LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 295 



" 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 Da- 

 vid, putting into his mouth such punning conceits as 

 " fears are my feres," and in his " Saint Peter's Com- 

 plaint " makes that rashest and shortest-spoken of the 

 Apostles drawl through thirty pages of maudlin repent- 

 ance, 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 com- 

 monly a painful something misnamed by the noun and 

 misqualified by the adjective. To dilute David, and 

 make doggerel of that majestic prose of the Prophets 

 which has the glow and wide-orbited metre of constel- 

 lations, may be a useful occupation to keep country-gen- 

 tlemen out of litigation or retired clergymen from polem- 

 ics ; but to regard these metrical mechanics as sacred 

 because nobody wishes to touch them, as meritoriou? 

 because no one can be merry in their company, — to 

 rank them in the same class with those ancient songs of 

 the Church, sweet with the breath of saints, sparkling 

 with the tears of forgiven penitents, and warm with the 

 fervor of martyrs, — nay, to set them up beside, such 



