About his checkered sides I wind,
And leave his brooks and meads behind,
And groves, and grottoes where I lay,
And vistas shooting beams of day:
Wide and wider spreads the vale,
As circles on a smooth canal:
The mountains round, unhappy fate,
Sooner or later, of all height,
Withdraw their summits from the skies,
And lessen as the others rise:
Still the prospect wider spreads,
Adds a thousand woods and meads;
Still it widens, widens still,
And sinks the newly risen hill.
Now I gain the mountain's brow,
What a landskip lies below!
No clouds, no vapours intervene,
But the gay, the open scene
Does the face of nature shew,
In all the hues of heaven's bow;
And, swelling to embrace the light,
Spreads around beneath the sight.
Old castles on the cliffs arise,
Proudly towering in the skies!
Rushing from the woods, the spires
Seem from hence ascending fires!
Half his beams Apollo sheds
On the yellow mountain heads!
Gilds the fleeces of the flocks,
And glitters on the broken rocks!
Below me trees unnumbered rise,
Beautiful in various dyes :
The gloomy pine, the poplar blue,
The yellow beech, the sable yew,
The slender fir that taper grows,
The sturdy oak with broad-spread boughs.
And beyond the purple grove,
Haunt of Phillis, queen of love!
Gaudy as the opening dawn,
Lies a long and level lawn,
On which a dark hill, steep and high,
Holds and charms the wandering eye!
Deep are his feet in Towy's flood,
His sides are cloathed with waving wood,
And ancient towers crown his brow,
That cast an aweful look below;
Whose ragged walls the ivy creeps,
And with her arms from falling keeps:
So both a safety from the wind
On mutual dependence find.
'Tis now the raven's bleak abode;
'Tis now the apartment of the toad;
And there the fox securely feeds,
And there the poisonous adder breeds,
Concealed in ruins, moss, and weeds;
While, ever and anon, there falls
Huge heaps of hoary mouldered walls.
Yet time has seen, that lifts the low,
And level lays the lofty brow,
Has seen this broken pile complete,
Big with the vanity of state;
But transient is the smile of fate!
A little rule, a little sway,
A sunbeam in a winter's day,
Is all the proud and mighty have
Between the cradle and the grave.
And see the rivers, how they run
Through woods and meads, in shade and sun,
Sometimes swift, sometimes slow,
Wave succeeding wave, they go
A various journey to the deep,
Like human life, to endless sleep!
Thus is nature's vesture wrought,
To instruct our wandering thought;
Thus she dresses green and gay,
To disperse our cares away.
Ever charming, ever new,
When will the landskip tire the view!
The fountain's fall, the river's flow,
The woody valleys, warm and low;
The windy summit, wild and high,
Roughly rushing on the sky!
The pleasant seat, the ruined tower,
The naked rock, the shady bower;
The town and village, dome and farm,
Each give each a double charm,
As pearls upon an Ethiop's arm.
See, on the mountain's southern side,
Where the prospect opens wide,
Where the evening gilds the tide,
How close and small the hedges lie!
What streaks of meadows cross the eye!
A step, methinks, may pass the stream,
So little distant dangers seem;
So we mistake the future's face,
Eyed thro' hope's deluding glass;
As yon summits soft and fair,
Clad in colours of the air,
Which to those who journey near,
Barren, brown, and rough appear;
Still we tread the same coarse way,
The present's still a cloudy day.
O may I with myself agree,
And never covet what I see;
Content me with an humble shade,
My passions tamed, my wishes laid;
For while our wishes wildly roll,
We banish quiet from the soul :
'Tis thus the busy beat the air,
And misers gather wealth and care.
Now, even now, my joys run high,
As on the mountain turf I lie;
While the wanton zephyr sings,
And in the vale perfumes his wings;
While the waters murmur deep,
While the shepherd charms his sheep,
While the birds unbounded fly,
And with music fill the sky,
Now, even now, my joys run high.
Be full, ye courts; be great who will;
Search for peace with all your skill;
Open wide the lofty door,
Seek her on the marble floor:
In vain you search, she is not there;
In vain you search the domes of care!
Grass and flowers Quiet treads,
On the meads and mountain heads,
Along with Pleasure close allied,
Ever by each other's side:
And often, by the murmuring rill,
Hears the thrush, while all is still,
Within the groves of Grongar Hill.
The Fleece, in blank verse, is not an English pastoral Georgic on sheep and the shepherd's cares and joys, but sees the fleece through the shearing, washing, dyeing, carding, spinning, and weaving, and even follows English woollens on their last journey by land and sea to France, Russia, Siberia, India, China, the United States, South America, and all the world; it is a patriotic poem on the woollen manufacture and the seaborne trade of the nation of shopkeepers. Description of the land suitable for rearing sheep leads quite naturally to pictures of life in Lapland and Arabia, which are not good for sheep-breeding; the voyages of Jason and the argonauts of the golden fleece presented inevitable attractions; and the Miltonic and sonorous lists of places to which English manufactures find their way leave room for references to Vasco da Gama, Columbus, and Anson. Not content with the processes of woollen manufacture, this poet of the woollen interest in its widest sense bursts into an enthusiastic excursus on the forging and sharpening of sheep-shears and cutlery at Leeds. Dyer had a warm affection for his native Wales, and Welsh sheep, Demetia, Siluria, the banks of the Wye and Severn, occupy disproportionate space in a a survey of British sheep-farming. And repeated returns to the magnificence of Plynlimmon, Cader Idris, and other Welsh hills show that Dyer and his contemporaries were by no means so dead to the glories of mountain scenery as is often assumed. Amid the comically prosaic details and tedious didacticism there are fine passages and admirable lines in The Fleece, to which Mr Leslie Stephen is unjust in dismissing it as simply unreadable. The combination of true simplicity and eighteenth-century artificiality is curiously entertaining. Dyer's frank enthusiasm for the English climate, its refreshing fogs and rains, and the perennial verdure and purling brooks thereby nourished, is unconventional, frank, and infectious :
Those slow-descending showers,
Those hovering fogs, that bathe our growing vales
In deep November (loathed by trifling Gaul,
Effeminate), are gifts the Pleiads shed,
Britannia's handmaids. As the beverage falls,
Her hills rejoice, her valleys laugh and sing.
Hail noble Albion! where no golden mines,
No soft perfumes, nor oils, nor myrtle bowers,
The vigorous frame and lofty heart of man
Enervate round whose stern cerulean brows
White-winged snow, and cloud, and pearly rain,
Frequent attend, with solemn majesty:
Rich queen of mists and vapours! These thy sons
With their cool arms compress; and twist their nerves
For deeds of excellence and high renown.
Thus formed, our Edwards, Henrys, Churchills, Blakes,
Our Lockes, our Newtons, and our Miltons, rose.
See, the sun gleams; the living pastures rise,
After the nurture of the fallen shower,
How beautiful! How blue the ethereal vault,
How verdurous the lawns, how clear the brooks!
Such noble warlike steeds, such herds of kine,
So sleek, so vast; such spacious flocks of sheep,
Like flakes of gold illumining the green,
What other paradise adorn but thine,
Britannia? happy, if thy sons would know
Their happiness.
This English Cotter's Saturday Night' is not without a charming and truthful realism:
Only a slender tuft of useful ash,
And mingled beech and elm, securely tall,
The little smiling cottage warm embowered;
The little smiling cottage, where at eve
He meets his rosy children at the door,
Prattling their welcomes, and his honest wife,
With good brown cake and bacon slice, intent
To cheer his hunger after labour hard.
This is part of the shepherd's duties:
But spread around thy tenderest diligence
In flowery spring-time, when the new-dropt lamb,
Tottering with weakness by his mother's side,
Feels the fresh world about him; and each thorn,
Hillock, or furrow trips his feeble feet :
O guard his meek sweet innocence from all
The innumerous ills that rush around his life!
Mark the quick kite, with beak and talons prone,
Circling the skies to snatch him from the plain;
Observe the lurking crows; beware the brake;
There the sly fox the careless minute waits;
Nor trust thy neighbour's dog, nor earth, nor sky; . .
Between the lark's note and the nightingale's,
His hungry bleating still with tepid milk:
In this soft office may thy children join,
And charitable habits learn in sport.
Colin, on the top of Craig-y-Breiddyn in Mont gomeryshire, laments like a modern philanthropic economist the rush to the towns :
What various views unnumbered spread beneath!
Woods, towers, vales, caves, dells, cliffs, and torren
And here and there, between the spiry rocks, [floods
The broad flat sea. Far nobler prospects these,
Than gardens black with smoke in dusty towns,
Where stenchy vapours often blot the sun :
Yet flying from his quiet, thither crowds
Each greedy wretch for tardy-rising wealth,
Which comes too late; that courts the taste in vain,
Or nauseates with distempers. Yes, ye rich,
Still, still be rich, if thus ye fashion life,
And piping, careless, silly shepherds we;
We silly shepherds, all intent to feed
Our snowy flocks, and wind the sleeky fleece. Dyer rejoiced in the present and prospective well-being of the American colonies :
Happy the voyage, o'er the Atlantic brine,
By active Raleigh made, and great the joy,
When he discerned above the foamy surge
A rising coast, for future colonies,
Opening her bays and figuring her capes,
Even from the northern tropic to the pole.
No land gives more employment to the loom,
Or kindlier feeds the indigent; no land
With more variety of wealth rewards
The hand of labour: thither from the wrongs
Of lawless rule the free-born spirit flies;
Thither affliction, thither poverty,
And arts and sciences: thrice happy clime,
Which Britain makes the asylum of mankind.
But joy superior far his bosom warms,
Who views those shores in every culture dressed;
With habitations gay, and numerous towns,
On hill and valley; and his countrymen
Formed into various states, powerful and rich,
In regions far remote: who from our looms
Take largely for themselves, and for those tribes
Of Indians, ancient tenants of the land,
In amity conjoined, of civil life
The comforts taught, and various new desires,
Which kindle arts, and occupy the poor,
And spread Britannia's flocks o'er every dale.
But he quite foresees American rivalry in raw
material, if not in manufacture, and warns Britons,
then as now too secure, of the dangers of slackness:
Even in the new Columbian world appears
The woolly covering: Apacheria's glades,
And Canses', echo to the pipes and flocks
Of foreign swains. While Time shakes down his sands,
And works continual change, be none secure :
Quicken your labours, brace your slackening nerves,
Ye Britons; nor sleep careless on the lap
Of bounteous Nature; she is elsewhere kind.
See Mississippi lengthen-on her lawns,
Propitious to the shepherds: see the sheep
Of fertile Arica, like camels formed,
Which bear huge burdens to the sea-beat shore,
And shine with fleeces soft as feathery down.
The country of the Apache Indians-parts of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona-was even farther away in the Wild West than Kansas. The sheep of Arica are, of course, llamas.
Isaac Hawkins Browne (1705-60), son of the vicar of Burton-on-Trent, was educated at Oxford, and in 1736 published a clever series of six imitations of then living authors which obtained great popularity. They naturally suggest a comparison with the parodies in the Rejected Addresses. Browne, who was called to the Bar, resided mainly on his family estate, but sat in Parliament for some time as member for Wenlock in Shropshire. He wrote a Latin poem, De Animi Immortalitate, which was much praised and repeatedly translated (as by Soame Jenyns), and an English poem on the subject of Design and Beauty. Johnson said that of all conversers he was the most delightful with whom I ever was in company,' and gave the sympathetic Boswell food for comfort when he told him that Browne 'drank freely for thirty years.' His imitations are his happiest work, the subject of the whole being A Pipe of Tobacco. The first of the series, A New Year's Ode, appropriately parodies the manner of Colley Cibber, then poetlaureate, in recitativo and airs, and begins:
Old battle-array, big with horror, is fled,
And olive-robed Peace again lifts up her head;
Sing, ye Muses, tobacco, the blessing of peace;
Was ever a nation so blessed as this?
Air. When summer suns grow red with heat,
Tobacco tempers Phoebus' ire;
When wintry storms around us beat,
Tobacco chears with gentle fire.
Yellow autumn, youthful spring,
In thy praises jointly sing.
Like Neptune, Cæsar guards Virginian fleets,
Fraught with tobacco's balmy sweets;
Old Ocean trembles at Britannia's power,
And Boreas is afraid to roar.
Cibber's laureate effusions are here happily traves-
tied. Ambrose Philips is also well hit off-not by
Browne himself, but by an ingenious friend :'
Little tube of mighty power,
Charmer of an idle hour,
Object of my warm desire,
Lip of wax and eye of fire;
And thy snowy taper waist
With my finger gently braced,
And thy pretty swelling crest,
With my little stopper pressed,
And the sweetest bliss of blisses
Breathing from thy balmy kisses.
Thomson is the subject of the third imitation:
O thou, matured by glad Hesperian suns,
Tobacco, fountain pure of limpid truth,
That looks the very soul; whence pouring thought,
Swarms all the mind; absorpt is yellow care,
And at each puff imagination burns;
Flash on thy bard, and with exalting fires
Touch the mysterious lip that chants thy praise,
In strains to mortal sons of earth unknown.
Behold an engine, wrought from tawny mines
Of ductile clay, with plastic virtue formed,
And glazed magnifick o'er, I grasp, I fill.
From Patotheke with pungent powers perfumed
Itself one tortoise all, where shines imbibed
Each parent ray; then rudely rammed illume,
With the red touch of zeal-enkindling sheet,
Marked with Gibsonian lore; forth issue clouds,
Thought-thrilling, thirst-inciting clouds around,
And many-mining fires: I all the while,
Lolling at ease, inhale the breezy balm.
But chief, when Bacchus wont with thee to join
In genial strife and orthodoxal ale,
Stream life and joy into the Muse's bowl.
Oh, be thou still my great inspirer, thou
My Muse: oh, fan me with thy zephyr's boon,
While I, in clouded tabernacle shrined,
Burst forth all oracle and mystick song.
Many of the lines and phrases are from Thomson's poem of Liberty (1732), which also explains Gibsonian lore. Patotheke is a pedantic coinage for a tobacco-box. Such a smart parody of Thomson's magniloquent style and diction being inevitably ludicrous, the usually good-natured poet was offended, and indited some angry lines in reply. The fourth imitation is in the style of Young's Satires, which are less strongly marked by mannerism than the Night Thoughts, not then written. The parody begins :
Criticks avaunt; Tobacco is my theme;
Tremble like hornets at the blasting steam.
And you, court-insects, flutter not too near
Its light, nor buzz within the scorching sphere.
Pollio, with flame like thine my verse inspire,
So shall the Muse from smoke elicit fire.
It is Pope of course who is thus imitated:
Blest leaf! whose aromatic gales dispense
To templars modesty, to parsons sense :
So raptured priests, at famed Dodona's shrine,
Drank inspiration from the steam divine.
Poison that cures, a vapour that affords
Content more solid than the smile of lords:
Rest to the weary, to the hungry food,
The last kind refuge of the wise and good.
Inspired by thee, dull cits adjust the scale
Of Europe's peace, when other statesmen fail.
By thee protected, and thy sister beer,
Poets rejoice, nor think the bailiff near.
Nor less the critic owns thy genial aid,
While supperless he plies the piddling trade.
What though to love and soft delights a foe,
By ladies hated, hated by the beau,
Yet social freedom long to courts unknown,
Fair health, fair truth, and virtue are thy own.
Come to thy poet, come with healing wings,
And let me taste thee unexcised by kings!
In the last, beginning:
Boy! bring an ounce of Freeman's best,
And bid the vicar be my guest-
Browne not merely caught the manner of Swift, but successfully reproduced his coarseness.
Matthew Green (1696-1737), author of The Spleen, praised by Pope and Gray, left the austere Dissenting communion of his parents, had a post as clerk in the London Custom-House, performed his duties faithfully, and from time to time wrote and published verses. He was a witty and entertaining companion, but seems to have had personal experience of 'the spleen,' to judge by the aptness with which he discusses its various forms and their appropriate remedies, in comic verse like that of Hudibras and of some of Swift's poems. The poem was first published by Glover, the author of Leonidas, after Green's death. Gray thought that even the wood-notes of Green often break out into strains of real poetry and music;' and the fourth line of the first of the following extracts from The Spleen (alluding to David and Goliath, and not unlike Shakespeare's
Man but a rush against Othello's breast,
And he retires),
soon attained to the dignity of a stock quotation.
Cures for Melancholy.
To cure the mind's wrong bias, spleen,
Some recommend the bowling-green;
Some hilly walks; all exercise;
Fling but a stone, the giant dies;
Laugh and be well. Monkeys have been
Extreme good doctors for the spleen;
And kitten, if the humour hit,
Has harlequined away the fit.
Since mirth is good in this behalf,
At some particulars let us laugh.
If spleen-fogs rise at break of day,
I clear my evening with a play,
Or to some concert take my way.
The company, the shine of lights,
The scenes of humour, music's flights,
Adjust and set the soul to rights. . . .
In rainy days keep double guard,
Or spleen will surely be too hard;
Which, like those fish by sailors met,
Fly highest while their wings are wet.
In such dull weather, so unfit
To enterprise a work of wit;
When clouds one yard of azure sky,
That 's fit for simile, deny,
I dress my face with studious looks,
And shorten tedious hours with books.
But if dull fogs invade the head,
That memory minds not what is read,
I sit in window dry as ark,
And on the drowning world remark:
Or to some coffee-house I stray
For news, the manna of a day,
And from the hipped discourses gather
That politics go by the weather. . .
Sometimes I dress, with women sit,
And chat away the gloomy fit;
Quit the stiff garb of serious sense,
And wear a gay impertinence,
Nor think nor speak with any pains,
But lay on Fancy's neck the reins.
I never game, and rarely bet,
Am loath to lend or run in debt.
No Compter-writs me agitate,
Who moralising pass the gate,
And there mine eyes on spendthrifts turn,
Who vainly o'er their bondage mourn.
Wisdom, before beneath their care,
Pays her upbraiding visits there,
And forces Folly through the grate
Her panegyric to repeat.
Experience, joined with common sense,
To mortals is a providence.
Happy the man who, innocent,
Grieves not at ills he can't prevent;
His skiff does with the current glide,
Not puffing pulled against the tide.
He, paddling by the scuffling crowd,
Sees unconcerned life's wager rowed,
And when he can't prevent foul play,
Enjoys the folly of the fray.
The gate is the gate of the Compter or debtor's prison; me is the antecedent to the who that follows.
Contentment-A Wish.
May Heaven-it's all I wish for-send
One genial room to treat a friend,
Where decent cupboard, little plate,
Display benevolence, not state.
And may my humble dwelling stand
Upon some chosen spot of land:
A pond before full to the brim,
Where cows may cool, and geese may swim; Behind, a green, like velvet neat,
Soft to the eye, and to the feet;
Where odorous plants in evening fair
Breathe all around ambrosial air;
From Eurus, foe to kitchen ground,
Fenced by a slope with bushes crowned,
Fit dwelling for the feathered throng,
Who pay their quit-rents with a song;
With opening views of hill and dale,
Which sense and fancy do regale,
Where the half cirque, which vision bounds,
Like amphitheatre surrounds:
And woods impervious to the breeze,
Thick phalanx of embodied trees;
From hills through plains in dusk array,
Extended far, repel the day;
Here stillness, height, and solemn shade
Invite, and contemplation aid:
Here nymphs from hollow oaks relate
The dark decrees and will of fate;
And dreams, beneath the spreading beech,
Inspire, and docile fancy teach;
While soft as breezy breath of wind,
Impulses rustle through the mind:
Here Dryads, scorning Phoebus' ray,
While Pan melodious pipes away,
In measured motions frisk about,
Till old Silenus puts them out.
There see the clover, pea, and bean
Vie in variety of green;
Fresh pastures speckled o'er with sheep,
Brown fields their fallow Sabbaths keep,
Plump Ceres golden tresses wear,
And poppy top-knots deck her hair,
And silver streams through meadows stray,
And Naiads on the margin play,
And lesser nymphs on side of hills,
From plaything urns pour down the rills.
Lord Hervey (1696–1743), the son of a Suffolk knight, is well known as the Sporus of Pope and as husband of the much-besung and beautiful Mary Lepell. A supple politician and a good parliamentary debater, he was successively ViceChamberlain and Lord Privy Seal, and a great favourite with Queen Caroline. His history, called Memoirs of the Reign of George II. from his Accession till the Death of Queen Caroline, edited in 1848 by John Wilson Croker, is very valuable in its way. It abounds in minute details drawn from personal observation; the characters are cleverly drawn; and he has described at length all the vices, coarseness, and dullness of the court, in a style concise and pointed. His portraits are often spiteful, and he rarely does justice to the good qualities of those-and they were manywhom he disliked. Besides his Memoirs, Lord Hervey published many pamphlets, wrote occasional verses, and joined with Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in endeavouring vainly to repel the envenomed shafts of Pope. He was of talent and energy, though contending with wretched health, drinking asses' milk, and rouging his countenance to conceal his ghastly appearance; of moral principle or public honour he appears to have been destitute. A few weeks before his death we find him writing thus characteristically to Lady Mary: 'The last stages of an infirm life are filthy roads, and, like all other roads, I find the further one goes from the capital, the more tedious the miles grow, and the more rough and disagreeable the way. I know of no
turnpikes to mend them; medicine pretends to be such, but doctors who have the management of it, like the commissioners for most other turnpikes, seldom execute what they undertake; they only put the toll of the poor cheated passenger in their pockets, and leave every jolt at least as bad as they found it, if not worse.' The extracts that follow are from the Memoirs.
Traits of George II. and Queen Caroline. The Duke of Richmond asked the king immediately to succeed Lord Scarborough, and the king was not averse to granting his request any further than he was always averse to giving anything to anybody. Many ingredients concurred to form this reluctance in his majesty to bestowing. One was that, taking all his notions from a German measure, he thought every man who served him in England overpaid; another was, that while employments were vacant he saved the salary; but the most prevalent of all was his never having the least inclination to oblige. I do not believe there ever lived a man to whose temper benevolence was so absolutely a stranger. It was a sensation that, I dare say, never accompanied any one act of his power; so that whatever good he did was either extorted from him, or was the adventitious effect of some self-interested act of policy consequently, if any seeming favour he conferred ever obliged the receiver, it must have been because the man on whom it fell was ignorant of the motives from which the giver bestowed. I remember Sir Robert Walpole saying once, in speaking to me of the king, that to talk with him of compassion, consideration of past services, charity, and bounty, was making use of words that with him had no meaning. . . . The queen, by long studying and long experience of his temper, knew how to instil her own sentiments-whilst she affected to receive his majesty's; she could appear convinced whilst she was controverting, and obedient whilst she was ruling; and by this means her dexterity and address made it impossible for anybody to persuade him what was truly his case-that whilst she was seemingly on every occasion giving up her opinion and her will to his, she was always in reality turning his opinion and bending his will to hers. She managed this deified image as the heathen priests used to do the oracles of old, when, kneeling and prostrate before the altars of a pageant god, they received with the greatest devotion and reverence those directions in public which they had before instilled and regulated in private. And as these idols consequently were only propitious to the favourites of the augurers, so nobody who had not tampered with our chief priestess ever received a favourable answer from our god storms and thunder greeted every votary that entered the temple without her protection—calms and sunshine those who obtained it. The king himself was so little sensible of this being his case, that one day, enumerating the people who had governed this country in other reigns, he said Charles I. was governed by his wife, Charles II. by his mistresses, King James by his priests, King William by his men, and Queen Anne by her women-favourites. His father, he added, had been governed by anybody that could get at him. And at the end of this compendious history of our great and wise monarchs, with a significant, satisfied, triumphant air, he turned about, smiling, to one of his auditors, and asked him: And who do they say governs now?' Whether
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