ther
marks betrays itself to be a modern composition. If we look into the
Latin writers we find none of this mixed wit in Virgil, Lucretius, or
Catullus; very little in Horace, but a great deal of it in Ovid, and
scarce anything else in Martial.

Out of the innumerable branches of mixed wit, I shall choose one instance
which may be met with in all the writers of this class. The passion of
love in its nature has been thought to resemble fire, for which reason
the words "fire" and "flame" are made use of to signify love. The witty
poets, therefore, have taken an advantage, from the doubtful meaning of
the word "fire," to make an infinite number of witticisms. Cowley
observing the cold regard of his mistress's eyes, and at the same time
the power of producing love in him, considers them as burning-glasses
made of ice; and, finding himself able to live in the greatest
extremities of love, concludes the torrid zone to be habitable. When his
mistress has read his letter written in juice of lemon, by holding it to
the fire, he desires her to read it over a second time by love's flames.
When she weeps, he wishes it were inward heat that distilled those drops
from the limbec. When she is absent, he is beyond eighty, that is,
thirty degrees nearer the pole than when she is with him. His ambitious
love is a fire that naturally mounts upwards; his happy love is the beams
of heaven, and his unhappy love flames of hell. When it does not let him
sleep, it is a flame that sends up no smoke; when it is opposed by
counsel and advice, it is a fire that rages the more by the winds blowing
upon it. Upon the dying of a tree, in which he had cut his loves, he
observes that his written flames had burnt up and withered the tree. When
he resolves to give over his passion, he tells us that one burnt like him
for ever dreads the fire. His heart is an AEtna, that, instead of
Vulcan's shop, encloses Cupid's forge in it. His endeavouring to drown
his love in wine is throwing oil upon the fire. He would insinuate to
his mistress that the fire of love, like that of the sun, which produces
so many living creatures, should not only warm, but beget. Love in
another place cooks Pleasure at his fire. Sometimes the poet's heart is
frozen in every breast, and sometimes scorched in every eye. Sometimes
he is drowned in tears and burnt in love, like a ship set on fire in the
middle of the sea.

The reader may observe in every one of these insta