over the intuitive faculties, the one always there, the other flashing in
when you least expect it, accounts for that inequality and even
incongruousness in his writing which makes one revise his judgment at
every tenth page. In his prose you come upon passages that persuade you
he is a poet, in spite of his verses so often turning state's evidence
against him as to convince you he is none. He is a prose-writer, with a
kind of Aeolian attachment. For example, take this bit of prose from the
dedication of his version of Virgil's Pastorals, 1694: "He found the
strength of his genius betimes, and was even in his youth preluding to
his Georgicks and his Aeneis. He could not forbear to try his wings,
though his pinions were not hardened to maintain a long, laborious
flight; yet sometimes they bore him to a pitch as lofty as ever he was
able to reach afterwards. But when he was admonished by his subject to
descend, he came down gently circling in the air and singing to the
ground, like a lark melodious in her mounting and continuing her song
till she alights, still preparing for a higher flight at her next sally,
and tuning her voice to better music." This is charming, and yet even
this wants the ethereal tincture that pervades the style of Jeremy
Taylor, making it, as Burke said of Sheridan's eloquence, "neither prose
nor poetry, but something better than either." Let us compare Taylor's
treatment of the same image: "For so have I seen a lark rising from his
bed of grass and soaring upwards, singing as he rises, and hopes to get
to heaven and climb above the clouds; but the poor bird was beaten back
by the loud sighings of an eastern wind, and his motion made irregular
and inconstant, descending more at every breath of the tempest than it
could recover by the libration and frequent weighing of his wings, till
the little creature was forced to sit down and pant, and stay till the
storm was over, and then it made a prosperous flight, and did rise and
sing as if it had learned music and motion of an angel as he passed
sometimes through the air about his ministries here below." Taylor's