ht:
With dreadful cheer and looks thrown to the sky,
Longing for death, and yet she could not die.

Next saw we Dread, all trembling how he shook
With foot uncertain proffered here and there,
Benumbed of speech, and with a ghastly look
Searched every place, all pale and dead with fear,
His cap borne up with staring of his hair." &c.

All the other allegorical personages named, and only named, by Virgil,
as well as a few additional ones, are pourtrayed in succession, and with
the same strength and fullness of delineation; but with the exception of
War, who appears in the attributes of Mars, they are represented simply
as _examples_ of Old age, Malady, &c., not as the _agents_ by whom these
evils are inflicted upon others. Cerberus and Charon occur in their
appropriate offices, but the monstrous forms Gorgon, Chimaera, &c., are
judiciously suppressed; and the poet is speedily conducted to the banks
of that "main broad flood"

"Which parts the gladsome fields from place of woe."

"With Sorrow for my guide, as there I stood,
A troop of men the most in arms bedight,
In tumult clustered 'bout both sides the flood:
'Mongst whom, who were ordained t' eternal night,
Or who to blissful peace and sweet delight,
I wot not well, it seemed that they were all
Such as by death's untimely stroke did fall."

Sorrow acquaints him that these are all illustrious examples of the
reverses which he was lately deploring, who will themselves relate to
him their misfortunes; and that he must afterwards

"Recount the same to Kesar, king and peer."

The first whom he sees advancing towards him from the throng of ghosts
is Henry duke of Buckingham, put to death under Richard III.: and his
"Legend," or story, is unfortunately the only one which its author ever
found leisure to complete; the favor of his illustrious kinswoman on her
accession causing him to sink the poet in the courtier, the ambassador,
and finally the minister of state. But he had already done enough to
earn himself a lasting name amongst the improvers of poetry in England.
In tragedy he gave the first regular model; in personification he
advanced far beyond all his predecessors, and furnished a prototype to
that master of allegory, Spenser. A greater than Spenser has also been
indebted to him; as will be evident, I think, to all who compare the
description of the figures on the shield of war in his Induction,