LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 217 



come the demand for Drummond, whose chief value to posterity 

 is as the Boswell of Ben Jonson. Sir Thomas Overbury s 

 Characters are interesting illustrations of contemporaryman- 

 ners, and a mine of foot-notes to the works of better men ; but, 

 with the exception of The Fair and Happy Milkmaid/ they are 

 dull enough to have pleased James the First ; his Wife is a 

 cento of far-fetched conceits here a tomtit, and there a hen 

 mistaken for a pheasant, like the contents of a cockney s game- 

 bag, and his chief interest for us lies in his having been mixed 

 up with an inexplicable tragedy and poisoned in the Tower, not 

 without suspicion of royal complicity. The Piers Ploughman 

 is a reprint, with very little improvement that we can discover, 

 of Mr. Wright s former edition. It would have been very well 

 to have republished the Fair Virtue/ and Shepherd s Hunt 

 ing of George Wither, which contain all the true poetry he ever 

 wrote; but we can imagine nothing more dreary than the seven 

 hundred pages of his Hymns and Songs/ whose only use, that 

 we can conceive of, would be as penal reading for incorrigible 

 poetasters. If a steady course of these did not bring them out 

 of their nonsenses, nothing short of hanging would. Take this 

 as a sample, hit on by opening at random : 



Rottenness my bones possest ; 

 Trembling fear possessed me; 

 I that troublous day might rest : 

 For, when his approaches be 

 Onward to the people made, 

 His strong troops will them invade. 



Southwell is, if possible, worse. He paraphrases David, 

 putting into his mouth such punning conceits as fears are my 

 feres/ and in his Saint Peter s Complaint makes that rashest 

 and shortest-spoken of the Apostles drawl through thirty pages 

 of maudlin repentance, in which the distinctions between the 

 north and northeast sides of a sentimentality are worthy of 

 Duns Scotus. It does not follow, that, because a man is hanged 

 for his faith, he is able to write good verses. We would almost 

 match the fortitude that quails not at the good Jesuit s poems 

 with his own which carried him serenely to the fatal tree. The 

 stuff of which poets are made, whether finer or not, is of a very 

 different fibre from that which is used in the tough fabric of 

 martyrs. It is time that an earnest protest should be uttered 

 against the wrong done to the religious sentiment by the greater 

 part of what is called religious poetry, and which is commonly 

 a painful something misnamed by the noun and misqualified 

 by the adjective. To dilute David, and make doggerel of th?t 



