject, iii. 2. "I want the trick of flattery, my lord; I cannot bow to scarlet and gold lace; Embroidery is not an idol for my worship." Shirley, The Duke's Mistress, i. 1. "But carelesse Quiet lyes." Spenser, F. Q., i. 1, 41. "There in close covert by some brook, Where no profaner eye may look, Hide me from day's gairish eye, While the bee with honied thigh, That at her flowery work doth sing, And the waters murmuring, With such consort as they keep, Entice the dewy-feathered sleep." Milton, Il Penseroso. See T. Warton's elegant poem, The Hamlet. 652. Shakespeare makes Henry the Sixth agree with the poet; the king says, 3 Hen. VI., ii. 5: Ah, what a life were this; how sweet! how lovely! Gives not the hawthorn bush a sweeter shade To kings, that fear their subjects' treachery? When care, mistrust, and treason wait on him.” 653. "The use of things is all, and not the store: Surfeit and fullness have killed more than Famine." Ben Jonson, The Staple of News, end. "Upon those lips, the sweet fresh buds of youth, The holy dew of prayer lies, like pearl And worshipped sires: 'mong them her latest tracks Did Justice, from the earth withdrawing, print. But me the chiefest, may the Muses, sweet 'Bove all [attractions], whose religious [gifts] I bear, deep smitten with a mighty love, Embrace, and shew the pathways and the stars Of heav'n, the changeful fadings of the sun, And travails of the moon; whence [comes] the quake 661 To earth; beneath what pow'r deep seas upheave, When burst their barriers, and again sink back Themselves upon themselves; why speed so fast To dip them in the ocean wintry suns, Charm me, and streamlets rilling in the dales; 670 The floods and forests may I love, unfamed! Oh! [could I live] where [lie] the plains, Sperchæus too, Who knows the rural deities, both Pan, The traitor brothers goading, or the Dace, Down swooping from the Danube oathcolleagued; Not Roman fortunes and expiring realms : Nor has he either, in compassion, mourned The destitute, or envied him that hath. What fruits the boughs, what willing fields themselves, 690 Of free accord, have yielded, he hath culled; One with extermination makes assault that "The poor man's cry he thought a holy knell : Robert Greene, A Maiden's Dream. 692. "To drown the tempest of a pleader's tongue." Massinger, The Fatal Dowry, i. 1. 695. The kings were courted because they lacked either the sense or honesty to say: "Wherefore pay you This adoration to a sinful creature? We may give poor men riches, confer honours As are beneath us, and, with this puffed up, Ambition would persuade us to forget That we are men: but he that sits above us, 698. Webster, The Thracian Wonder, iii. 2. On Sarra's purple; wealth another hoards, | Winter is come: in olive-mills is brayed And o'er his deeply-buried gold he broods. The Sicyon berry; with the acorn blithe, One, awe-struck at the Rostra, stands The swine return; their arbutes give the amazed; woods, 701 Another, staring on with mouth agape, The clapping through the seats, yea doubly pealed, Of commons both and sires hath held enchained. They joy, bespattered with their brothers' blood, For exile, too, their homes and thresholds dear Do they exchange, and seek a land that lies Beneath another sun. The husbandman The earth hath sundered with his crooked plough : Hence the year's travail; hence his native land 710 And children's infant children he supports; Hence droves of oxen and deserving steers. Nor is there rest; but either with its fruits The year o'erflows, or in the birth of flocks, Or sheaf of Cereal stalk, and with its yield The furrows lades, and vanquishes the barns. "Their sumptuous gluttonies, and gorgeous feasts On citron tables or Atlantic stone; Their wines of Setia, Cales, and Falerne, Chios, and Crete; and how they quaff in gold, Crystal, and myrrhine cups, emboss'd with gems And studs of pearl." Milton, P. R., b. iv. "I, that forgot I was made of flesh and blood, and thought the silk, Spun by the diligent worms out of their entrails, Massinger, The Bondman, iii. 3. 700. "You swear, forswear, and all to compass wealth: Your money is your god, your hoard your heaven." Robert Greene, James the Fourth, v. 4. "No! I'll not lessen my dear golden heap, Which, every hour increasing, does renew My youth and vigour; but, if lessened,-then, Then my poor heart-strings crack! Let me enjoy it, And brood o'er 't, while I live, it being my life, My soul, my all." Massinger, The Roman Actor, ii. 1. "But the base miser starves amidst his store, Broods on his gold, and, griping still at more, Sits sadly pining, and believes he's poor." Dryden, Wife of Bath's Tale, 468-70. "As some lone miser, visiting his store, Bends at his treasure, counts, recounts it o'er; Hoards after hoards his rising raptures fill, Yet still he sighs, for hoards are wanting still." Goldsmith, Traveller. "This applause, Confirmed in your allowance, joys me more Than if a thousand full-crammed theatres Should clap their eager hands, to witness that The scene I act did please, and they admire it." Massinger, The Renegade, iv. 3. 703. 720 And autumn in variety lays down Himself the days of feast observes, and, stretched Along the turf, where in the midst the fire Is burning, and his comrades wreathe the bowl, 730 Thee, pouring, O Lenæan, he invokes ; And for the masters of the flock appoints The games of flying javelin on the elm ; And stalwart frames they strip for rural list. This life of yore the olden Sabines led; This Remus and his brother; thus in sooth Etruria brave hath waxed, and Rome become The loveliest of things, and for herself Seven heights hath singly girdled with a wall. 741 Ere, too, the sceptre of the Cretan king, 723. The cessation of such tendernesses is sadly described by Gray in his Elegy: "No children run to lisp their sire's return, Or climb his knees the envied kiss to share." Thomson has a tender touch of nature, taken, like this of Virgil, from home life. In a very successful description of a father lost in a snow-storm, he says: "In vain his little children, peeping out Winter, 313-315. That is a neighbour to the bordering down, "With some regard to what is just and right And Thomson, of the reign of Peace; Britannia, 113, &c.: "Pure is thy reign, when, unaccursed by blood, Nought save the sweetness of indulgent showers 20 I, foremost, to my native land with me, Line 15. Gray thus finely alludes to the decay of poetry in Greece, and its translation to Rome; Progress of Poesy: "Where each old poetic mountain Inspiration breath'd around; Ev'ry shade and hallow'd fountain Till the sad Nine, in Greece's evil hour, Left their Parnassus for the Latian plains." 22. So Milton, in Lycidas: "O fountain Arethuse, and thou honour'd flood, Smooth sliding Mincius, crown'd with vocal reeds." 26. Ophelia, mourning over Hamlet's insanity, speaks of him as "The expectancy and rose of the fair state, The glass of fashion, and the mould of form, The observ'd of all observers." Hamlet, iii. 1. III. A hundred four-yoked chariots will impel Along the floods. The whole of Greece for me, Alpheus leaving and Molorchus' groves, It joys to lead, and view the butchered steers ; Or how the scene with shifted fronts withdraws, And how the intertissued Britons raise 4I And pillars, tow'ring up with naval bronze. trusts In flight, and in his rear-directed shafts ; The stones of Paros, effigies that breathe, 44. "Oh! let us gain a Parthian victory: The only way to conquer is to fly." Dryden, Love Triumphant, ii. 1. "I am but dead, stone looking upon stone: What was he that did make it? See, my lord, Would you not deem it breathed, and that those veins Did verily bear blood ?" 49. Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale, v. 3. "Some carve the trunks, and breathing shapes bestow, Giving the trees more life than when they grow." Cowley, Davideis, b. ii. "The fairest, softest, sweetest frame beneath, Now made to seem, and more than seem, to breathe." Parnell, Hesiod. "And breathing forms from the rude marble start." T. Warton, Sonnet v. "Heroes in animated marble frown, And legislators seem to think in stone." Pope, Temple of Fame. 50 | And toil, and ruthlessness of rigid death Sweeps them away. There aye will be, The lineage of Assaracus, and names Meanwhile the Dryads' woods and glades Track we, Maecenas, thy no soft behests: Citharon calls us, and Tayget's hounds, 60 Comes thund'ring back. Soon ne'ertheless whose frames Thou wouldest liefer should be changed: then aye Do thou recruit them; and lest thou again Should seek them lost, forestall, and for thy herd A youthful offspring year by year allot. 100 Nor less, too, is the choice the same for brood Of horses. Do but thou on those, which thou Shalt settle for the nation's hope to raise, Bestow. From first the colt of noble strain Be girt to celebrate the burning fights And in the van to enter on the path, Griefs of the mind, pains of the feeble body, Best is the figure of the grim-eyed cow, 72 And is at times uncivil with her horn, Brushes her footsteps with her tip of tail. While to thy flocks survives a merry youth, race 91 Supply by breeding. Each best day of life J. Fletcher, A Wife for a Month, ii. 5. "Time is the moth Shirley, The Humorous Courtier, i. 1. "A flower that does with opening morn arise, And, flourishing the day, at evening dies; A winged eastern blast, just skimming o'er The ocean's brow, and sinking on the shore; A fire, whose flames through crackling stubble fly; 99. A meteor, shooting from the summer sky; A noontide shadow, and a midnight dream,- Middleton, A Fair Quarrel, iii. 2. 108. On the impatience of the horse Pope is very happy: "The impatient courser pants in every vein, And, pawing, seems to beat the distant plain: He takes the river at redoubled draughts, |