Lives of the English Poets : Waller, Milton, Cowley - Samuel Johnson

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general character of his poetry is elegance and gaiety.  He is never pathetic, and very rarely sublime.  He seems neither to have had a mind much elevated by nature nor amplified by learning.  His thoughts are such as a liberal conversation and large acquaintance with life would easily supply.  They had however then, perhaps, that grace of novelty which they are now often supposed to want by those who, having already found them in later books, do not know or inquire who produced them first.  This treatment is unjust.  Let not the original author lose by his imitators.

      Praise, however, should be due before it is given.  The author of Waller’s Life ascribes to him the first practice of what Erythræus and some late critics call “Alliteration,” of using in the same verse many words beginning with the same letter.  But this knack, whatever be its value, was so frequent among early writers, that Gascoigne, a writer of the sixteenth century, warns the young poet against affecting it; Shakespeare, in the “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” is supposed to ridicule it; and in another play the sonnet of Holofernes fully displays it.

      He borrows too many of his sentiments and illustrations from the old mythology, for which it is vain to plead the example of ancient poets; the deities, which they introduced so frequently, were considered as realities, so far as to be received by the imagination, whatever sober reason might even then determine.  But of these images time has tarnished the splendour.  A fiction, not only detected but despised, can never afford a solid basis to any position, though sometimes it may furnish a transient allusion, or slight illustration.  No modern monarch can be much exalted by hearing that, as Hercules had his “club” he has his “navy.”

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