slender foods, will nauseate the full meal set before him in these lines; Where, through the long-drawn aisle, and fretted vault, The pealing anthem swells the note of praise. Of this last line, however, criticism must remark, that either the composition of the thought is faulty, or the arrangement of the expression is inverted. It is not the anthem that swells the note, but the agglomeration of notes that swells the anthem. I am content to suppose this to have been his meaning; communicated in a mode of arrangement, unpleasing to an English reader in his own language, but of which he admits the propriety in Latin compositions. I have seen this line most correctly transferred into that language in many different modes, all of them meritorious, in a selection from Exercises written by the Boys of the first form in Merchant Taylor's School, and sent to me, with a view, of which I will not gratify my vanity with the publication; though justice requires that of the worthy master I should solace the labours, by recording the unwearied diligence, and by bearing testimony to those abilities that are sedulously exerted in forming the rising hopes of another age. XI. Fault has already been found with Gray for conforming to the affected use of participles in place of adjectives. "Honied spring;" madding crowd, &c." "Storied urn," is of the same family, and even more exceptionable, because liable to misapprehension. The intended meaning of the epithet is, "having stories figured upon it." In the Pense an artificial increase of dimension, by a minute and tedious enumeration. IX. In the three first lines of the ninth stanza is inculcated a serious truth, by way of check to the sneers of grandeur and ambition. But Beauty is forced awkwardly into the company of these scoffers. As she was no accomplice in their mockery, she is unjustly, as well as unpolitely, involved in their mortification. Of the third line the expression is faulty, because it is obscure. The signification of the word " await," is not yet very pointedly ascertained. Whether does the hour of death await pomp and beauty? or do they await it? Both modes of phraseology have examples in our language. "Even as the wretch, condemn'd to lose his life, is said by Fairfax. But the other is the more generally received We rausage. ther accustom ourselves to say, that" the evil awaits the sufferer;" than that "the sufferer awaits the evil." According to this view, it should be awaits. But, as by this means the nominative and the verb would change places in the syntax, and the arrangement be awkward to an English ear; in several editions, and particularly in Mr Mason's, it has been printed "await." There is a difficulty both ways. When, in the use of any expression, an author finds himself thus troubled and beset, he ought to abandon it altogether, and substitute one of more undisputed capability. The stanza concludes with a conceit. It is not true, that "the path of glory leads but to the grave." Nor is it because it is the path of glory that it leads thither at all. Parnell's thought, with less conceit, has in it more of interest, and much more of piety. "Death's but a path that must be trod, In a series of stanzas that follow, the author sets himself to expostulate with the proud; and undertakes to prove the absurdity of the contempt which he supposes them ready to pour on the "unhonoured dead," for their want of more superb monuments, from a regular succession of common places : 1. It was no "fault" of theirs that they had not such monuments. 2. They would have stood them in little stead, had they had them. 3. Worth and Genius may have existed without them. 4. It was the injustice of fortune that made them want them. 5. The account was balanced for them another way. Night-Piece. |