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As bone has the supporting share
In human form divinely fair,
Although an evil when laid bare;

As light and air are, fed by fire,
A shining good while all conspire,
But, separate, dark raging ire ;

As hope and love arise from faith
Which then admits no ill, nor hath,
But, if alone, it would be wrath ;

Or any instance thought upon
In which the evil can be none
Till unity of good is gone :-

So, by abuse of thought and skill,
The greatest good, to wit, Free Will,
Becomes the origin of ill.

Thus when rebellious angels fell,
The very Heaven where good ones dwell
Became the apostate spirits' hell;

Seeking against eternal right

A force without a love and light
They found, and felt its evil might.

Thus Adam, biting at their bait
Of good and evil, when he ate
Died to his first thrice-happy state,

Fell to the evils of this ball
Which, in harmonious union all,
Were Paradise before his fall,

And, when the life of Christ in men
Revives its faded image, then

Will all be Paradise again.

EPIGRAMS.

In truths that nobody can miss
It is the quid that makes the quis ;
In such as lie more deeply hid

It is the quis that makes the quid.

God bless the King-I mean the faith's defender!
God bless (no harm in blessing!) the Pretender!
But who pretender is, or who is king-
God bless us all!-that's quite another thing.

RICHARD GLOVER.

[RICHARD GLOVER, the son of a London merchant, was born in 1712, in a house near Cannon Street, City. He was not at either university, but through sympathy with the history of ancient Greece made himself a competent Greek scholar. He entered into business, and was much esteemed and trusted by the London merchants. In 1760 he was elected M.P. for Weymouth. His chief poems were, Leonidas, 1737 (enlarged in 1770); London, or the Progress of Commerce, 1739; Admiral Hosier's Ghost, in the same year; and The Athenaid, published posthumously in 1788. He died in 1785.]

Glover was a man of considerable powers, but he was stronger on the side of politics and practical life than in the field of literature. In his poems the rhetoric of party warfare is more conspicuous than the inspiration of genius. His best-known poem, Leonidas, was based it is true on his reading of Herodotus and Plutarch; but in reality it is the utterance of one who wished to stir his fellow-citizens to an anti-Walpole 'patriotic' policy. So far as the form is concerned it may be called a blank-verse echo of Pope's version of Homer, the influence of which may continually be traced; and under the inspiration of this model Glover expands the few simple chapters of his authority Herodotus into the dimensions of an epic by inventing various characters, love-affairs, and thrilling episodes.

Campbell remarks that the want of 'impetuosity of progress' is the chief fault in the poem. It does not seem clear that this censure is just. The action moves on swiftly enough, and is sufficiently varied by epoch-making or decorative incidents. The personages introduced are not inactive, or long-winded; they have only the damning fault of being dull. The reader does not much care what they do, nor what becomes of them. A sort of glossy rhetoric is the

general characteristic of the poem, which accordingly is not without striking passages, but the lack of human interest mars the total effect. Campbell was nearer the mark when, after observing that Glover does not make his pictures grotesque by introducing modern accessories and details, he added,—'but his purity is cold, his heroes are like outlines of Grecian faces, with no distinct or minute physiognomy.' In agreement with this line of criticism, Southey describes Leonidas as ‘cold and bald, stately rather than strong in its best parts, and in general rather stiff than stately.' The terseness which Glover, writing about Spartans, affected, made him often pile a number of short abrupt sentences one upon the other; hence the stiffness and baldness of which Southey complains. Thus we read in Book xii :

'On living embers these are cast. So wills

Leonidas. The phalanx then divides.

Four troops are form'd, by Dithyrambus led,

By Alpheus, by Diomedon. The last

Himself conducts. The word is given. They seize

The burning fuel.'

The conclusion, where Leonidas, after performing impossible feats of valour and slaughter, dies without a word, rather of exhaustion than of wounds, exhibits an uninteresting flatness, which Glover, who knew Virgil well, and must have noted how wonderfully effective are the last words of Dido, Turnus, Pallas, and Mezentius, ought sedulously to have avoided.

Of the Athenaid, a sequel to Leonidas, with its thirty books, it is enough to say that it is simply unreadable. It appears to be a florid reproduction, with new incidents and scenery, of the story of the Græco-Persian war, from Thermopyla to Platea.

The opposition to Sir Robert Walpole found in Glover an enthusiastic ally. One of his chief objects in writing London is said to have been to exasperate the public mind against Spain, a power to which Walpole was held to have truckled. In the same year, after the news came of Vernon's success at Porto Bello, Glover wrote the spirited ballad of Hosier's Ghost, rather perhaps with the design of damaging Walpole than exalting Vernon. The political aim interests us no more; but the music and swing of the verse, perhaps also the naval cast of the imagery and the diction,-will keep this ballad popular with Englishmen for many a year to

come.

T. ARNOLD.

POLYDORUS AND MARON.

[From Leonidas, Book IX.]

'I too, like them, from Lacedæmon spring,
Like them instructed once to poise the spear,
To lift the ponderous shield. Ill destined wretch!
Thy arm is grown enervate, and would sink
Beneath a buckler's weight. Malignant fates,
Who have compelled my free-born hand to change
The warrior's arms for ignominious bonds;
Would you compensate for my chains, my shame,
My ten years anguish, and the fell despair,
Which on my youth have preyed; relenting once,
Grant I may bear my buckler to the field,
And, known a Spartan, seek the shades below!'
'Why to be known a Spartan must thou seek
The shades below?' Impatient Maron spake.
'Live, and be known a Spartan by thy deeds;
Live, and enjoy thy dignity of birth;
Live, and perform the duties which become
A citizen of Sparta. Still thy brow

Frowns gloomy, still unyielding. He who leads
Our band, all fathers of a noble race,

'Will ne'er permit thy barren day to close
Without an offspring to uphold the state.'

'He will,' replies the brother in a glow,
Prevailing o'er the paleness of his cheek,
'He will permit me to complete by death
The measure of my duty; will permit
Me to achieve a service, which no hand
But mine can render, to adorn his fall
With double lustre, strike the barbarous foe
With endless terror, and avenge the shame
Of an enslaved Laconian.' Closing here
His words mysterious, quick he turned away
To find the tent of Agis. There his hand
In grateful sorrow ministered her aid;

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