Is my mother’s! hearts of slain Lovers, made into a chain! And between each rising breast Lies the valley, call’d my nest, Where I sit and proyne my wings After flight; and put new stings To my shafts! Her very name With my mother’s is the same.’— ‘I confess all,’ I replied, ‘And the glass hangs by her side, And the girdle ‘bout her waste, All is Venus: save unchaste. But, alas! thou seest the least Of her good, who is the best Of her sex; but could’st thou, Love, Call to mind the forms, that strove For the apple, and those three Make in one, the same were she. For this beauty yet doth hide Something more than thou hast spied. Outward grace weak love beguiles: She is Venus when she smiles, But she’s Juno when she walks, And Minerva when she talks.’ In one of the songs in Cynthia’s Revels, we find, amidst some very pleasing imagery, the origin of a celebrated line in modern poetry— ‘Drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, &c.’ This has not even the merit of originality, which is hard upon it. Ben Jonson had said two hundred years before, ‘Oh, I could still (Like melting snow upon some craggy hill) Drop, drop, drop, drop, Since nature’s pride is now a wither’d daffodil.’ His Ode to the Memory of Sir Lucius Cary and Sir H. Morrison, has been much admired, but I cannot but think it one of his most fantastical and perverse performances. I cannot, for instance, reconcile myself to such stanzas as these. —‘Of which we priests and poets say Such truths as we expect for happy men, And there he lives with memory; and Ben THE STAND Jonson, who sung this of him, ere he went Himself to rest, Or taste a part of that full joy he meant To have exprest, In this bright asterism; Where it were friendship’s schism (Were not his Lucius long with us to tarry) To separate these twi— Lights, the Dioscori; And keep the one half from his Harry. But fate doth so alternate the design, While that in Heaven, this light on earth doth shine.’ This seems as if because he cannot without difficulty write smoothly, he becomes rough and crabbed in a spirit of defiance, like those persons who cannot behave well in company, and affect rudeness to show their contempt for the opinions of others.