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[5] “To begin then with Shakspeare:  he was the man who of all modern,
and perhaps ancient poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul. 
All the images of nature were still present to him, and he drew them not
laboriously, but luckily:  when he describes any thing, you more than see
it, you feel it too.   Those who accuse him to have wanted learning, give
him the greater commendation:  he was naturally learned:  he needed not
the spectacles of books to read nature; he looked inwards and found her
there.   I cannot say, he is every where alike; were he so, I should do
him injury to compare him with the greatest of mankind.   He is many times
flat, and insipid; his comic wit degenerating into clenches, his serious
swelling into bombast.   But he is always great, when some great occasion
is presented to him.   No man can say, he ever had a fit subject for his
wit, and did not then raise himself as high above the rest of poets,
Quantum lenta solent inter Viburna Cupressi.”
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It should appear, in tracing the history of our literature, that poetry had, at the period of which we are speaking, in general declined, by successive gradations, from the poetry of imagination, in the time of Elizabeth, to the poetry of fancy (to adopt a modern distinction) in the time of Charles I.; and again from the poetry of fancy to that of wit, as in the reign of Charles II. and Queen Anne.  It degenerated into the poetry of mere common places, both in style and thought, in the succeeding reigns:  as in the latter part of the last century, it was transformed, by means of the French Revolution, into the poetry of paradox.

Of Donne I know nothing but some beautiful verses to his wife, dissuading her from accompanying him on his travels abroad, and some quaint riddles in verse, which the Sphinx could not unravel.

Waller still lives in the name of Sacharissa; and his lines on the death of Oliver Cromwell shew that he was a man not without genius and strength of thought.

Marvel is a writer of nearly the same period, and worthy of a better age.  Some of his verses are harsh, as the words of Mercury; others musical, as is Apollo’s lute.  Of the latter kind are his boat-song, his description of a fawn, and his lines to Lady Vere.  His lines prefixed to Paradise Lost are by no means the most favourable specimen of his powers.

Butler’s Hudibras is a poem of more wit than any other in the language.  The rhymes have as much genius in them as the thoughts; but there is no story in it, and but little humour.  Humour is the making others act or talk absurdly and unconsciously:  wit is the pointing out and ridiculing that absurdity consciously, and with more or less ill-nature.  The fault of Butler’s poem is not that it has too much wit, but that it has not an equal quantity of other things.  One would suppose that the starched manners and sanctified grimace of the times in which he lived, would of themselves have been sufficiently rich in ludicrous incidents and characters; but they seem rather to have irritated his spleen, than to have drawn forth his powers of picturesque imitation.  Certainly if we compare Hudibras with Don Quixote in this respect, it seems rather a meagre and unsatisfactory performance.