the affectation of such conceits has always marked the decay and
approaching death of a reigning school of poetry; that when, for
instance, the primeval forest of the Elizabethan poets dwindled down
into a barren scrub of Vaughans, and Cowleys, and Herberts, and
Crashawes, this was the very form in which the deadly blight
appeared. In vain did the poetasters, frightened now and then at
their own nonsense, try to keep up the decaying dignity of poetry by
drawing their conceits, as poetasters do now, from suns and galaxies,
earthquakes, eclipses, and the portentous, and huge and gaudy in
Nature; the lawlessness and irreverence for Nature, involved in the
very worship of conceits, went on degrading the tone of the conceits
themselves, till the very sense of true beauty and fitness seemed
lost; and a pious and refined gentleman like George Herbert could
actually dare to indite solemn conundrums to the Supreme Being, and
believe that he was writing devout poetry, and "looking through
nature up to nature's God," when he delivered himself thus in one of
his least offensive poems (for the most sacred and most offensive of
them we dare not quote, lest we incur the same blame which we have
bestowed on Mr. Smith, and sing of Church festivals as--)


Marrow of time, eternity in brief,
Compendiums epitomised, the chief
Contents, the indices, the title-pages
Of all past, present, and succeeding ages,
Sublimate graces, antedated glories;
The cream of holiness.
The inventories
Of future blessedness,
The florilegia of celestial stories,