hill all my frame, and stop my faltering tongue."
Now Lydia, so they call'd his gentle friend,
Who, with averted eye, but in her soul
Had felt the lancing steel, her aid applied,
"And stay, dear youth (she said), or with thee take
Thy Lydia, thine alike in life or death!"
At Lydia's name, at Lydia's well known voice,
He strove again to raise his drooping head
And ope his closing eye, but strove in vain,
And on her trembling bosom sunk away.
Now other fears distract his weeping friends:
But short their grief! for soon his life return'd,
And, with return of life, return'd their peace.--(B. iii.)

The country which he has undertaken to describe in this poem is fertile
and tame. There was little left to him, except to enlarge on its
antiquities, to speak of the habitations that were scattered over it,
and to compliment the most distinguished among their possessors. Every
day must detract something from the interest, such as it is, that arises
from these sources. A poet should take care not to make the fund of his
reputation liable to be affected by dilapidations, or to be passed away
by the hands of a conveyancer.

It would seem as if he had never visited a tract of land much wilder
than that in which he was bred and born. In speaking of "embattled
walls, raised on the mountain precipice," he particularises "Beaudesert;
Old Montfort's seat;"[2]--a place, which, though it is pleasantly
diversified with hill and dale, has no pretensions of so lofty a kind.
This, he tells us, was "the haunt of his youthful steps;" and here he
met with Somerville, the poet of the Chase, to whom both the subject and
the title of his poem might have been suggested by that extensive
common, known by the name of Cannock Chase,[3] on the border of which
Beaudesert is situated.

The digressions, with which he has endeavoured to enliven the monotony
of his subject, are sometimes very far-fetched. He has scarcely finished
his exordium, when he goes back to the third day of the creation, and
then passes on to the deluge. This reminds one of the Mock Advocate in
the Plaideurs of Racine, who, having to defend the cause of a dog that
had robbed the pantry, begins,

Avant la naissance du monde----

on which the judge yawns and interrupts him,

Avocat, ah! passons an deluge.

Of his shorter pieces, the three Elegies on Birds are well deserving of
notice. That entitled the Blackbirds is so prettily imagined, and so
n