scatters flowers of every hue and of every odour. This is one of
the few poems in which blank verse could not be changed for rhyme
but with disadvantage. The wild diffusion of the sentiments and the
digressive sallies of imagination would have been compressed and
restrained by confinement to rhyme. The excellence of this work is
not exactness but copiousness; particular lines are not to be
regarded; the power is in the whole, and in the whole there is a
magnificence like that ascribed to Chinese plantation, the
magnificence of vast extent and endless diversity.

His last poem was the "Resignation," in which he made, as he was
accustomed, an experiment of a new mode of writing, and succeeded
better than in his "Ocean" or his "Merchant." It was very falsely
represented as a proof of decaying faculties. There is Young in
every stanza, such as he often was in the highest vigour. His
tragedies, not making part of the collection, I had forgotten, till
Mr. Stevens recalled them to my thoughts, by remarking, that he
seemed to have one favourite catastrophe, as his three plays all
concluded with lavish suicide, a method by which, as Dryden
remarked, a poet easily rids his scene of persons whom he wants not
to keep alive. In Busiris there are the greatest ebullitions of
imagination, but the pride of Busiris is such as no other man can
have, and the whole is too remote from known life to raise either
grief, terror, or indignation. The Revenge approaches much nearer
to human practices and manners, and therefore keeps possession of
the stage; the first design seems suggested by Othello, but the
reflections, the incidents, and the diction, are original. The
moral observations are so introduced and so expressed as to have all
the novelty that can be required. Of The Brothers I may be allowed
to say nothing, since nothing was ever said of it by the public. It