at there is in most of them that sprinkling
of the better nature, which, like holy water, chases away and
disperses the contagion of the bad. They have this in them, besides,
that they bring us acquainted with the every-day human face,--they
give us skill to detect those gradations of sense and virtue (which
escape the careless or fastidious observer) in the countenances of
the world about us; and prevent that disgust at common life, that
_taedium quotidianarum formarum_, which an unrestricted passion for
ideal forms and beauties is in danger of producing. In this, as in
many other things, they are analogous to the best novels of Smollett
or Fielding.

* * * * *

ON THE
POETICAL WORKS OF GEORGE WITHER

The poems of G. Wither are distinguished by a hearty homeliness of
manner, and a plain moral speaking. He seems to have passed his life
in one continued act of an innocent self-pleasing. That which he
calls his _Motto_ is a continued self-eulogy of two thousand lines,
yet we read it to the end without any feeling of distaste, almost
without a consciousness that we have been listening all the while to
a man praising himself. There are none of the cold particles in it,
the hardness and self-ends, which render vanity and egotism hateful.
He seems to be praising another person, under the mask of self: or
rather, we feel that it was indifferent to him where he found the
virtue which he celebrates; whether another's bosom or his own were
its chosen receptacle. His poems are full, and this in particular is
one downright confession, of a generous self-seeking. But by self he
sometimes means a great deal,--his friends, his principles, his
country, the human race.

Whoever expects to find in the satirical pieces of this writer any of
those peculiarities which pleased him in the satires of Dryden or
Pope, will be grievously disappointed. Here are no high-finished
characters, no nice traits of individual nature, few or no
personalities. The game run down is coarse general vice, or folly as
it appears in classes. A liar, a drunkard, a coxcomb, is _stript and
whipt;_ no Shaftesbury, no Villiers, or Wharton, is curiously
anatomized, and read upon. But to a well-natured mind there is a
charm of moral sensibility running through them, which amply
compensates the want of those luxuries. Wither seems everywhere
bursting with a love of goodness, and a hatred of all low and base
actions. At this day