taste of his age, or, perhaps, were written in ridicule of it; but no circumstance in his life is more remarkable, than that “Comus,” the “Monody on Lycidas,” the “Allegro and Penseroso,” and the “Hymn on the Nativity,” are unpolluted by the metaphysical jargon and affected language which the age esteemed indispensable to poetry.  This refusal to bend to an evil so prevailing, and which held out so many temptations to a youth of learning and genius, can only be ascribed to the natural chastity of Milton’s taste, improved by an earnest and eager study of the purest models of antiquity.

But besides Milton, who stood aloof and alone, there was a race of lesser poets, who endeavoured to glean the refuse of the applause reaped by Donne, Cowley, and their followers, by adopting ornaments which the latter had neglected, perhaps because they could be attained without much labour or abstruse learning.  The metaphysical poets, in their slip-shod pindarics, had totally despised, not only smoothness and elegance but the common rhythm of versification.  Many and long passages may be read without perceiving the least difference between them and barbarous jingling, ill-regulated prose; and in appearance, though the lines be divided into unequal lengths, the eye and ear acknowledge little difference between them and the inscription on a tomb-stone.  In a word, not only harmony of numbers, but numbers themselves, were altogether neglected; or if an author so far respected ancient practice as to make lines which could be scanned like verse, he had done his part, and was perfectly indifferent, although they sounded like prose.[12] But as melody will be always acceptable to the ear, some poets chose this neglected road to fame, and gained a portion of public favour, by attending to the laws of harmony, which their rivals had discarded.  Waller and Denham were the first who thus distinguished themselves; but, as Johnson happily remarks, what was acquired by Denham, was inherited by Waller.  Something there was in the situation of both these authors, which led them to depart from what was then the beaten path of composition.  They were men of rank, wealth, and fashion, and had experienced all the interruptions to deep study, with which such elevated station is naturally attended.  It was in vain for Waller, a wit, a courtier, and a politician; or for Denham, who was only distinguished at the university as a dreaming, dissipated gambler, to attempt to rival the metaphysical subtleties of Donne and Cowley, who had spent serious and sequestered lives in acquiring the knowledge and learning which they squandered in their poetry.  Necessity, therefore and perhaps a dawning of more simple taste, impelled these courtly poets to seek another and more natural mode of pleasing.  The melody of verse was a province unoccupied, and Waller, forming his rhythm upon the modulation of Fairfax, and other poets of the maiden reign, exhibited in his very first poem[13] striking marks of attention