‘Fair and flagrant things’—Crashaw’s own phrase—might serve for a brilliant and fantastic praise and protest in description of his own verses. In the last century, despite the opinion of a few, and despite the fact that Pope took possession of Crashaw’s line— ‘Obedient slumbers that can wake and weep,’ and for some time of the present century, the critics had a wintry word to blame him with. They said of George Herbert, of Lovelace, of Crashaw, and of other light hearts of the seventeenth century—not so much that their inspiration was in bad taste, as that no reader of taste could suffer them. A better opinion on that company of poets is that they had a taste extraordinarily liberal, generous, and elastic, but not essentially lax: taste that gave now and then too much room to play, but anon closed with the purest and exactest laws of temperance and measure. The extravagance of Crashaw is a far more lawful thing than the extravagance of Addison, whom some believe to have committed none; moreover, Pope and all the politer poets nursed something they were pleased to call a ‘rage,’ and this expatiated (to use another word of their own) beyond all bounds. Of sheer voluntary extremes it is not in the seventeenth century conceit that we should seek examples, but in an eighteenth century ‘rage.’ A ‘noble rage,’ properly provoked, could be backed to write more trash than fancy ever tempted the half-incredulous sweet poet of the older time to run upon. He was fancy’s child, and the bard of the eighteenth century was the child of common sense with straws in his hair—vainly arranged there. The eighteenth century was never content with a moderate mind; it invented ‘rage’; it matched rage with a flagrant diction mingled of Latin words and simple English words made vacant and ridiculous, and these were the worst; it was resolved to be behind no century in passion—nay, to show the way, to fire the nations. Addison taught himself, as his hero taught the battle, ‘where to rage’; and in the later years of the same literary age, Johnson summoned the lapsed and absent fury, with no kind of misgiving as to the resulting verse. Take such a phrase as ‘the madded land’; there, indeed, is a word coined by the noble rage as the last century evoked it. ‘The madded land’ is a phrase intended to prove that the law-giver of taste, Johnson himself, could lodge the fury in his breast when opportunity occurred. ‘And dubious title shakes the madded land.’ It would be hard to find anything, even in Addison, more flagrant and less fair.