and tenderness of his feelings, for his bashful and retiring manners, for the excellence of his Latin compositions, and for his solitary walks, pursued in a path they still point out below the elms which skirt a meadow on the banks of the Cherwell,—­a river, we need scarcely say, which there weds the Isis.  It was in such lonely evening or Saturday strolls that he probably acquired the habit of pensive reverie to which we owe many of the finest of his speculations in after days, such as that in Spectator, No. 565, beginning, “I was yesterday, about sunset, walking in the open fields, when insensibly the night fell upon me,” &c.

Prose English essays, however, were as yet strangers to his pen.  His ambition was to be a poet, and while still under twenty-two, he produced and printed some complimentary verses to Dryden, then declining in years, and fallen into comparative neglect.  The old poet was pleased with the homage of the young aspirant, which was as graceful in expression as it was generous in purpose.  For instance, alluding to Dryden’s projected translation of “Ovid,” he says, that “Ovid,” thus transformed, shall “reveal”

  “A nobler change than he himself can tell.”

This, however, although happy, starts a different view of the subject.  It suggests the idea that most translations are metamorphoses to the worse, like that of a living person into a dead tree, or at least of a superior into an inferior being.  In Pope’s “Iliad,” you have the metamorphosis of an eagle into a nightingale; in Dryden’s “Virgil,” you have a stately war-horse transformed into a hard-trotting hackney; in Hoole’s versions of the Italian Poets, you have nymphs nailed up in timber; while, on the other hand, in Coleridge’s “Wallenstein,” you have the “nobler change,” spoken of by Addison, of—­shall we say?-a cold and stately holly-tree turned into a murmuring and oracular oak.

That, after thus introducing himself to Dryden, he met him occasionally seems certain, although the rumour circulated by Spence that he taught the old man to sit late and drink hard seems ridiculous.  Dryden introduced him to Congreve, and through Congreve he made the valuable acquaintance of Charles Montague, then leader of the Whigs in the House of Commons, and Chancellor of the Exchequer.

He afterwards published a translation of that part of the “Fourth Book of the Georgics” referring to bees, on which Dryden, who had procured a preface to his own complete translation of the same poem from Addison, complimented him by saying—­“After his bees, my later swarm is scarcely worth hiving.”  He published, too, a poem on “King William,” and an “Account of the Principal English Poets,” in which he ventures on a character of Spenser ere he had read his works.  It thus is, as might have been expected, poor and non-appreciative, and speaks of Spenser as a poet pretty nearly forgotten.  Some time after this, he collected a volume, entitled, “Musae Anglicanae,” in which he inserted all his early Latin verses.