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expreffions, and to leave curiofity often unfatisfied. What he did not tell, cannot however now be known. I muft therefore recommend the perufal of his work, to which my narration be confidered only as a flender fupplement.

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COWLEY, like other poets who have written with narrow views, and inftead of tracing intellectual pleasure to its natural fources in the mind of

man, paid their court to temporary prejudices, has been at one time too much praised, and too much neglected at another.

Wit, like all other things fubject by their nature to the choice of man, has its changes and fashions, and at different times takes different forms. About the beginning of the feventeenth century appeared a race of writers that may be. termed the metaphyfical poets; of whom, in a criticism on the works of Cowley, the laft of the race, it is not improper to give some account.

The metaphyfical poets were men of learning, and to fhew their learning was their whole endeavour; but, unluckily refolving to fhew it in rhyme, instead of writing poetry, they only: wrote verses, and very often fuch verses, as ftood the trial of the finger better. than of the ear; for the modulation

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was fo imperfect, that they were only found to be verfes by counting the fyltables.

If the father of criticifin has rightly denominated poetry τέχνη μιμητικής an imitative art, these writers will, without great wrong, lose their right: to the name of poets; for they cannot be faid to have imitated any thing; they neither copied nature nor life; neither painted the forms of matter, nor represented the operations of intel-.

lect.

Thofe however who deny them to be poets, allow them to be wits. Dryden confeffes of himself and his contemporaries, that they fall below Donne

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in

in wit, but maintains that they furpass

him in poetry..

If Wit be well described by Pope, as

being "that which has been often

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thought, but was never before fo well "expreffed," they certainly never attained, nor ever fought it; for they endeavoured to be fingular in their thoughts, and were careless of their diction. But Pope's account of wit is undoubtedly erroneous: he depreffes. it below its natural dignity, and re-duces it from ftrength of thought to happiness of language..

If by a more noble and more ade quate conception that be confidered as Wit, which is at once natural and new, that which, though not obvious, is,

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upon its firft production, acknowledged to be juft; if it be that, which he that never found it, wonders how he miffed; to wit of this kind the metaphyfical poets have feldom rifen. Their thoughts are often new, but feldom natural; they are not obvious, but neither are they juft; and the reader, far from wondering that he miffed them, wonders more frequently by what perversenefs of industry they were ever found.

But Wit, abftracted from its effects upon the hearer, may be more rigorously and philofophically confidered as a kind of difcordia concors; a combination of diffimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike. Of wit, thus defined, they have

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