the great reason why the reader is
disappointed is, that the thought of the Last Day makes every man more
than poetical, by spreading over his mind a general obscurity of sacred
horrour, that oppresses distinction, and disdains expression.

His story of Jane Grey was never popular. It is written with elegance
enough; but Jane is too heroick to be pitied.

The Universal Passion is, indeed, a very great performance. It is said
to be a series of epigrams; but, if it be, it is what the author
intended; his endeavour was at the production of striking distichs and
pointed sentences; and his distichs have the weight of solid sentiment,
and his points the sharpness of resistless truth.

His characters are often selected with discernment, and drawn with
nicety; his illustrations are often happy, and his reflections often
just. His species of satire is between those of Horace and Juvenal; and
he has the gaiety of Horace without his laxity of numbers, and the
morality of Juvenal, with greater variation of images. He plays, indeed,
only on the surface of life; he never penetrates the recesses of the
mind, and, therefore, the whole power of his poetry is exhausted by a
single perusal; his conceits please only when they surprise.

To translate he never condescended, unless his Paraphrase on Job may be
considered as a version; in which he has not, I think, been
unsuccessful; he, indeed, favoured himself, by choosing those parts
which most easily admit the ornaments of English poetry.

He had least success in his lyrick attempts, in which he seems to have
been under some malignant influence: he is always labouring to be great,
and at last is only turgid.

In his Night Thoughts he has exhibited a very wide display of original
poetry, variegated with deep reflections and striking allusions, a
wilderness of thought, in which the fertility of fancy scatters flowers
of every hue and of every odour. This is one of the few poems in which
blank verse could not be changed for rhyme but with disadvantage. The
wild diffusion of the sentiments, and the digressive sallies of
imagination, would have been compressed and restrained by confinement to
rhyme. The excellence of this work is not exactness, but copiousness;
particular lines are not to be regarded; the power is in the whole; and
in the whole there is a magnificence like that ascribed to Chinese
plantations, the magnificence of vast extent and endless diversity.

His last poem was Resi