LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 247 



poetry. He is to be classed with the lucky authors who, without 

 great powers, have written one or two pieces so facile in thought 

 and fortunate in phrase as to be carried lightly in the memory, 

 poems in which analysis finds little, but which are charming in 

 their frail completeness. This faculty of hitting on the precise 

 lilt of thought and measure that shall catch the universal ear 

 and sing themselves in everybody s memory, is a rare gift. We 

 have heard many ingenious persons try to explain the cling of 

 such a poem as * The Burial of Sir John Moore/ and the result 

 of all seemed to be, that there were certain verses that were 

 good, not because of their goodness, but because one could not 

 forget them. They have the great merit of being portable, and 

 we have to carry so much luggage through life, that we should 

 be thankful for what will pack easily and take up no room. 



All that Lovelace wrote beside these three poems is utterly 

 worthless, mere chaff from the threshing of his wits. Take out 

 the four pages on which they are printed, and we have two hun 

 dred and eighty-nine left of the sorriest stuff that ever spoiled 

 paper. The poems are obscure, without anything in them to 

 reward perseverance, dull without being moral, and full of con 

 ceits so far-fetched that we could wish the author no worse fate 

 than to carry them back to where they came from. We are no 

 enemies to what are commonly called conceits, but authors bear 

 them, as heralds say, with a difference. And a terrible differ 

 ence it is! With men like Earle, Donne, Fuller, Butler, Mar- 

 veil, and even Ouarles, conceit means wit; they would carve the 

 merest cherry-stone of thought in the quaintest and delicatest 

 fashion. But with duller and more painful writers, such as Gas- 

 coyne, Marston, Felltham, and a score of others, even with 

 cleverer ones like Waller, Crashawe, and Suckling, where they 

 insisted on being fine, their wit is conceit. Difficulty without 

 success is perhaps the least tolerable kind of writing. Mere 

 stupidity is a natural failing; we skip and pardon. But the 

 other is Dulness in a domino, that travesties its familiar figure, 

 and lures us only to disappoint. These unhappy verses of Love 

 lace s had been dead and lapt in congenial lead these two hun 

 dred years; what harm had they done Mr. Hazlitt that he 

 should disinter them ? There is no such disenchanter of peace 

 able reputations as one of these resurrection-men of literature, 

 who will not let mediocrities rest in the grave, where the kind 

 sexton, Oblivion, had buried them, but dig them up to make a 

 profit ( n their lead. 



Of 1 Mr. Smith s editors, Mr. W. Carew Hazlitt is the worst, 



