Nor Love nor Fate dare I accuse, Because my Love did me refuse: But oh! mine own unworthinesse, That durst presume so mickle blisse; Too mickle ’twere for me to love A thing so like the God above, An Angels face, a Saint-like voice, Were too divine for humane choyce. Oh had I wisely given my heart, For to have lov’d him, but in part, Save onely to have lov’d his face For any one peculiar grace, A foot, or leg, or lip, or eye, I might have liv’d, where now I dye. But I that striv’d all these to chuse, Am now condemned all to lose. You rurall Gods that guard the plains, And chast’neth unjust disdains; Oh do not censure him for this, It was my error, and not his. This onely boon of thee I crave, To fix these lines upon my grave, With _Icarus_ I soare[d] too high, For which (alas) I fall and dye. On the _TIME-POETS_. One night the great _Apollo_ pleas’d with _Ben_, Made the odde number of the Muses ten; The fluent _Fletcher_, _Beaumont_ rich in sense, In Complement and Courtships quintessence; Ingenious _Shakespeare_, _Massinger_ that knowes The strength of Plot to write in verse and prose: Whose easie Pegassus will amble ore Some threescore miles of Fancy in an houre; Cloud-grapling _Chapman_, whose Aerial minde Soares at Philosophy, and strikes it blinde; _Danbourn_ [_Dabourn_] I had forgot, and let it be, He dy’d Amphibion by the Ministry; _Silvester_, _Bartas_, whose translatique part Twinn’d, or was elder to our Laureat: Divine composing _Quarles_, whose lines aspire The April of all Poesy in May, [_Tho. May._] Who makes our English speak _Pharsalia_; _Sands_ metamorphos’d so into another [_Sandys_] We know not _Sands_ and _Ovid_ from each other; He that so well on _Scotus_ play’d the Man, The famous _Diggs_, or _Leonard Claudian_; The pithy _Daniel_, whose salt lines afford A weighty sentence in each little word; Heroick _Draiton_, _Withers_, smart in Rime, The very Poet-Beadles of the Time: Panns pastoral _Brown_, whose infant Muse did squeak At eighteen yeares, better than others speak: _Shirley_ the morning-child, the Muses bred, And sent him born with bayes upon his head: Deep in a dump _Iohn Ford_ alone was got With folded armes and melancholly hat; The squibbing _Middleton_, and _Haywood_ sage, Th’ Apologetick Atlas of the Stage; Well of the Golden age he could intreat, But little of the Mettal he could get; Three-score sweet Babes he fashion’d from the lump, For he was Christ’ned in _Parnassus_ pump; The Muses Gossip to _Aurora’s_ bed, And ever since that time his face was red. Thus through the horrour of infernall deeps, With equal pace each of them softly creeps, And being dark they had _Alectors_ torch, [_Alecto’s_] And that made _Churchyard_ follow from his Porch, Poor, ragged, torn, & tackt, alack, alack You’d think his clothes were pinn’d upon his back.