of "The
Fair and Happy Milkmaid," they are dull enough to have pleased James the
First; his "Wife" is a _cento_ of far-fetched conceits,--here a tomtit,
and there a hen mistaken for a pheasant, like the contents of a
cockney's game-bag; and his chief interest for us lies in his having
been mixed up with an inexplicable tragedy and poisoned in the Tower,
not without suspicion of royal complicity. The "Piers Ploughman" is
a reprint, with very little improvement that we can discover, of
Mr. Wright's former edition. It would have been very well to have
republished the "Fair Virtue," and "Shepherd's Hunting" of George
Wither, which contain all the true poetry he ever wrote; but we can
imagine nothing more dreary than the seven hundred pages of his "Hymns
and Songs," whose only use, that we can conceive of, would be as penal
reading for incorrigible poetasters. If a steady course of these did not
bring them out of their nonsenses, nothing short of hanging would. Take
this as a sample, hit on by opening at random:--

"Rottenness my bones possest;
Trembling fear possessed me;
I that troublous day might rest:
For, when his approaches be
Onward to the people made,
His strong troops will them invade."

Southwell is, if possible, worse. He paraphrases David and puts into his
mouth such punning conceits as "Fears are my feres," and in his "Saint
Peter's Complaint" makes that rashest and shortest-spoken of the
Apostles drawl through thirty pages of maudlin repentance, in which the
distinctions between the north and northeast sides of a sentimentality
are worthy of Duns Scotus. It does not follow, that, because a man is
hanged for his faith, he is able to write good verses. We would almost
match the fortitude that quails not at the good Jesuit's poems with his
own which carried him serenely to the fatal tree. The stuff of which
poets are made, whether finer or not, is of a very different fibre from
that which is used in the tough fabric of martyrs. It is time that
an earnest protest should be uttered against the wrong done to the
religious sentiment by the greater part of what is called religious
poetry, and which is commonly a painful something misnamed by the noun
and misqualified by the adjective. To dilute David, and make doggerel of
that majestic prose of the Prophets which has the glow and wide-orbited
metre of constellations, may be a useful occupation to keep
country-gentlemen out of litigation or retired cler