We must not omit also the first clause of the sixteenth stanza, which affords an admirable example of spirited and harmonious rhythm. Tarquin in addressing Lucrece:— "He stories to her ears her husband's fame, Won in the fields of fruitful Italy; And decks with praises Collatine's high name; Made glorious by his manly chivalry, With bruised arms and wreaths of victory." One of the peculiar excellences of the _Rape of Lucrece_, is its frequent expression of correct sentiment in pointed language and emphatic verse. Tarquin, soliloquising on the crime which he is about to commit, thus gives vent to the agonies of momentary contrition:— "Fair torch, burn out thy light, and lend it not To darken her whose light excelleth thine! And die unhallow'd thoughts, before you blot With your uncleanness that which is divine! O shame to knighthood and to shining arms! O foul dishonour to my houshold's grave! O impious act, including all foul harms! A martial man to be soft fancy's slave!— What win I, if I gain the thing I seek? A dream, a breath, a froth of fleeting joy! Who buys a minute's mirth, to wail a week? Or sells eternity, to get a toy?" The same terseness of diction and concinnity of versification appear in the subsequent lines:— "Then for thy husband's and thy children's sake, Tender my suit: bequeath not to their lot The shame that from them no device can take, The blemish that will never be forgot." It may, likewise, be added, that simplicity and strength in the modulation, together with a forcible plainness of phraseology, characterise a few stanzas, of which one shall be given as an instance:— "O teach me how to make mine own excuse! Or, at the least, this refuge let me find; Though my gross blood be stain'd with this abuse, Immaculate and spotless is my mind; That was not forc'd; that never was inclin'd To accessary yieldings—but, still pure, Doth in her poison'd closet yet endure." To these short examples, which are selected for the purpose of showing, not only the occasional felicity of the poet in the mechanism of his verse, but the uncommon and unapprehended worth of what this mechanism is the vehicle, we shall subjoin three passages of greater length, illustrative of what this early production of our author's Muse can exhibit in the three great departments of the _descriptive_, the _pathetic_, and the _morally sublime_. Lucrece, in the paroxysms of her grief, is represented as telling her mournful story "To pencil'd pensiveness and coloured sorrow," to a piece "Of skilful painting, made for Priam's Troy," where "Many a dry drop seemed a weeping tear, Shed for the slaughtered husband by the wife;" and where "The red blood reek'd to show the painter's strife, And dying eyes gleam'd forth their ashy lights:"