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.

Take The Weeper of Crashaw--his most flagrant poem. Its follies
are all sweet-humoured, they smile. Its beauties are a quick and
abundant shower. The delicate phrases are so mingled with the
flagrant that it is difficult to quote them without rousing that
general sense of humour of which any one may make a boast; and I am
therefore shy even of citing the "brisk cherub" who has early
sipped the Saint's tear: "Then to his music," in Crashaw's
divinely simple phrase; and his singing "tastes of this breakfast
all day long." Sorrow is a queen, he cries to the Weeper, and when
sorrow would be seen in state, "then is she drest by none but
thee." Then you come upon the fancy, "Fountain and garden in one
face." All places, times, and objects are "Thy tears' sweet