Among the odes, some of which might more properly be termed idylliums,
The Hamlet is of uncommon beauty; the landscape is truly English, and
has the truth and tenderness of Gainsborough's pencil. Those To a Friend
on his leaving a Village in Hampshire, and the First of April, are
entitled to similar praise. The Crusade, The Grave of King Arthur, and
most of the odes composed for the court, are in a higher strain. In the
Ode written at Vale Royal Abbey, is a striking image, borrowed from some
lent verses, written by Archbishop Markham, and printed in the second
volume of that collection.

High o'er the trackless heath, at midnight seen,
No more the windows ranged in long array
(Where the tall shaft and fretted arch between
Thick ivy twines) the taper'd rites betray.

_Prodidit areanas arcta fenestra faces_.

His sonnets have been highly and deservedly commended by no less
competent a judge than Mr. Coleridge. They are alone sufficient to prove
(if any proof were wanting) that this form of composition is not
unsuited to our language. One of our longest, as it is one of our most
beautiful poems, the Faerie Queene, is written in a stanza which demands
the continual recurrence of an equal number of rhymes; and the chief
objection to our adopting the sonnet is the paucity of our rhymes.

The lines to Sir Joshua Reynolds are marked by the happy turn of the
compliment, and by the strength and harmony of the versification, at
least as far as the formal couplet measure will admit of those
qualities. They need not fear a comparison with the verses addressed by
Dryden to Kneller, or by Pope to Jervas.