V. seem to avoid, or to use unskilfully. But he has CHAP. many unwarrantable licences in his metre, and even false quantities, as is common to the great majority of these Latin versifiers. 70. Gaspar Barlæus had as high a name, perhaps, Barlæus. as any Latin poet of this age. His rhythm is indeed excellent, but if he ever rises to other excellence, I have not lighted on the passages. A greater equality I have never found than in Barlæus ; nothing is bad, nothing is striking. It was the practice with Dutchmen on their marriage to purchase epithalamiums in hexameter verse; and the muse of Barlæus was in request. These nuptial songs are of course about Peleus and Thetis, or similar personages, interspersed with fitting praises of the bride and bridegroom. Such poetry is not likely to rise high. The epicedia, or funeral lamentations, paid for by the heir, are little, if at all, better than the epithalamia; and the panegyrical effusions on public or private events rather worse. The elegies of Barlæus, as we generally find, are superior to the hexameters; he has here the same smoothness of versification, and a graceful gaiety which gives us pleasure. In some of his elegies and epistles he counterfeits the Ovidian style extremely well, so that they might pass for those of his model. Still there is an equability, a recurrence of trivial thoughts and forms, which in truth is too much characteristic of modern Latin to be a reproach to Barlæus. He uses the polysyllabic termination less than earlier Dutch poets. One of the epithalamia of Barlæus, it may be observed before we leave him, is entitled Paradisus, and recounts the nuptials of Adam and Eve. It is possible that Milton may have seen this; the fourth book of the Paradise Lost compresses the excessive diffuseness of Barlæus, but the ideas are in great measure the same. Yet since this must naturally be the case, we cannot presume imitation. That Milton availed himself of all the poetry he had read, we cannot doubt; if Lauder had possessed as much learning as malignity, he might have made out his case (such as it would have been), without having recourse to his own stupid forgeries. Few of the poems of Barlæus are so redundant as this; he has the gift of stringing together mythological parallels and descriptive poetry without stint, and his discretion does not inform him where to stop. 71. The eight books of Sylvæ by Balde, a German ecclesiastic, are extolled by Baillet and Bouterwek far above their value; the odes are tumid and unclassical; yet some have called him equal to Horace. Heinsius tried his skill in Greek verse. His Peplus Græcorum Epigrammatum was published in 1613. These are what our schoolboys would call very indifferent in point of elegance, and, as I should conceive, of accuracy: articles and expletives (as they used to be happily called), are perpetually employed for the sake of the metre, not of the sense. 72. Scotland might perhaps compete with Holland in this as well as in the preceding age. In the Delitiæ Poetarum Scotorum, published in 1637 by Arthur Jonston, we find about an equal produce of each century, the whole number being thirty seven. Those of Jonston himself, and some elegies by Scot of Scotstarvet, are among the best. The Scots certainly wrote Latin with a good ear and considerable elegance of phrase. A sort of critical controversy was carried on in the last century as to the versions of the psalms by Buchanan and Jonston. Though the national honour may seem equally secure by the superiority of either, it has, I believe, been usual in Scotland to maintain the older poet against all the world. I am nevertheless inclined to think that Jonston's psalms, all of which are in elegiac metre, do not fall short of those of Buchanan, either in elegance of style or in correctness of Latinity. In the 137th, with which Buchanan has taken much pains, he may be allowed the preference, but not at a great interval, and he has attained this superiority by too much diffuseness. CHAP. V. grams. Roxana. 73. Nothing good, and hardly tolerable, in a Owen's Epipoetical sense, had appeared in Latin verse among ourselves till this period. Owen's epigrams, (Audoeni Epigrammata,) a well-known collection, were published in 1607; unequal enough, they are sometimes neat and more often witty: but they scarcely aspire to the name of poetry. Alabaster, a man Alabaster's of recondite Hebrew learning, published in 1632 his tragedy of Roxana, which, as he tells us, was written about forty years before for one night's representation, probably at college, but had been lately printed by some plagiary as his own. He forgets however to inform the reader, and thus lays himself open to some recrimination, that his tragedy is very largely borrowed from the Dalida CHAP. V. May's Supplement to Lucan. of Groto, an Italian dramatist of the sixteenth 74. But the first Latin poetry which England can vaunt is May's Supplement to Lucan, in seven books, which carry down the history of the Pharsalia to the death of Cæsar. This is not only a very spirited poem, but, in many places at least, an excellent imitation. The versification, though it frequently reminds us of his model, is somewhat more negligent. May seems rarely to fall into Lucan's tumid extravagances, or to emulate his philosophical grandeur; but the narration is almost as impetuous and rapid, the images as thronged; and sometimes we have rather a happy imitation * I am indebted for the knowledge of this to a manuscript note I found in the copy of Alabaster's Roxana in the British Museum: Haud multum abest hæc tragedia a pura versione tragediæ Italicæ Ludovici Groti Cæci Hadriensis cui titulus Dalida. This induced me to read the tragedy of Groto, which I had not previously done. The title of Roxana runs thus: Roxana tragedia a plagiarii unguibus vindicata aucta et agnita ab autore Gul. Alabastro. Lond. 1632. V. of the ingenious sophisms Lucan is apt to employ. CHAP. The death of Cato and that of Cæsar are among the passages well worthy of praise. In some lines on Cleopatra's intrigue with Cæsar, being married to her brother, he has seized, with felicitous effect, not only the broken cadences, but the love of moral paradox we find in Lucan.* Latin 75. Many of the Latin poems of Milton were Milton's written in early life, some even at the age of poems. seventeen. His name, and the just curiosity of mankind to trace the development of a mighty genius, would naturally attract our regard. They are in themselves full of classical elegance, of thoughts natural and pleasing, of a diction culled with taste from the gardens of ancient poetry, of a versification remarkably well-cadenced and grateful to the ear. There is in them, without a marked originality, which Latin verse can rarely admit but at the price of some incorrectness or impropriety, a more individual display of the poet's mind than we usually find. "In the elegies," it is said by Warton, a very competent judge of Latin poetry, "Ovid was professedly Milton's model for language and versification. They are not however a perpetual and uniform tissue of Ovidian phraseology. With Ovid in view he has an original manner and character of his own, which exhibit a remarkable Nec crimen inesse Concubitu nimium tali, Cleopatra, putabunt Quis credat? justi ad thalamos Cleopatra mariti, |