1793* ^" EngliJJj poetry. — Allegro, Stc. 275 



in this respect, been lefs attentive ; and though the 

 fame he has so justly acquired, for his Paradise Lost, 

 has given a degree of respectability to all his other 

 writings ; yet in all of these we discover more of 

 labour than is suitable to the ease of light composi- 

 tions. In the Allegro indeed, the measure he has a- 

 dopted is not unsuitable to the subject, — and all the 

 objects brought under view are of the pleasing 

 kind. But whoever will compare these with the 

 light pieces of Anapreon, or the odes of Hafez, 

 will easily perceive that the Allegro has been writ- 

 ten by a grave man who made every effort to be 

 chearful ; while the others indicate an internal 

 fund of gaity of disposition. But Milton has foi^- 

 gotten himself still more in his Penseroso ; for 

 there, adopting the same measure he had contrived 

 for the Allegro, which is perfectly unsaitable to the 

 subject, he has gone directly contrary to those rules 

 which his own practice in most cases fliowed he thought 

 were efsential. The Lycidas, too, in spite of some 

 just thoughts, and happy exprefsions, is, upon the 

 whole, a stiff unnatural performance ; and as utterly 

 destitute of feeling as the monody of lord Littleton ; 

 which is but a laboured imitation of it. I would 

 not give one single stroke of the true pathos of na- 

 ture, lor five thousand pages of such frigid lamenta- 

 tions. 



Milton perhaps never wrote a poem in which his 

 genuine feelings were brought so fully forth, as tlie 

 Comus. In liis other works he speaks for the most 



part to tlie understanding ; in this to the heart, to 



the heart I mean of such men as had ideas of a si- 



