This day you shall be Spectatissimi. You shall no more deal with the hollow dye, Or the frail card. You shall start up young viceroys, And have you your punks and punketees, my Surly; Where is my Subtle, there? Within, oh! Face. [within] Sir, he'll come to you by and by. His Lungs, his Zephyrus, he that puffs his coals, Till he firk nature up in her own centre. You are not faithful, Sir. This night I'll change And early in the morning will I send To all the plumbers and the pewterers, And buy their tin and lead up; and to Lothbury, Surly. What, and turn that too? Mam. Yes, and I'll purchase Devonshire and Cornwall, And make them perfect Indies! You admire now? Surly. No, faith. Mam. But when you see th' effects of the great medicine, Of which one part projected on a hundred Of Mercury, or Venus, or the Moon, Nay, to a thousand, so ad infinitum ; Do Surly. Yes, when I see't, I will.— you think I fable with you? I assure you, Not only can do that, but, by its virtue, To whom he will. In eight and twenty days Surly. No doubt; he's that already. Restore his years, renew him, like an eagle, To the fifth age; make him get sons and daughters, Young giants: as our philosophers have done, The ancient patriarchs, afore the flood, But taking, once a week, on a knife's point, Become stout Marses, and beget young Cupids. You are incredulous. Surly. Faith, I have a humour. I would not willingly be gulled. Your stone Mam. Pertinax, my Surly, Will you believe antiquity? records? I'll show you a book where Moses and his sister, And Solomon, have written of the art; Ay, and a treatise penn'd by Adam— Surly. How! Mam. Of the philosophers' stone, and in High Dutch. Surly. Did Adam write, Sir, in High Dutch? Mam. He did; Which proves it was the primitive tongue. [Enter Face, as a servant. How now! Do we succeed? Is our day come, and holds it? Mam. Pertinax, my Surly, Again I say to thee aloud, Be rich. This day thou shalt have ingots, and to-morrow To lose ourselves in; and my baths like pits A wealthy citizen, or a rich lawyer, Have a sublimed pure wife, unto that fellow Mam. No. I'll have no bawds. But fathers and mothers. They will do it best, Shall be the pure and gravest of divines That I can get for money. We will be brave, Puffe, now we have the medicine. And I will eat these broths with spoons of amber, My footboys shall eat pheasants, calver'd salmons, Dressed with an exquisite and poignant sauce; Go forth and be a knight. Mam. Do. My shirts I'll have of taffeta-sarsnet, soft and light As cobwebs; and for all my other raiment, It shall be such as might provoke the Persian, Were he to teach the world riot anew. My gloves of fishes and birds' skins, perfum'd Surly. And do you think to have the stone with this? A pious, holy, and religious man, One free from mortal sin, a very virgin,— Mam. That makes it, Sir, he is so;-but I buy it. My venture brings it me. He, honest wretch, A notable, superstitious, good soul, Has worn his knees bare, and his slippers bald, 6 Act ii, scene 1. I have only to add a few words on Beaumont and Fletcher. 'Rule a Wife and Have a Wife,' The Chances,' and 'The Wild Goose Chase,' the original of the 'Inconstant,' are superior in style and execution to anything of Ben Jonson's. They are, indeed, some of the best comedies on the stage; and one proof that they are so is, that they still hold possession of it. They show the utmost alacrity of invention in contriving ludicrous distresses, and the utmost spirit in bearing up against, or impatience and irritation under them. Don John, in 'The Chances,' is the heroic in comedy. Leon, in 'Rule a Wife and Have a Wife,' is a fine exhibition of the born gentleman and natural fool: the Copper Captain is sterling to this hour: his mistress, Estifania, only died the other day with Mrs. Jordan: and the two grotesque females in the same play, act better than the Witches in 'Macbeth.' LECTURE III. On Cowley, Butler, Suckling, Etherege, &c. THE metaphysical poets or wits of the age of James and Charles I., whose style was adopted and carried to a more dazzling and fantastic excess by Cowley in the following reign, after which it declined, and gave place almost entirely to the poetry of observation and reasoning, are thus happily characterised by Dr. Johnson. "The metaphysical poets were men of learning, and to show their learning was their whole endeavour: but unluckily resolving to show it in rhyme, instead of writing poetry, they only wrote verses, and very often such verses as stood the trial of the finger better than of the ear; for the modulation was so imperfect, that they were only found to be verses by counting the syllables. "If the father of criticism has rightly denominated poetry Texvn piparikǹ, an imitative art, these writers will, without great wrong, lose their right to the name of poets, for they cannot be said to have imitated anything; they neither copied nature nor life; neither painted the forms of matter, nor represented the operations of intellect." The whole of the account is well worth reading; it was a subject for which Dr. Johnson's powers both of thought and expression were better fitted than any other man's. If he had had the same capacity for following the flights of a truly poetic imagination, or for feeling the finer touches of nature, that he had felicity and force in detecting and exposing the aberrations from the broad and beaten path of propriety and common sense, he would have amply deserved the reputation he has acquired as a philosophical critic. The writers here referred to (such as Donne, Davies, Cra |