poets of his age, joins in the oft-repeated complaint:--

Stil finest wits are 'stilling Venus' rose,
In Paynim toyes the sweetest vaines are spent;
To Christian workes few have their talents lent.

It was left for George Herbert and his contemporaries to take up the
attempt once more--this time with better success--"to reprove the vanity
of those many love poems that are daily writ and consecrated to Venus,
and to bewail that so few are writ that look towards God and heaven."

Cannot thy dove
Outstrip their Cupid easily in flight?
Or, since thy ways are deep, and still the same,
Will not a verse run smooth that bears thy name?

But although Herbert and his successors, in their devotional lyrics, gave
a whole new province to English poetry, they left the idolatrous
government of the older provinces undisturbed. Dramatic and narrative
poetry went on in the old way, and drew their inspiration from the old
founts. Year by year, as our native poetic wealth increased, it became
more and more difficult to break with the past, and to lead poetry back
to Zion. Nature and precedent seemed allied against the innovation. The
worst of religious poetry, as Johnson more than once pointed out, is its
poverty of subject, and its enforced chastity of treatment. You cannot
make a picture out of light alone; there must be something to break it
on. Then, too, there was Shakespeare to be reckoned with: he had written
no hymns nor spiritual songs; among the works of God, he had found man to
be deserving of his unremitting attention; yet, while a certain monotony
of manner afflicted the singers of good and godly ballads, he had seemed
never at a loss for a subject, never at the end of the copious
inspiration that he drew from his unsanctified themes.

Nevertheless, the seventeenth century, which stirred so many questions in
politics and criticism, stirred this also; the fitness of sacred subjects
for heroic poetry was debated long and ardently both in France and
England, and many experiments were made. These experiments belong, as
might be expected, mainly to the time of the civil troubles. It was then
that the versifying of the Psalms became a desolating industry; and Mr.
Zachary Boyd, an ornament of the University of Glasgow, having worked his
will on King David, made bold rhyming raids on passages of the Bible that
are usually allowed to rest in prose. The high places of scholarship felt
the new infe