phical poem; and in that belief he was encouraged by his friend and commentator Selden, to whose name the epithet of learned was in old times always and deservedly affixed. With how becoming a sense of its dignity and variety the Poet entered upon his subject, these lines may shew:

Thou powerful God of flames, in verse divinely great,
Touch my invention so with thy true genuine heat,
That high and noble things I slightly may not tell,
Nor light and idle toys my lines may vainly swell;
But as my subject serves so high or low to strain,
And to the varying earth so suit my varying strain,
That Nature in my work thou mayest thy power avow ;
That as thou first found'st art, and didst her rules allow,
So I, to thine own self that gladly near would be,
May herein do the best in imitating thee.

As thou hast here a hill, a vale there, there a flood,
A mead here, there a heath, and now and then a wood,
These things so in my song I naturally may show ;
Now as the mountain high, then as the valley low;
Here fruitful as the mead; there as the heath be bare,
Then as the gloomy wood I may be rough, tho' rare.

I would not say of this Poet, as Kirkpatrick says of him, that when he

-his Albion sung

With their own praise the echoing vallies rung ;

His bounding Muse o'er every mountain rode

And every river warbled where he flowed;

but I may say that if instead of sending his Muse to ride over the mountains, and resting contented with her report, he had ridden or walked over them himself, his poem would better have deserved that praise for accuracy which has been bestowed upon it by critics who had themselves no knowledge which could enable them to say whether it were accurate or not. Camden was more diligent; he visited some of the remotest counties of which he wrote.

This is not said with any intention of detracting from Michael Drayton's fame: the most elaborate criticism could neither raise him above the station which he holds in English literature, nor degrade him from it. He is extolled not beyond the just measure of his deserts in his epitaph which has been variously ascribed to Ben Jonson, to Randolph, and to Quarles, but with most probability to the former, who knew and admired and loved him.

He was a poet by nature, and carefully improved his talent ;-one who sedulously laboured to deserve the approbation of such as were capable of appreciating, and cared nothing for the censures which others might pass upon him. "Like me that list," he

says,

my honest rhymes,

Nor care for critics, nor regard the times.

And though he is not a poet virúm volitare per ora, nor one of those whose better fortune it is to live in the hearts of their devoted admirers, yet what he deemed his greatest work will be preserved by its subject; some of his minor poems have merit enough in their execution to ensure their preservation, and no one who studies poetry as an art will think his time mis-spent in perusing the whole,-if he have any real love for the art which he is pursuing. The youth who enters upon that pursuit without a feeling of respect and gratitude for those elder poets, who by their labours have prepared the way for him, is not likely to produce any thing himself that will be held in remembrance by posterity.

CHAPTER XXXVII. P. I.

ANECDOTES OF PETER HEYLYN and LIGHTFOOT, EXEMPLIFYING THAT GREAT KNOWLEDGE IS NOT ALWAYS APPLICABLE TO LITTLE THINGS: AND THAT AS CHARITY BEGINS AT HOME, SO IT MAY WITH EQUAL TRUTH SOMETIMES BE SAID THAT KNOWLEDGE ENDS THERE.

A scholar in his study knows the stars,

Their motion and their influence, which are fix'd,
And which are wandering; can decypher seas,
And give each several land his proper bounds:
But set him to the compass, he's to seek,
Where a plain pilot can direct his course
From hence unto both the Indies.

HEYWOOD.

THERE was a Poet who wrote a descriptive poem, and then took a journey to see the scenes which he had described. Better late than never, he thought; and thought wisely in so thinking. Drayton was not likely to have acted thus upon

after consideration, if in the first conception of his subject he did not feel sufficient ardour for such an undertaking. It would have required indeed a spirit of enterprize as unusual in those days as it is ordinary now. Many a long day's ride must he have taken over rough roads, and in wild countries; and many a weary step would it have cost him, and many a poor lodging must he have put up with at night, where he would have found poor fare, if not cold comfort. So he thought it enough, in many if not most parts, to travel by the map, and believed himself to have been sufficiently "punctual and exact in giving unto every province its peculiar bounds, in laying out their several land-marks, tracing the course of most of the principal rivers, and setting forth the situation and estate of the chiefest towns."

Peter Heylyn who speaks thus of his own exactness in a work partaking enough of the same nature as the Poly-olbion to be remembered here, though it be in prose and upon a wider subject, tells a humourous anecdote of himself, in the preface to his Cosmography. "He that shall think this work imperfect," says he, “(though I