Which is nonsense and not poetry, though Dr. Percy admired it. Dr. Donne, and the poets whom Dr. Johnson called metaphysical (as if all poets are not so), is thought to be full of conceits. But the essence of a conceit is not in a comparison being far-fetched,--the imagination can make fire and water friendly when it likes,--but in playing upon the meanings of two words where one is taken in a metaphorical sense. This is a mark of the superficial mind always; whereas Donne’s may be called a subterficial one, which went down to the roots of thought instead of playing with its blossoms. Not long after the “Faëry Queene” were published the “Polyolbion” of Drayton, and the “Civil Wars” of Daniel. Both of these men were respectable poets (especially Drayton), but neither of them could reconcile poetry with gazetteering or chronicle-making. They are as unlike as a declaration in love and a declaration in law. This was the period of the Saurians in English Poetry, interminable poems, book after book and canto after canto, like far-stretching _vertebræ_, prodigious creatures that rendered the earth unfit for the dwelling of Man. They are all dead now, the unwieldy monsters--ichthyo-, plesio-, and megalosauri--they all sleep well, and their huge remains are found imbedded in those vast morasses, the “Collections of the Poets.” We wonder at the length of face and general atra-bilious look that mark the portraits of that generation; but it is no marvel when even the poetry was such downright hard work. Poems of this sort might have served to while away the three-centuried evening of antediluvian lives. It is easy to understand how our ancestors could achieve great things when they encountered such hardships for mere amusement. If we agree with Horace in pitying the pre-Homeric heroes because they were without poets, we may sincerely commiserate our forefathers of that generation because they had them. The reading of one of these productions must have been nearly as long a business as the taking of Troy, and deserved a poet to sing it. Perhaps fathers, when their time on earth was up, folded the leaf down and left the task to be finished by their sons--a dreary inheritance.