‘Hence, all you vain delights; As short as are the nights Wherein you spend your folly: There’s nought in this life sweet, If man were wise to see ‘t, But only melancholy, Oh, sweetest melancholy. Welcome folded arms and fixed eyes, A sight that piercing mortifies; A look that’s fasten’d to the ground, A tongue chain’d up without a sound; Fountain heads, and pathless groves, Places which pale passion loves: Moon-light walks, when all the fowls Are warmly hous’d, save bats and owls; A midnight bell, a passing groan, These are the sounds we feed upon: Then stretch our bones in a still, gloomy valley; Nothing so dainty sweet as lovely melancholy.’ It has been supposed (and not without every appearance of good reason) that this pensive strain, ‘most musical, most melancholy,’ gave the first suggestion of the spirited introduction to Milton’s Il Penseroso. ‘Hence, vain deluding joys, The brood of folly without father bred!... But hail, thou Goddess, sage and holy, Hail, divinest melancholy, Whose saintly visage is too bright To hit the sense of human sight, &c.’ The same writer thus moralises on the life of man, in a set of similes, as apposite as they are light and elegant. ‘Like to the falling of a star, Or as the flights of eagles are, Or like the fresh spring’s gaudy hue, Or silver drops of morning dew, Or like a wind that chafes the flood, Or bubbles which on water stood: Even such is man, whose borrow’d light Is straight call’d in and paid to night:— The wind blows out, the bubble dies; The spring intomb’d in autumn lies; The dew’s dried up, the star is shot, The flight is past, and man forgot.’ ‘The silver foam which the wind severs from the parted wave’ is not more light or sparkling than this: the dove’s downy pinion is not softer and smoother than the verse. We are too ready to conceive of the poetry of that day, as altogether old-fashioned, meagre, squalid, deformed, withered and wild in its attire, or as a sort of uncouth monster, like ‘grim-visaged comfortless despair,’ mounted on a lumbering, unmanageable Pegasus, dragon-winged, and leaden-hoofed; but it as often wore a sylph-like form with Attic vest, with faery feet, and the butterfly’s gaudy wings. The bees were said to have come, and built their hive in the mouth of Plato when a child; and the fable might be transferred to the sweeter accents of Beaumont and Fletcher! Beaumont died at the age of five and twenty. One of these writers makes Bellario the Page say to Philaster, who threatens to take his life—