gruous to the personage to whom it is ascribed, but as it is so
evidently contrary to reason and nature, that it ought never to be
mentioned but as a fable in any serious poem:

--Virtue giv'n for lost,
Deprest, and overthrown, as seem'd,
Like that self-begotten bird
In the Arabian woods embost,
That no second knows nor third,
And lay ere while a holocaust,
From out her ashy womb now teem'd,
Revives, reflourishes, then vigorous most
When most unactive deem'd,
And though her body die, her fame survives
A secular bird, ages of lives.

Another species of impropriety is the unsuitableness of thoughts to the
general character of the poem. The seriousness and solemnity of tragedy
necessarily reject all pointed or epigrammatical expressions, all remote
conceits and opposition of ideas. Samson's complaint is therefore too
elaborate to be natural:

As in the land of darkness, yet in light,
To live a life half dead, a living death,
And bury'd; but, O yet more miserable!
Myself, my sepulchre, a moving grave,
Buried, yet not exempt,
By privilege of death and burial,
From worst of other evils, pains and wrongs.

All allusions to low and trivial objects, with which contempt is usually
associated, are doubtless unsuitable to a species of composition which
ought to be always awful, though not always magnificent. The remark
therefore of the chorus on good or bad news seems to want elevation:

_Manoah_. A little stay will bring some notice hither.
_Chor_. Of good _or_ bad so great, of bad the sooner;
For evil news _rides post_, while good news _baits_.

But of all meanness that has least to plead which is produced by mere
verbal conceits, which, depending only upon sounds, lose their existence
by the change of a syllable. Of this kind is the following dialogue:

_Chor_. But had we best retire? I see a _storm_.

_Sams_. Fair days have oft contracted wind and rain.

_Chor_. But this another kind of tempest brings.

_Sams_. Be less abstruse, my riddling days are past.

_Chor_. Look now for no enchanting voice, nor fear
The bait of honied words; a rougher tongue
Draws hitherward; I know him by his stride,
The giant _Harapha_.--

And yet more despicable are the lines in which Manoah's paternal
kindness is commended by the chorus:

Fathers are wont to _lay up_ for their sons,
Thou for thy son art bent to _lay out_ all.

Samson's complaint of the inco