He taught them Honour, Virtue’s bashfulness; A fort so yieldless that it fears to treat; Like power it grows to nothing, growing less; Honour, the moral conscience of the great. He taught them Kindness; soul’s civility, In which, nor courts, nor cities have a part; For theirs is fashion, this from falshood free, Where love and pleasure know no lust nor art. And Love he taught; the soul’s stol’n visit made Tho’ froward age watch hard, and law forbid; Her walks no spy has trac’d, nor mountain staid; Her friendship’s cause is as the loadstone hid. He taught them love of Toil; Toil which does keep Obstructions from the mind, and quench the blood; Ease but belongs to us like sleep, and sleep, Like opium, is our med’cine, not our food. The plot is at length involved in so many intricate and apparently unsurmountable difficulties, that it is scarce possible to conceive a satisfactory termination. Perhaps the poet was sensible of a want of power to extricate himself, and chose thus to submit to a voluntary bankruptcy of invention, rather than hazard his reputation by going further. In his postscript, indeed, he excuses himself on account of sickness and approaching dissolution. However disappointed we may be by his abrupt departure from scenes which he has filled with confusion, we ought not to forget the pleasures already received from them. “If (says he to his reader, with more than the spirit of a dying man) thou art one of those who has been warmed with poetic fire, I reverence thee as my judge.” From such a judicature, this NOBLE FRAGMENT, would, I doubt not, acquire for him what the critic laments his having lost, “the possession of that true and permanent glory of which his large soul appears to have been full[2].” [2] Disc. on Poetical Imitation. AN ENQUIRY INTO THOSE KINDS OF DISTRESS WHICH EXCITE AGREEABLE SENSATIONS.