May you but brief unfrequent visits find
  To prove you patient, your Ardelia kind.

No one can read her sensitive verses, and not be sure that she was the sweetest and most soothing of bed-side visitants.

It was a quiet life which Daphnis and Ardelia spent in the recesses of Eastwell Park.  They saw little company and paid few visits.  There was a stately excursion now and then, to the hospitable Thynnes at Longleat, and Anne Finch seldom omitted to leave behind her a metrical tribute to the beauties of that mansion.  They seem to have kept up little connection with the Court or with London.  There is no trace of literary society in this volume.  Nicholas Rowe twice sent down for their perusal translations which he had made; and from another source we learn that Lady Winchilsea had a brisk passage of compliments with Pope.  But these were rare incidents.  We have rather to think of the long years spent in the seclusion of Eastwell, by these gentle impoverished people of quality, the husband occupied with his mathematical studies, his painting, the care of his garden; the wife studying further afield in her romantic reverie, watching the birds in wild corners of her park, carrying her Tasso, hidden in a fold of her dress, to a dell so remote that she forgets the way back, and has to be carried home “in a Water-cart driven by one of the Underkeepers in his green Coat, with a Hazle-bough for a Whip.”  It is a little oasis of delicate and pensive refinement in that hot close of the seventeenth century, when so many unseemly monsters were bellowing in the social wilderness.

AMASIA

AMASIA:  or, The Works of the Muses.  A Collection of Poems.  In three volumes.  By Mr. John Hopkins.  London:  Printed by Tho.  Warren, for Bennet Banbury, at the Blue-Anchor, in the Lower-Walk of the New-Exchange, 1700.

It has often been remarked that if the author of the poorest collection of minor verse would accurately relate in his quavering numbers what his personal observations and adventures have been, his book would not be entirely without value.  But ninety-nine times out of a hundred, this is precisely what he cannot do.  His rhymes carry him whither he would not, and he is lost in a fog of imitated phrases and spurious sensations.  The very odd and very rare set of three little volumes, which now come before us, offer a curious exception to this rule.  The author of Amasia was no poet, but he possessed the faculty of writing with exactitude about himself.  He prattled on in heroic couplets from hour to hour, recording the tiny incidents of his life.  At first sight, his voluble miscellany seems a mere wilderness of tame verses, but when we examine it closely a story gradually evolves.  We come to know John Hopkins, and live in the intimacy of his circle.  His poems contain a novelette in solution.  So far as I can discover, nothing whatever is known of him save what he reveals of himself, and no one, I think, has ever searched his three uninviting volumes.  In the following paragraphs I have put together his story as it is to be found in the pages of Amasia.