and
especially those of them which relate to the siege of Troy, with the
exquisitely rich and vivid description of a picture on that subject in
Shakespeare's early poem on Tarquin and Lucretia.

The legend of the duke of Buckingham is composed in a style rich, free
and forcible; the examples brought from ancient history, of the
suspicion and inward wretchedness to which tyrants have ever been a
prey, and afterwards, of the instability of popular favor, might in this
age be accounted tedious and pedantic; they are however pertinent, well
recited, and doubtless possessed the charm of novelty with respect to
the majority of contemporary readers. The curses which the unhappy duke
pours forth against the dependent who had betrayed him, may almost
compare, in the energy and inventiveness of malice, with those of
Shakespeare's queen Margaret; but they lose their effect by being thrown
into the form of monologue and ascribed to a departed spirit, whose
agonies of grief and rage in reciting his own death have something in
them bordering on the burlesque.

The mind of Sackville was deeply fraught, as we have seen, with classic
stores; and at a time when England possessed as yet no complete
translation of Virgil, he might justly regard it as a considerable
service to the cause of national taste to transplant into our vernacular
poetry some scattered flowers from his rich garden of poetic sweets.
Thus he has embellished his legend with an imitation or rather
paraphrase of the celebrated description of night in the fourth book of
the AEneid. The lines well merit transcription.

"Midnight was come, when ev'ry vital thing
With sweet sound sleep their weary limbs did rest;
The beasts were still, the little birds that sing
Now sweetly slept besides their mother's breast,
The old and all were shrowded in their nest;
The waters calm, the cruel seas did cease;
The woods, the fields, and all things held their peace.

The golden stars were whirled amid their race,
And on the earth did laugh with twinkling light,
When each thing nestled in his resting place
Forgat day's pain with pleasure of the night:
The hare had not the greedy hounds in sight;
The fearful deer had not the dogs in doubt,
The partridge dreamt not of the falcon's foot.

The ugly bear now minded not the stake,
Nor how the cruel mastives do him tear;
The stag lay still unroused from the brake;
The