336 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 



tie, 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 them- 

 selves 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 

 w^its. Take out the four pages on which they are 

 printed, and we have two hundred and eighty -nine left 

 of the sorriest stuff that ever spoiled paper. The poems 

 are obscure, without anything in them to reward perse- 

 verance, dull without being moral, and full of conceits 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 w^hat are commonly called conceits, 

 but authors bear them, as heralds say, with a difference. 

 And a terrible difference it is ! With men like Earle, 

 Donne, Fuller, Butler, Marvell, and even Quarles, con- 

 ceit means wit ; they would carve the merest cheriy- 

 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 



