"Great nature, break thy chain that links together The fabric of the world, and make a chaos Like that within my soul."--"Love Triumphant." "Startle Nature, unfix the globe, And hurl it from its axletree and hinges."--"Albion Queens." "The tott'ring earth seems sliding off its props." ] [Footnote 154: "D--n your delay, ye torturers, proceed: I will not hear one word but Almahide."--"Conq. of Gran." ] [Footnote 155: Mr. Dryden hath imitated this in All for Love.] [Footnote 156: This Miltonic style abounds in the New Sophonisba. "And on her ample brow Sat majesty." ] [Footnote 157: "Your ev'ry answer still so ends in that, You force me still to answer you, Morat."--"Aurengzebe. ] [Footnote 158: "Morat, Morat, Morat! you love the name."--_Ibid._ ] [Footnote 159: "Here is a sentiment for the virtuous Huncamunca!" says Mr. D--s. And yet, with the leave of this great man, the virtuous Panthea, in Cyrus, hath a heart every whit as ample: "For two I must confess are gods to me, Which is my Abradatus first, and thee."--"Cyrus the Great." Nor is the lady in Love Triumphant more reserved, though not so intelligible: "I am so divided, That I grieve most for both, and love both most." ] [Footnote 160: A ridiculous supposition to any one who considers the great and extensive largeness of hell, says a commentator; but not so to those who consider the great expansion of immaterial substance. Mr. Banks makes one soul to be so expanded, that heaven could not contain it. "The heavens are all too narrow for her soul."--"Virtue Betrayed." The Persian Princess hath a passage not unlike the author of this: "We will send such shoals of murder'd slaves, Shall glut hell's empty regions." This threatens to fill hell, even though it was empty; Lord Grizzle, only to fill up the chinks, supposing the rest already full.] [Footnote 161: Mr. Addison is generally thought to have had this simile in his eye when he wrote that beautiful one at the end of the third act of his Cato.] [Footnote 162: This beautiful simile is founded on a proverb which does honour to the English language: "Between two stools the breech falls to the ground." I am not so well pleased with any written remains of the ancients as with those little aphorisms which verbal tradition hath delivered down to us under the title of proverbs. It were to be wished that, instead of filling their pages with the fabulous theology of the pagans, our modern poets would think it worth their while to enrich their works with the proverbial sayings of their ancestors. Mr. Dryden hath chronicled one in heroic: "Two ifs scarce make one possibility."--"Conq. of Granada."