Is fittest to hunt at force. For whom when, with his hounds, The labouring hunter tufts the thick unbarbed grounds, The often bellowing hounds to vent his secret leir,a He rousing rusheth out, and through the brakes doth drive, When after goes the cry, with yellings loud and deep, ceives That he his speed must trust, his usual walk he leaves, And o'er the champain flies; which when the assembly find, Each follows as his horse were footed with the wind. When he hath gotten ground (the kennel cast arear) Them frighting from the guard of those who had their keep; But, when as all his shifts his safety still denies, Put quite out of his walk, the ways and fallows tries. Whom when the ploughman meets, his team he letteth stand, a Lair. VOL. III. п To assail him with his goad; so, with his hook in hand, Until the noble deer, through toil bereaved of strength, The cruel ravenous hounds and bloody hunters near, He turns upon his foes, that soon have him inclosed, This passage, though long, will scarcely be felt to be tedious. It is one of the most animated descriptions in poetry. We add a short specimen of Drayton's lighter style from his Nymphidia-the account of the equipage of the Queen of the Fairies, when she set out to visit her lover Pigwiggen. The reader may compare it with Mercutio's description in Romeo and Juliet : Her chariot ready straight is made; a "But" is the common reading. Her chariot of a snail's fine shell, The wheels composed of cricket's bones, That Mab his queen should have been there, She mounts her chariot with a trice, Which when they heard, there was not one As she had been diswitted. Hop, and Mop, and Drab so clear, Upon a grasshopper they got, A cobweb over them they throw, SYLVESTER. One of the most popular poets of this date was Joshua Sylvester, the translator of The Divine Weeks and Works, and other productions, of the French poet Du Bartas. Sylvester has the honour of being supposed to have been one of the early favourites of Milton.* In one of his publications he styles himself a MerchantAdventurer, and he seems to have belonged to the Puritan party, which may have had some share in influencing Milton's regard. His translation of Du Bartas was first published in 1605; and the seventh edition (beyond which, we believe, its popularity did not carry it) appeared in 1641.f Nothing can be more uninspired than the general run of Joshua's verse, or more fantastic and absurd than the greater number of its more ambitious passages; for he had no taste or judgment, and, provided the stream of sound and the jingle of the rhyme were kept up, all was right in his notion. His poetry consists chiefly of translations from the French; but he is also the author of some original picces, the title of one of which, a courtly offering from the poetical Puritan to the prejudices of King James, may be quoted as a lively specimen of his style and genius :— "Tobacco battered, and the pipes shattered, about their ears that idly idolize * Milton's obligations to Sylvester were first pointed out in Considerations on Milton's Early Reading, and the Prima Stamina of his Paradise Lost, together with Extracts from a Poet of the Sixteenth Century, by the Rev. Charles Dunster. 1800. † Ritson, in his Bibliographia Poetica,' makes the edition of 1613 to have been only the third; but it is called the fourth on the title-page. so base and barbarous a weed, or at leastwise overlove so loathsome a vanity, by a volley of holy shot thundered from Mount Helicon."* But, with all his general flatness and frequent absurdity, Sylvester has an uncommon flow of harmonious words at times, and occasionally even some fine lines and felicitous expressions. His contemporaries called him the "Silver-tongued Sylvester," for what they considered the sweetness of his versification— and some of his best passages justify the title. Indeed, even when the substance of what he writes approaches nearest to nonsense, the sound is often very graceful, soothing the car with something like the swing and ring of Dryden's heroics. But, after a few lines, is always sure to come in some ludicrous image or expression which destroys the effect of the whole. The translation of Du Bartas is inscribed to King James in a most adulatory and elaborate Dedication, consisting of a string of sonnetshaped stanzas, ten in all, of which the two first are a very fair sample of the mingled good and bad of Sylvester's poetry :— "To England's, Scotland's, France', and Ireland's king; Upon whose head honour and fortune smiles; The Daphnean crown to crown him laureate ; Whole and sole sovereign of the Thespian spring, Prince of Parnassus and Pierian state; * 8vo. Lond., 1615. |