Infandum!*

Pecudesque locuta,

5. These stopp'd the moon, and call'd th' unbody'd shades
To midnight banquets in the glimm❜ring glades;
Made visionary fabrics round them rise,

And airy spectres skim before their eyes;
Of Talismans and Sigils knew the pow'r,
And careful watch'd the planetary hour.†

These superstitions of the East are highly striking to the imagination. Since the time that poetry has been forced to assume a more sober, and, perhaps, a more rational air, it scarcely ventures to enter these fairy regions. There are some, however, who think it has suffered by deserting these fields of fancy, and by totally laying aside the descriptions of magic and enchantment. What an exquisite picture has Thomson given us in his delightful CASTLE OF INDOLENCE!

To stand, embodied, to our senses plain,)
Sees on the naked hill, or valley low,

The whilst in ocean. Phœbus dips his wain,

A vast assembly moving to and fro,

Then all at once in air dissolves the wonderous show.

I cannot at present recollect any solitude so romantic, or peopled with beings so proper to the place, and the spectator. The mind naturally loves to lose itself in one of these wildernesses, and to forget the hurry, the noise and splendor of more polished life.

6. But on the South, a long majestic race

Of Egypt's priests the gilded niches grace.†

I wish POPE had enlarged on the rites and ceremonies of these Egyptian priests, a subject finely suited to descriptive poetry. Milton has touched some of them finely, in an ode not sufficiently attended to;

Nor is Osiris seen

In Memphian grove or green,

Castle of Indolence, Stan. 30. B. 1.

+ V. 109.

Trampling

Trampling the unshower'd grass with lowings loud:
Nor can he be at rest

Within his sacred chest,

Nought but profoundest hell can be his shroud:
In vain with timbrel'd anthems dark,
The sable-stoled sorcerers bear his worship'd ark.*

7. High on his car Sesostris struck my view,
Whom sceptred slaves in golden harness drew;
His hands a bow and pointed jav❜lin hold,
His giant limbs are arm'd in scales of gold.†

This colossal statue of the celebrated Eastern tyrant is not very strongly imagined. As Phidias is said to have received his ideas of majesty in his famous Jupiter, from a passage in Homer, so it is to be wished, that our author's imagination had been inflamed and enlarged, by studying Milton's magnificent picture of Satan. The word hold, in the third line, is particularly feeble and flat. It is well known, that the Egyptians, in all their productions of art, mistook the gigantic for the sublime, and greatness of bulk for greatness of manner.

8. Of

* Milton's Poems, Vol. II. Page 30. Newton's Edit. Oct.

+ V. 113.

3. Of Gothic structure was the Northern side,
O'erwrought with ornaments of barb'rous pride.*

"Those who have considered the theory of Architecture, (says a writer who had thoroughly studied it,) tell us the proportions of the three Grecian orders were taken from the Human Body, as the most beautiful and perfect production of nature. Hence were derived those graceful ideas of columns, which had a character of strength without clumsiness, and of delicacy without weakness. Those beautiful proportions were, I say, taken originally from nature, which, in her creatures, as hath been already observed, referreth to some use, end, or design. The Gonfiezza also, or swelling, and the diminution of a pillar, is it not in such proportion as to make it appear strong and light at the same time? In the same manner, must not the whole entablature, with its projections, be so proportioned, as to seem great, but not heavy; light, but not little; inasmuch as a deviation into either extreme, would thwart that reason and use of things, wherein

1

* V. 119.

wherein their beauty is founded, and to which it is subordinate? The entablature, and all its parts and ornaments, architrave, freeze, cornice, triglyphs, metopes, modiglions, and the rest, have each an use, or appearance of use, in giving firmness and union to the building, in protecting it from the weather, in casting off the rain, in representing the ends of the beams with their intervals, the production of the rafters, and so forth. And if we consider the graceful angles in frontispieces, the spaces between the columns, or the ornaments of the capitals, shall we not find that their beauty ariseth from the appearance of use, or the imitation of natural things, whose beauty is originally founded on the same principle? Which is, indeed, the grand distinction between Grecian and Gothic architecture: the latter being fantastical, and for the most part founded neither in nature nor reason, in necessity nor use; the appearance of which accounts for all the beauties, graces, and ornaments of the other. "*

*ALCIPHRON, Vol. I. Dial. III.

9. There