Pen of Cowley! impudent goose-quill, how darest thou guess what Cowley would have written?
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.
Numbscull! that would limit an infinite head by the square contents of thy own numbscull.
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.
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.
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_.
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,
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."
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!
----Aaron Hill, who, although, in general, a bombastic writer, produced some pieces of merit, particularly the Caveat, an allegorical satire on Pope.