The imagination must be indeed fertile, which could produce this ill-placed exuberance of imagery. The poet, when composing this passage, must have had in his mind all the remote ideas of Hecate, a heathen Goddess, of a beetle, of night, of a peal of bells, and of that action of the muscles, commonly called a gape or yawn. _Ritson_ Numbscull! that would limit an infinite head by the square contents of thy own numbscull. _Scott_ The great merit of a poet is not, like Cowley, Donne, and Denham, to say what no man but himself has thought, but what every man besides himself has thought; but no man expressed, or, at least, expressed so well. _Ritson_ In other words, all _that_ is poetry, which Mr. Scott has thought, as well as the poet; but _that_ cannot be poetry, which was not obvious to Mr. Scott, as well as to Cowley, Donne, and Denham. _Scott_ Mr. Mason observes of the language in this part [the Epitaph], that it has a Doric delicacy. It has, indeed, what I should rather term a _happy rusticity_. _Ritson_ Come, see Rural felicity. GOLDSMITH'S DESERTED VILLAGE No busy steps the grass-grown footway tread, But all the bloomy flush of life is fled-- All but yon widow'd solitary thing, That feebly bends beside the plashy spring; She, wretched matron, forced, in age, for bread, To strip the brook with mantling cresses spread, _Scott_ Our author's language, in this place, is very defective in correctness. After mentioning the general privation of the "bloomy flush of life," the exceptionary "all but" includes, as part of that "bloomy flush," an aged decrepit matron; that is to say, in plain prose, "the bloomy flush of life is all fled but one old woman." _Ritson_ Yet Milton could write: Far from all resort of mirth, Save the cricket on the hearth, Or the bell-man's drowsy charm-- and I dare say he was right. O never let a quaker, or a woman, try their hand at being witty, any more than a Tom Brown affect to speak by the spirit! _Scott_ ----Aaron Hill, who, although, in general, a bombastic writer, produced some pieces of merit, particularly the Caveat, an allegorical satire on Pope. _Ritson_ Say rather his verses on John Dennis, beginning "Adieu, unsocial excellence!" which are implicitly a finer satire on Pope than twenty Caveats. All that Pope could or did say against Dennis, is there condensed; and what he should have said, and did not, for him, is there too.[44] [44] ON THE DEATH OF MR. DENNIS