eximiam tenentis.
Ille annum circiter
MDCCLXX.
Rus suum in agro Cantabrigiensi
Mutavit Bathonia,
Quem locum ei praeter omne dudum arrisisse
Testis est, celeberrimum illud Poema,
Titulo inde ducto insignitum:
Ibi deinceps sex et triginta annos commoratus,
Obiit A.D. MDCCCV.
Et aetatis suae
Octogesimo primo.

To this there is an encomium added, which its prolixity hinders me from
inserting.

A painter and a poet were, perhaps, never more similar to each other in
their talents than the contemporaries Bunbury and Anstey. There is in
both an admirable power of seizing the ludicrous and the grotesque in
their descriptions of persons and incidents in familiar life; and this
accompanied by an elegance which might have seemed scarcely compatible
with that power. There is in both an absence of any extraordinary
elevation or vigour; which we do not regret, because we can hardly
conceive but that they would be less pleasing if they were in any
respect different from what they are. Each possesses a perfect facility
and command over his own peculiar manner, which has secured him from
having any successful imitator. Yet as they were both employed in
representing the fortuitous and transient follies, which the face of
society had put on in their own day, rather than in portraying the
broader and more permanent distinctions of character and manners, it may
be questioned whether they can be much relished out of their own
country, and whether even there, the effect must not be weakened as
fatuity and absurdity shall discover new methods of fastening ridicule
upon themselves. They border more nearly on farce than comedy. They have
neither of them any thing of fancy, that power which can give a new and
higher interest to the laughable itself, by mingling it with the
marvellous, and which has placed Aristophanes so far above all his
followers.

When Anstey ventures out of his own walk, he does not succeed so well.
It is strange that he should have attempted a paraphrase of St. Paul's
eulogium on Charity, after the same task had been so ably executed by
Prior. If there is anything, however, that will bear repetition, in a
variety of forms, it is that passage of scripture; and his verses though
not equal to Prior's, may still be read with pleasure.

The Farmer's Daughter is a plain and affecting tale.

His Latin verses might well have been spared. In the translation of
Gray's Elegy there is a more than usual crampness; occasioned,