His blank verse in the English Garden has not the majesty of Akenside, the sweetness of Dyer, or the terseness of Armstrong. Its characteristic is delicacy; but it is a delicacy approaching nearer to weakness than to grace. It has more resemblance to the rill that trickles over its fretted channel, than to the stream that winds with a full tide, and "warbles as it flows." The practice of cutting it into dialogue had perhaps crippled him. As he has made the characters in his plays too attentive to the decorations of the scene-painter, so in the last book of the English Garden he has turned his landscape into a theatre, for the representation of a play. The story of Nerina is too long and too complicated for an episode in a didactic poem. He will seldom bear to be confronted with those writers whom he is found either by accident or design to resemble. His picture of the callow young in a bird's-nest is, I think, with some alteration, copied from Statius. --Her young meanwhile Callow and cold, from their moss-woven nest Peep forth; they stretch their little eager throats Broad to the wind, and plead to the lone spray Their famish'd plaint importunately shrill. (_English Garden_, b. 3.) --Volucrum sic turba recentum, Cum reducem longo prospexit in aethere matrem, Ire cupit contra, summaque e margine nidi Extat hians; jam jamque cadat ni pectore toto Obstet aperta parens et amantibus increpet alis. (_Theb._ lib. x. 458.) Oppian's imitation of this is happier. [Greek: Os dhopot aptaenessi pherei bosin dortalichoisi Maetaer, eiarinae Zephurou protangelos ornis, Oi dapalon truzontes epithroskousi kaliae, Gaethusunoi peri maetri, kai imeirontes edodaes Xeilos anaptussousin apan depi doma lelaeken Andros xeinodochoio liga klazousi neossois.] (Halieut. I. in. 248.) Hurd, in the letter he addressed to him on the Marks of Imitation, observed, that the imagery with which the Ode to Memory opens, is borrowed from Strada's Prolusions. The chorus in Elfrida, beginning Hail to thy living light, Ambrosial morn! all hail thy roseate ray: is taken from the Hymnus in Auroram, by Flaminio. His Sappho, a lyrical drama, is one of the few attempts that have been made to bring amongst us that tuneful trifle, the modern Opera of the Italians. It has been transferred by Mr. Mathias into that language, to which alone it seemed properly to belong. Mr. Glasse has done as much for Caractacus by giving it up to the Greek. Of the two Odes, which are all, excepting some few fragments, that remain to us of the Lesbian poetess, he has introduced Translations into his drama. There is more glitter of phrase than in the versions made, if I recollect right, by Ambrose Phillips, which are inserted in the Spectator, No. 222 and 229; but much less of that passionate emotion which marks the original. Most of my readers will remember that which begins,