at the blunder. All this is surely despicable; and even when he
tries to act the lover without the help of gods or goddesses, his
thoughts are unaffecting or remote. He talks not "like a man of
this world."

The greatest of all his amorous essays is "Henry and Emma," a dull
and tedious dialogue, which excites neither esteem for the man nor
tenderness for the woman. The example of Emma, who resolves to
follow an outlawed murderer wherever fear and guilt shall drive him,
deserves no imitation; and the experiment by which Henry tries the
lady's constancy is such as must end either in infamy to her or in
disappointment to himself.

His occasional poems necessarily lost part of their value, as their
occasions, being less remembered, raised less emotion, Some of them,
however, are preserved by their inherent excellence. The burlesque
of Boileau's ode on Namur has in some parts such airiness and levity
as will always procure it readers, even among those who cannot
compare it with the original. The epistle to Boileau is not so
happy. The "Poems to the King," are now perused only by young
students, who read merely that they may learn to write; and of the
"Carmen Seculare," I cannot but suspect that I might praise or
censure it by caprice without danger of detection; for who can be
supposed to have laboured through it? Yet the time has been when
this neglected work was so popular that it was translated into Latin
by no common master.

His poem on the Battle of Ramillies is necessarily tedious by the
form of the stanza. An uniform mass of ten lines thirty-five times
repeated, inconsequential and slightly connected, must weary both