es' _wrath_, to Greece the _direful spring_
Of woes unnumber'd, _heav'nly_ Goddess sing;
The wrath which _hurl'd_ to Pluto's _gloomy reign_
The souls of _mighty_ chiefs untimely slain.

In the first couplet the language is distorted by inversions, clogged
with superfluities, and clouded by a harsh metaphor; and in the second
there are two words used in an uncommon sense, and two epithets inserted
only to lengthen the line; all these practices may in a long work easily
be pardoned, but they always produce some degree of obscurity and
ruggedness.

Easy poetry has been so long excluded by ambition of ornament, and
luxuriance of imagery, that its nature seems now to be forgotten.
Affectation, however opposite to ease, is sometimes mistaken for it; and
those who aspire to gentle elegance, collect female phrases and
fashionable barbarisms, and imagine that style to be easy which custom
has made familiar. Such was the idea of the poet who wrote the following
verses to a _countess cutting paper_:

Pallas grew _vap'rish once and odd_,
She would not _do the least right thing_
Either for Goddess or for God,
Nor work, nor play, nor paint, nor sing.

Jove frown'd, and "Use (he cried) those eyes
So skilful, and those hands so taper;
Do something exquisite and wise"--
She bow'd, obey'd him, and cut paper.

This vexing him who gave her birth,
Thought by all Heaven a _burning shame_,
_What does she next_, but bids on earth
Her Burlington do just the same?

Pallas, you give yourself _strange airs_;
But sure you'll find it hard to spoil
The sense and taste of one that bears
The name of Savile and of Boyle.

Alas! one bad example shown,
How quickly all the sex pursue!
See, madam! see the arts o'erthrown
Between John Overton and _you_.

It is the prerogative of easy poetry to be understood as long as the
language lasts; but modes of speech, which owe their prevalence only to
modish folly, or to the eminence of those that use them, die away with
their inventors, and their meaning, in a few years, is no longer known.

Easy poetry is commonly sought in petty compositions upon minute
subjects; but ease, though it excludes pomp, will admit greatness. Many
lines in Cato's soliloquy are at once easy and sublime:

'Tis the Divinity that stirs within us;
'Tis Heaven itself that points out an hereafter,
And intimates eternity to man.
--If there's a Power abov