is typical of late Elizabethan mannerism. "Heaves" is used to rhyme to "leaves"; "the dust of sin" is apparently the redeemed soul, why the sky is "industrious," except as a kind of pun on the preceding "dust," is not apparent; we are to wonder why the dust of sin is not allowed "to fly to dust and ashes,"--in short a solemn and sacred poem can hardly be written in a style more unhappily out of keeping. When the fate of fallen man is trembling in the balance, Mercy "smooths the wrinkles of the Fathers brow," and Justice, observing this with displeasure (it is like a Homeric quarrel of Athene and Aphrodite!), throws herself between Mercy and the Father, like "a vapour from a moory slough," and begins a virulent invective against That wretch, beast, caitiff, Monster-Man, who, in Egypt, is disgracing himself by animal worship, while in Greece, Neptune spews out the lady Aphrodite. Your songs exceed your matter-- says Giles to other poets,-- this of mine The matter which it sings, shall make divine. Alas! the poem, though it has fine occasional passages, some music, and much energy, is written in a style of conceits, and of ingenious antitheses, which are wholly out of accord with "the matter". We cannot but see that the poet, in regard to taste, is wholly lost, is too much a child of his time, so rich in everything but perception of form and limit, so fantastically over-adorned in verse as in vesture. Giles wrote of Phineas as the Kentish lad, that lately taught His oaten reed the trumpet's silver sound. Phineas did this in his vast allegorical poem, "The Purple Island" (1633) (the human body). His stanzas are of seven lines, the first four rhyming alternately, the last three have all the same rhyme. Both poets imitate Spenser with a difference in stanza, and a notable difference in genius; both have musical passages, and both anticipate Milton in their choice of sacred subjects. Quarles saluted Phineas as "The Spenser of this age". Phineas is the more musical, but also by far the more lengthy of these Kentish swains. His "Piscatory Eclogues" follow Spenser's pastorals. They are of a moral tendency and would not have interested Izaak Walton. The fisher (in salt water there are no anglers), is born "To sweat, to freeze, to watch, to fast, to toil". Phineas attacks the indolent clergy, as Milton did. They are a crew of idle grooms, Idle and bold that never saw the seas. It is probable that Milton, as a Cambridge man, and a man with views like those of Phineas, was well acquainted with the poems of both the Fletchers, which are in fact the sunken stepping-stone from Spenser to Milton. The puritanism of Phineas's long poem, "The Locusts or Apollyonists" (1627) preludes to the civil war. The poet will tell Of priests, O no! Mass-priests, priests cannibal, and Thou purple whore, mounted on scarlet beast, namely the Church of Rome. Satan says,