Lives of the English Poets: From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of Johnson's LivesCary, Henry Francis
General
Lives of the English Poets: From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of Johnson's Lives
Cary, Henry Francis
Poets, English -- Biography
were compared, as to its subject, with that of the Theban bard, on the
illness of Hiero, which opens with a wish that Chiron were yet living,
in order that the poet might consult him on the case of the Syracusan
monarch; and in its form, with that in which he asks of his native city,
in whom of all her heroes she most delighted.
Among the odes, some of which might more properly be termed idylliums,
The Hamlet is of uncommon beauty; the landscape is truly English, and
has the truth and tenderness of Gainsborough's pencil. Those To a Friend
on his leaving a Village in Hampshire, and the First of April, are
entitled to similar praise. The Crusade, The Grave of King Arthur, and
most of the odes composed for the court, are in a higher strain. In the
Ode written at Vale Royal Abbey, is a striking image, borrowed from some
lent verses, written by Archbishop Markham, and printed in the second
volume of that collection.
High o'er the trackless heath, at midnight seen,
No more the windows ranged in long array
(Where the tall shaft and fretted arch between
Thick ivy twines) the taper'd rites betray.
_Prodidit areanas arcta fenestra faces_.
His sonnets have been highly and deservedly commended by no less
competent a judge than Mr. Coleridge. They are alone sufficient to prove
(if any proof were wanting) that this form of composition is not
unsuited to our language. One of our longest, as it is one of our most
beautiful poems, the Faerie Queene, is written in a stanza which demands
the continual recurrence of an equal number of rhymes; and the chief
objection to our adopting the sonnet is the paucity of our rhymes.
The lines to Sir Joshua Reynolds are marked by the happy turn of the
compliment, and by the strength and harmony of the versification, at
least as far as the formal couplet measure will admit of those
qualities. They need not fear a comparison with the verses addressed by
Dryden to Kneller, or by Pope to Jervas.
His Latin compositions are nearly as excellent as his English. The few
hendecasyllables he has left, have more of the vigour of Catullus than
those by Flaminio; but Flaminio excels him in delicacy. The Mons
Catharinae contains nearly the same images as Gray's Ode on a Prospect
of Eton College. In the word "cedrinae," which occurs in the verses on
Trinity College Chapel, he has, we believe, erroneously made the
penultimate long. Dr. Mant has observed another mistake in his use of
the word "Tempe" as a feminine noun, in the lines translated from
Akenside. When in his sports with his brother's scholars at Winchester
he made their exercises for them, he used to ask the boy how many faults
he would have:--one such would have been sufficient for a lad near the
head of the school.
His style in prose, though marked by a character of magnificence, is at
times stiff and encumbered. He is too fond of alliteration in prose as
well as in verse; and the cadence of his sentences is too evidently
laboured.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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