The next ode is irregular, and, therefore, defective. As the sentiments
are pious, they cannot easily be new; for what can be added to topicks
on which successive ages have been employed!

Of the Paraphrase on Isaiah nothing very favourable can be said. Sublime
and solemn prose gains little by a change to blank verse; and the
paraphrast has deserted his original, by admitting images not Asiatick,
at least not Judaical:

Returning peace,
Dove-ey'd, and rob'd in white.

Of his petty poems, some are very trifling, without any thing to be
praised, either in the thought or expression. He is unlucky in his
competitions; he tells the same idle tale with Congreve, and does not
tell it so well. He translates from Ovid the same epistle as Pope; but,
I am afraid, not with equal happiness.

To examine his performances, one by one, would be tedious. His
translation from Homer into blank verse will find few readers, while
another can be had in rhyme. The piece addressed to Lambarde is no
disagreeable specimen of epistolary poetry; and his ode to the lord
Gower was pronounced, by Pope, the next ode in the English language to
Dryden's Cecilia. Fenton may be justly styled an excellent versifier and
a good poet.

Whatever I have said of Fenton is confirmed by Pope in a letter, by
which he communicated to Broome an account of his death:

TO
The Rev'd. Mr. BROOME,
At PULHAM, near HARLESTONE NOR [By BECCLES Bag.] SUFFOLKE

D'r SIR,

I intended to write to you on this melancholy subject, the death of Mr.
Fenton, before y'rs came; but stay'd to have inform'd myself & you of
y'e circumstances of it. All I hear is, that he felt a Gradual Decay,
tho' so early in Life, & was declining for 5 or 6 months. It was not, as
I apprehended, the Gout in his Stomach, but I believe rather a
Complication first of Gross Humours, as he was naturally corpulent, not
discharging themselves, as he used no sort of Exercise. No man better
bore y'e approaches of his Dissolution (as I am told) or with less
ostentation yielded up his Being. The great modesty w'ch you know was
natural to him, and y'e great Contempt he had for all Sorts of Vanity
and Parade, never appeared more than in his last moments: He had a
conscious Satisfaction (no doubt) in acting right, in feeling himself
honest, true, & unpretending to more than was his own. So he dyed, as he
lived, with that secret, yet s