tle space
the sweet faults of his poetic nonage, with its barren overgrowth of
unprofitable flowers,--bright point, soft metaphor, and sweet elaborate
antithesis--this is as good of its kind as anything between Aristophanes
and Horace Smith. Indeed, it may remind us of that parody on the soft,
superfluous, flowery and frothy style of Agathon, which at the opening of
the _Thesmophoriazusae_ cannot but make the youngest and most ignorant
reader laugh, though the oldest and most learned has never set eyes on a
line of the original verses which supplied the incarnate god of comic
song with matter for such exquisite burlesque.

To the speech above cited the reply of the Countess is even gracefuller,
and closer to the same general model of fanciful elegiac dialogue:--

Let not thy presence, like the April sun,
Flatter our earth, and suddenly be done:
More happy do not make our outward wall
Than thou wilt grace our inward house withal.
Our house, my liege, is like a country swain,
Whose habit rude, and manners blunt and plain.
Presageth naught; yet inly beautified
With bounty's riches, and fair hidden pride;
For where the golden ore doth buried lie,
The ground, undecked with nature's tapestry,
Seems barren, sere, unfertile, fruitless, dry;
And where the upper turf of earth doth boast
His pride, perfumes, {239} and particoloured cost,
Delve there, and find this issue and their pride
To spring from ordure and corruption's side.
But, to make up my all too long compare,
These ragged walls no testimony are
What is within; but, like a cloak, doth hide
From weather's waste the under garnished pride.
More gracious than my terms can let thee be,
Entreat thyself to stay awhile with me.

Not only the exquisite grace of this charming last couplet, but the
smooth sound strength, the fluency and clarity of the whole passage, may
serve to show that the original suggestion of Capell, if (as I think)
untenable, was not (we must admit) unpardonable. The very oversight
perceptible to any eye and painful to any ear not sealed up by stepdame
nature from all perception of pleasure or of pain derivable from good
verse or bad--the reckless reiteration of the same rhyme with but one
poor couplet intervening--suggests rather the oversight of an unfledged
poet than the obtuseness of a full-grown poeticule or poetaster.

But of how many among the servile or semi-servile throng of i