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Themselves they studied, as they felt they writ;
Intrigue was plot, obscenity was wit.

Vice always found a sympathetic friend;

They pleased their age and did not aim to mend. Yet bards like these aspired to lasting praise, And proudly hoped to pimp in future days.

Their cause was general, their supports were strong, Their slaves were willing and their reign was long, Till Shame regained the post that Sense betrayed, And Virtue called Oblivion to her aid.

Then crushed by rules, and weakened as refined, For years the power of Tragedy declined: From bard to bard the frigid caution crept, Till Declamation roared, whilst Passion slept. Yet still did Virtue deign the stage to tread, Philosophy remained though Nature fled. But forced at length her ancient reign to quit, She saw great Faustus lay the ghost of Wit; Exulting Folly hailed the joyful day, And Pantomime and Song confirmed her sway.

But who the coming changes can presage, And mark the future periods of the Stage? Perhaps if skill could distant times explore, New Behns, new Durfeys yet remain in store; Perhaps, where Lear has raved, and Hamlet died, On flying cars new sorcerers may ride: Perhaps (for who can guess th' effects of chance?) Here Hunt may box, or Mahomet may dance. Hard is his lot that, here by Fortune plac'd, Must watch the wild vicissitudes of taste; With ev'ry meteor of caprice must play, And chase the new-blown bubbles of the day. Ah! let not Censure term our fate our choice, The stage but echoes back the public voice; The drama's laws, the drama's patrons give, For we that live to please, must please to live. Then prompt no more the follies you decry, As tyrants doom their tools of guilt to die;

'Tis yours, this night, to bid the reign commence
Of rescued Nature and reviving Sense;

To chase the charms of sound, the pomp of show,
For useful mirth and salutary woe;

Bid scenic Virtue form the rising age,

And Truth diffuse her radiance from the stage.

PROLOGUE TO THE COMEDY OF A WORD TO THE WISE.

This night presents a play which public rage,
Or right, or wrong, once hooted from the stage,
From zeal or malice now no more we dread,
For English vengeance wars not with the dead.
A generous foe regards with pitying eye

The man whom fate has laid where all must lie.
To wit reviving from its author's dust

Be kind, ye judges, or at least be just.
For no renewed hostilities invade
Th' oblivious grave's inviolable shade.

Let one great payment every claim appease,
And him, who cannot hurt, allow to please,
To please by scenes unconscious of offence,
By harmless merriment, or useful sense,
Where aught of bright or fair the piece displays,
Approve it only-'tis too late to praise.

If want of skill or want of care appear,
Forbear to hiss-the poet cannot hear.

By all like him must praise and blame be found
At best a fleeting gleam, or empty sound.
Yet then shall calm reflection bless the night,
When liberal pity dignified delight;

When pleasure fir'd her torch at virtue's flame,
And mirth was bounty with an humbler name.

JOHN AND CHARLES WESLEY.

[JOHN WESLEY, founder of the people called Methodists,' was the second son of Samuel Wesley, Rector of Epworth. He was born June 17, 1703Educated at the Charterhouse and Oxford, he was elected Fellow of Lincoln College in 1726, and there with some brief intervals remained till 1735, when having been ordained by Potter, then Bishop of Oxford, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury, he laid the first foundations of the society which, from the rigid and almost ascetic rules adopted by its members, was called Methodists.'

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In 1735 he went to Georgia, at the inducement of General Oglethorpe, governor of that colony, to preach to the Indians. This mission, for personal reasons, was a comparative failure. He returned to England in 1738, and there found that his former friend and disciple, George Whitefield, had embarked on the course of itinerant preaching, in which John Wesley, though with considerable difference of character and opinions, joined him -and this from henceforth became the purpose of his life. A career of incessant activity, in which preaching, writing, and organising played almost equal parts, occupied the remainder of his long career, which closed on March 2, 1791. He had, as Matthew Arnold expresses it, a genius for godliness,' and he united with it a breadth of sympathy and a soundness of judgment which, although occasionally betrayed into eccentricity, gave him a conspicuous place amongst the teachers of the eighteenth century. His life is best told, in a literary point of view, by Southey, and with the utmost detail of admiring yet truthful partisanship, by Dr. Tyerman.

CHARLES WESLEY, John's younger brother, was born Oct. 18, 1708. He was educated at Westminster School, and Christ Church, Oxford, and shared his brother's career in Oxford and in Georgia. He was more of a scholar and poet than of a preacher, and his connexion with the Church of England was exposed to a less severe strain than that of John. He died in 1788.]

It was a fine conception which prompted John Wesley to the arduous task of creating for his followers not merely an ecclesiastical

society, a code of laws, and a rule of life, but also a poetical literature which should fulfil their religious aspirations. The thought was no doubt inspired by two motives, one expressed tersely by a famous Scottish statesman, the other by himself. Fletcher of Saltoun is reported to have said, 'Give others the making of a nation's laws, if only you give to me the making of a nation's ballads'; and John Wesley, from another point of view, added to this sense of the importance of popular poetry the feeling that it ought to be rescued from the exclusive possession of the world,-'Why should the devil have all the best tunes ?'

The poetical works of John and Charles Wesley extend through ten volumes, edited lately with scrupulous care by Dr. G. Osborn. Such a demand as he thus imposed on his own poetical powers was too extensive even for a great poet to have met; but in his case the difficulty was aggravated partly by the nature of the subject, partly by his own deficiencies. The question why poetry, as applied to sacred subjects, has not had a greater success, has been often debated. A distinguished critic of our times, in his professorial chair, is reported one day to have held out in one hand 'The Golden Treasury of English Lyrics,' collected by Francis Palgrave, and in the other 'The Book of Praise,' collected from all English hymnody by Lord Selborne, and to have asked, 'Why is it that the Golden Treasury contains almost nothing that is bad, and why is it that the Book of Praise contains almost nothing that is good?' The complaint does not apply exclusively to the hymns of Protestant Churches. Dean Milman, in his Latin Christianity, has observed that the fame of the Latin hymns of the Medieval Church rests chiefly on six or seven well-known examples. Take away the Dies Iræ, the Veni Sanctus Spiritus, the Stabat Mater Dolorosa, the Pange Lingua Gloriosa, the Lauda Sion Salvatorem,-and there remains very little that from a literary point of view deserves any attention. In the numerous hymns which have lately been translated into English from the Latin in Lord Bute's edition of the Roman Breviary, it is observable that whilst in those which are rendered into English by Cardinal Newman there is a distinct poetical glow and artistic finish, all the rest are couched in the uniform pedestrian style which is unfortunately familiar to English Churchmen in the vast mass of the verses contained in 'Hymns Ancient and Modern.' It is the English poet of the nineteenth century not the Latin hymnodists of the

fourteenth or fifteenth that have furnished whatever there is of poetical in the collection. Three reasons may be given for this comparative failure, inherent in the nature of the subject.

The first is, that the moment poetry is made a vehicle of theological argument it becomes essentially prosaic, as much, or almost as much, as if it were employed for arguments on political or philosophical problems. This accounts for the repulsive aspect worn by that vast number of the Wesleyan hymns which were written to set forth their peculiar and complex system of predestination, assurance, and substitution.

The second reason is, that the very greatness of the words which either from biblical or ecclesiastical usage have been consecrated to the sublime thoughts of religion, misleads the writer into the belief that they are of themselves sufficient to carry on the poetic afflatus. The consequence has been that, whether in Latin or in English, the writers of hymns have been tempted to ring the changes on sacred phrases without imparting to them the touch of their own native sentiment or genius; and consequently that a large majority of hymns exemplify almost as much as the watchwords of political or ecclesiastical party, although in a loftier region, the force of the expression of St. Paul, 'a sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal.'

The third cause is the temptation which biblical metaphors have afforded of pursuing into detail, and especially into anatomical detail, expressions derived from the physical structure of the human frame. Of all the forms of devotion which in the Roman Catholic Church have taken possession of devout minds, the most unattractive, the most prosaic, because the most surgical, is the devotion which fastens itself on pictures and representations of the Sacred Heart. Such is the temptation which the Wesleyan hymns have too much followed in their luxuriance of phraseology, like 'the dropping of the warm blood,' or like these lines from one of the poems of John Wesley:

'I felt my heart, and found a chillness cool
Its purple channels in my frozen side;
The spring was now become a standing pool,
Deprived of motion, and its active tide.'

These difficulties, as we have said, are almost inherent in the nature of the subject; but there are others which arise from the

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