Several metrical experiments were attempted in thefifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Spenser's hexameters have not come down to us; and Sidney's elegiac imitations of Ovid have no elegance to recommend them. The happiest copy of the Ovidian metre is contained in the following couplet of Coleridge:

In the hexameter rises the fountain's silvery column;
In the pentameter aye falling in melody back.

Campion, who was himself an experimentalist in poetry, wrote a treatise to show the inutility of rhyme *.

THE DAY OF JUDGMENT, AN ODE†.

ATTEMPTED IN THE ENGLISH SAPPHIC

When the fierce North-Wind with his airy forces
Rears up the Baltic to a foaming fury;

And the red lightning, with a storm of hail, comes
Rushing amain down;

Mr. Guest quotes the following song as appearing to him extremely beautiful:

In a letter from Beattie respecting this ode, in Pinkerton's

Literary Correspondence, vol. i., p. 11.

How the poor sailors stand amazed and tremble,
While the hoarse thunder, like a bloody trumpet,
Roars a loud onset to the gaping waters,

Quick to devour them.

Such shall the noise be, and the wild disorder,
(If things eternal may be like those earthly,)
Such the dire terror, when the great Archangel
Shakes the creation;

Tears the strong pillars of the vault of heaven,
Breaks up old marble, the repose of princes;
See the graves open, and the bones arising-
Flames all around them!

Hark, the shrill outcries of the guilty wretches!
Lively-bright horror and amazing anguish

Stare through their eyelids, while the living worm lies,
Gnawing within them.

Thoughts, like old vultures, prey upon their heart-strings,
And the smart twinges, when the eye beholds the
Lofty Judge, frowning, and a flood of vengeance
Rolling afore him.

Stop here, my fancy; (all away, ye horrid
Doleful ideas:) come, arise to Jesus!

How he sits, Godlike! and the saints around him
Thron'd, yet adoring!

O may I sit there, when he comes triumphant,
Dooming the nations! then ascend to glory!
While our hosannahs all along the passage,
Shout the Redeemer.

But whatever estimate may be formed of the literary merits of Watts' poetry, all readers will unite in extolling the ardour of its devotion, and the purity of its spirit. These, we may believe, have gained for him a more unfading garland than fame could ever have bestowed.

Of his Songs for Children only one opinion prevails; wherever they are known, they are admired. They present the happiest specimen, in any language, of religion and

morality recommended to the infant mind through the medium of verse. The diction is familiar and elegant, without being either too common or refined; and the imagery is wisely chosen from objects and scenes continually before the eye. In this manner has the writer obtained for himself a place in our hearts among the most cherished remembrances of childhood. The bee, that hums by us on the summer grass, recalls him to the memory; and we cannot think upon our mothers, without recollecting Watts *.

"

"You remember, I doubt not, the last sentence in Gibbon's Autobiography; I have engaged my young friend to write under it, Dr. Watts' beautiful Hymn, ending with the line,- Foretells a bright rising again.' This is one of the Hymns for Children, but surely it is for the children of God; for the heirs of glory; and when you compare it, either in point of good sense, or imagination, or sterling value, or sustaining hope, with the considerations and objects which feed the fancy, or exercise the understanding or affections of the most celebrated men who have engaged the attention, or called forth the eulogiums of the literati of the last century, you are irresistibly forced to exclaim, in the spirit of my grand favourite, O happy hymnist, O unhappy bard!"

Mr. Wilberforce, writing to his Son, in 1830; Memoirs, vol. v. p. 289.

EDWARD YOUNG.

NEAR the skirts of the forest, between Bishop's Waltham and Winchester, lies the little village of Upham; here, in June, 1681, was born the future author of the Night Thoughts. His father was rector of the parish. The poet's life commenced under flattering auguries. Jacob says, writing in 1720, that the “ queen stood godmother to him;" a mark of peculiar respect to the parent, and an earnest of patronage to the child. He was placed upon the foundation of Winchester School, but no vacancy occurring at New College before he was superannuated by the statutes, he entered, October, 1703, an independent member of that society, residing in the house of the Warden, upon whose death he removed, in the rank of a Gentleman Commoner, to Corpus, and, in 1708, was elected to a law-fellowship at All Souls, by Archbishop Tenison, as we are informed in the Biographia, from a feeling of regard for his father. He received the degree of Bachelor of Civil Law, April, 1714, and of Doctor, June, 1719.

It has been asserted that his subsequent conduct in the university was not altogether free from reproach. The charge has never been supported by evidence. That he had already begun to meditate seriously upon the great doctrines of our faith, we gather from an observation of Tindal, the deist, who was a fellow of the same college. "The other boys I can always answer, because I always know where they have their arguments, which I have

read a hundred times; but that fellow Young is continually pestering me with something of his own."

Of the respect shown to his talents and acquirements, we have a proof in his selection to deliver the Latin speech, when the foundation of the Codrington Library was laid, on the 20th of June, 1706. A remark of Pope to Warburton probably contains the solution of the difficulty. Young," he said, "had much of a sublime genius, though without common sense. So that his genius, having no guide, was perpetually liable to degenerate into bombast. This made him pass for a foolish youth, the sport of peers and poets; but his having a very good heart enabled him to support the clerical character when he assumed it, first with decency, and afterwards with honour." The late Dr. Ridley recollected a report, prevalent at Oxford, that Young, while composing, would shut his windows, and sit by a lamp, even in the middle of the day, and that skulls, bones, and instruments of death were among the ornaments of his study*. Upon one occasion, while engaged in the composition of a tragedy, we are told by Spence, that the Duke of Grafton sent him a human skull, with a candle in it, which the poet is said to have used.

His first attempt in verse was an Epistle to Lord Lansdown, in 1712, written with the usual insipidity of poems addressed to "Persons of Quality," but not without the singularity of expression that always distinguished his poetry. It concludes with some lines upon the death of Harrison, the friend of Addison and Swift, who, in a letter to Stella, describes him as "a pretty little fellow with a great deal of wit, good sense, and good nature." The lamentation is deficient in tenderness; but it contains Spence, quoted by Croft.

*