accumulated together! We hear the Jews, the cedars of Libanus, the shades of the departed kings, the kings of Babylon, those who find his body, and lastly, Jehovah himself, all speaking in order; and behold them acting their several parts, as it were, in a drama. One continued action is carried on or rather a various and manifold series of different actions is connected; an excellence more peculiarly appropriated to the sublimer ode, and consummately displayed in this poem of Isaiah, which is the most perfect and unexampled model among all the monuments of antiquity. The personifications are frequent, but not confused; are bold, but not affected: a free, lofty and truly divine spirit predominates through the whole. Nor is any thing wanting to crown. and complete the sublimity of this ode with absplute beauty; nor can the Greek or Roman poesy produce any thing that is similar, or second, to this ode."

It cannot be thought strange, that he who could so judiciously explain, could as poetically express,

VOL. I.

C

* Prælect. xiii, pag. 121.

1

express, the ideas of Isaiah: the latter he has performed in many instances; but in none more strikingly than in the following, which magnificently represents the Messiah treading the winepress in his anger; and which an impartial judge, not blinded by the charms of antiquity, will think equal to many descriptions in Virgil, in point of elegance and energy:

Ille patris vires indutus et iram

Dira rubens graditur, per stragem et fracta potentum
Agmina, prona solo; prostratisque hostibus ultor
Insultat; ceu præla novo spumantia musto
Exercens, salit attritas calcator in uvas,

Congestamque struem subigit: cæde atra recenti

Crura madent, rorantque inspersæ sanguine vestes.*

SECTION

* Prælect. vii. pag. 62.

SECTION II.

OF WINDSOR-FOREST, AND LYRIC PIECES.

DESCRIPTIVE Poetry was by no means the shining talent of POPE. This assertion may be manifested by the few images introduced in the poem before us, which are not equally applicable to any place whatsoever. Rural beauty in general, and not the peculiar beauties of the Forest of Windsor, are here described. Nor are the sports of setting, shooting, and fishing, included between the ninety-third and one hundred and fortysixth verses, to which the reader is referred, at all more appropriated. The stag-chase, that immediately follows, although some of the lines are incomparably good,* is not so full, so animated, and so circumstantiated, as that of Somerville.

C 2

* See particularly, ver. 151.

The

The digression that describes the demolition of the thirty villages by William the Conqueror, is well imagined; particularly,

Round broken columns clasping ivy twin'd ;
O'er heaps of ruin stalk'd the stately hind;
The fox obscene to gaping tombs retires,
And savage howlings fill the sacred quires.*

Though I cannot forbear thinking, that the following picture of the ruins of Godstow Nunnery, drawn, it should seem, on the spot, and worthy the hand of Paul Brill, is by no means excelled by the foregoing.

Qua nudo Rosamonda humilis sub culmine tecti
Marginis obscuri servat inane decus,

Rara intermissæ circum vestigia molis,
Et sola in vacuo tramite porta labat:
Sacræ olim sedes riguæ convallis in umbra,
Et veteri pavidum religione nemus.
Pallentes nocturna ciens campana sorores
Hinc matutinum sæpe monebat avem ;
Hinc procul in media tarde caliginis hora
Prodidit arcanas arcta fenestra faces :

Nunc muscosa extant sparsim de cespite saxa,
Nunc muro avellunt germen agreste boves.†

VOLTAIRE,

* Ver. 69. + Carmina Quadrages. Oxon. 1748. pag. 3.

VOLTAIRE, in the first volume of his entertaining and lively Essay on General History, is inclined to dispute the truth of this devastation imputed to William the Conqueror, but for a reason not very solid and conclusive. His objection consists in the improbability that any man in his senses, should think of depopulating a circuit of fifteen leagues, and of sowing and planting a forest therein, when he was now sixty-three years old, and could not reasonably hope to live long enough to have the pleasure of hunting in it after these trees were grown up. As if it were necessary to have only woods to hunt in, or that a forest should be laid out (as are some in France) in regular alleys and avenues of trees.

All our

old historians, Florence of Worcester, William of Malmesbury, Henry of Huntingdon, Simeon of Durham, Hoveden, Brompton, and Walter Mapes, join in charging William with this wanton act of cruelty and oppression. And yet those who have most accurately examined the New Forest, can discover no mark or footstep of any other place of habitation, parish, or church, or castle, than what at present remains. There is, indeed, some probability that the character of this Prince has