diversified with hill and dale, has no pretensions of so lofty a kind.
This, he tells us, was "the haunt of his youthful steps;" and here he
met with Somerville, the poet of the Chase, to whom both the subject and
the title of his poem might have been suggested by that extensive
common, known by the name of Cannock Chase,[3] on the border of which
Beaudesert is situated.

The digressions, with which he has endeavoured to enliven the monotony
of his subject, are sometimes very far-fetched. He has scarcely finished
his exordium, when he goes back to the third day of the creation, and
then passes on to the deluge. This reminds one of the Mock Advocate in
the Plaideurs of Racine, who, having to defend the cause of a dog that
had robbed the pantry, begins,

Avant la naissance du monde----

on which the judge yawns and interrupts him,

Avocat, ah! passons an deluge.

Of his shorter pieces, the three Elegies on Birds are well deserving of
notice. That entitled the Blackbirds is so prettily imagined, and so
neatly expressed, that it is worth a long poem. Thrice has Shenstone
mentioned it in his Letters, in such a manner as to show how much it had
pleased him. The Goldfinches is only less excellent. He has spoiled the
Swallows by the seriousness of the moral.

Nunc non erat his locus.

The first half of Peytoe's Ghost has enough in it to raise a curiosity,