Negative Love. I NEVER stoop'd so low as they Know what gives fuel to their fire. JOSEPH HALL Was born at Bristow-park, in the county of Leicester, 1574, and having received a school-education at his native place, was sent at the age of 15 to Emanuel college Cambridge, where he was distinguished as a wit, a poet, and a rhetorician. In 1612 he took the degree of D. D. was presented to the deanery of Worcester in 1616; promoted to the see of Exeter in 1627; and in 1641 translated to Norwich, of which he was deprived by sequestration in 1643. He then retired to a small estate, where he ended his life in 1656; plenus dierum, plenus virtutum. The various literary labours of his long life, and the persecutions to which he was exposed in his old age, are recited in every dictionary of biography. His only poetical compositions, entitled "Virgidemiarum," satires in six books, 1597, 1598, 1599, 12mo. (reprinted at Oxford, 1753, and in Anderson's Poets,) are, from their subject, by no means suited to the present publication; but it is hoped that the reader will excuse the insertion of one specimen from a work which must, even now, be considered as a model of elegance. The following satire is a ridicule on the fashion of attempt. ing to subject our language to the rules of Greek and Latin prosody, a fashion introduced by Gabriel Harvey, encouraged by Sir Philip Sidney and others, and not discouraged by Spenser. The extract here made has a particular allusion to Stanyhurst's translation of part of the Æneid, which had before been ridiculed in similar terms by Nash. LIB. I. SAT. VI. ANOTHER SCorns the home-spun thread of rhymes, And headstrong dactyls making music meet: The drawling spondees, pacing it below: BEN JONSON Was born in 1574, and died in 1637. SONG. [From "The Forest."] COME, my Celia, let us prove, "Tis no sin love's fruit to steal ; But the sweet theft to reveal, To be taken, to be seen,— These have crimes accounted been. SONG. To Celia. [From the same.] DRINK to me only with thine eyes, And I'll not look for wine. The thirst that from the soul doth rise But might I of Jove's nectar sup, I sent thee late a rosy wreath, It could not withered be; Since when it grows and smells, I swear, SONG. [From "The Silent Woman."] STILL to be neat, still to be drest, |