art of their legs, till they fitted
the couch which he had prepared for them.

Mr. Dryden hints at this obsolete kind of wit in one of the following
verses in his "Mac Flecknoe;" which an English reader cannot understand,
who does not know that there are those little poems above mentioned in
the shape of wings and altars:--

--Choose for thy command
Some peaceful province in acrostic land;

There may'st thou wings display, and altars raise,
And torture one poor word a thousand ways.

This fashion of false wit was revived by several poets of the last age,
and in particular may be met with among Mr. Herbert's poems; and, if I am
not mistaken, in the translation of Du Bartas. I do not remember any
other kind of work among the moderns which more resembles the
performances I have mentioned than that famous picture of King Charles
the First, which has the whole Book of Psalms written in the lines of the
face, and, the hair of the head. When I was last at Oxford I perused one
of the whiskers, and was reading the other, but could not go so far in it
as I would have done, by reason of the impatience of my friends and
fellow-travellers, who all of them pressed to see such a piece of
curiosity. I have since heard, that there is now an eminent
writing-master in town, who has transcribed all the Old Testament in a
full-bottomed periwig: and if the fashion should introduce the thick kind
of wigs which were in vogue some few years ago, he promises to add two or
three supernumerary locks that should contain all the Apocrypha. He
designed this wig originally for King William, having disposed of the two
Books of Kings in the two forks of the foretop; but that glorious monarch
dying before the wig was finished, there is a space left in it for the
face of any one that has a mind to purchase it.

But to return to our ancient poems in picture. I would humbly propose,
for the benefit of our modern smatterers in poetry, that they would
imitate their brethren among the ancients in those ingenious devices. I
have communicated this thought to a young poetical lover of my
acquaintance, who intends to present his mistress with a copy of verses
made in the shape of her fan; and, if he tells me true, has already
finished the three first sticks of it. He has likewise promised me to
get the measure of his mistress's marriage finger with a design to make a
posy in the fashion of a ring, which shall exactly fit it. It is so very