best; for as ladies wear black patches to make their complexions seem fairer than they are, so when an illustration is more obscure than the sense that went before it, it must of necessity make it appear clearer than it did; for contraries are best set off with contraries.  He has found out a new sort of poetical Georgics—­a trick of sowing wit like clover-grass on barren subjects, which would yield nothing before.  This is very useful for the times, wherein, some men say, there is no room left for new invention.  He will take three grains of wit like the elixir, and, projecting it upon the iron age, turn it immediately into gold.  All the business of mankind has presently vanished, the whole world has kept holiday; there has been no men but heroes and poets, no women but nymphs and shepherdesses:  trees have borne fritters, and rivers flowed plum-porridge.  When he writes, he commonly steers the sense of his lines by the rhyme that is at the end of them, as butchers do calves by the tail.  For when he has made one line, which is easy enough, and has found out some sturdy hard word that will but rhyme, he will hammer the sense upon it, like a piece of hot iron upon an anvil, into what form he pleases.  There is no art in the world so rich in terms as poetry; a whole dictionary is scarce able to contain them; for there is hardly a pond, a sheep-walk, or a gravel-pit in all Greece, but the ancient name of it is become a term of art in poetry.  By this means, small poets have such a stock of able hard words lying by them, as dryades, hamadryades, aoenides, fauni, nymphae, sylvani, &c. that signify nothing at all; and such a world of pedantic terms of the same kind, as may serve to furnish all the new inventions and “thorough reformations” that can happen between this and Plato’s great year.

ANDREW MARVELL.

(1621-1678.)

XVI.  NOSTRADAMUS’S PROPHECY.

    From Political Satires and other Pieces.  It is curious to note
    how much of the prophecy was actually fulfilled.

  For faults and follies London’s doom shall fix,
  And she must sink in flames in “sixty-six”;
  Fire-balls shall fly, but few shall see the train,
  As far as from Whitehall to Pudding-Lane;
  To burn the city, which again shall rise,
  Beyond all hopes aspiring to the skies,
  Where vengeance dwells.  But there is one thing more
  (Tho’ its walls stand) shall bring the city low’r;
  When legislators shall their trust betray,
  Saving their own, shall give the rest away;
  And those false men by th’ easy people sent,
  Give taxes to the King by Parliament;
  When barefaced villains shall not blush to cheat
  And chequer doors shall shut up Lombard Street. 
  When players come to act the part of queens,
  Within the curtains, and behind the scenes: 
  When no man knows in whom to put his trust,