discontinuance, revived the Olympian games, and sum→ moned thereunto from all parts the liveliest and activest persons that were; had enjoined them, before they fell to their games, to do honour to these nuptials. The Olympian games portend to the match celebrity, victory, and felicity.

"The fabric was a mountain with two descents, and served with two traverses. At the entrance of the king the first traverse was drawn, which was a pendant of a hill to the life with divers boscages and grovets upon the steep or hanging grounds thereof; and at the foot of the hill, four delicate fountains running with water, and bordered with sedges and waterflowers.

"Iris first appeared; and presently after, Mercury, striving to overtake her. Iris appareled in a robe of discoloured taffeta, figured in variable colours like the rainbow, a cloudy wreath on her head, and tresses. Mercury in doublet and hose of white taffeta, a white

hat, wings on his shoulders and feet, his caducens in

his hand, speaking to Iris as followeth :

Mercury. Stay, stay,

Stay, light-foot Iris, for thou striv'st in vain;

My wings are nimbler than thy feet.

Dissembling Mercury! my messages

Ask honest haste, not like those wanton ones

Your thund'ring father sends.

Mer.

Stay, foolish maid!

Or I will take my rise upon a hill,
When I perceive thee seated on a cloud
In all the painted glory that thou hast,
And never cease to clap my willing wings,
Till I catch hold of thy discoloured bow,
And shiver it, beyond the angry pow'r

Of your curst mistress to make up again.

Iris. Hermes, forbear. Juno will chide and strike.

Is great Jove jealous that I am employed

On her love-errands? She did never yet
Clasp weak mortality in her white arms,
As he hath often done.

&c. &c.

All this, it must be confessed, is sufficiently wild; yet the author, we see, thinks of his proprieties in the midst of it; and the critic, who is about to cry out against the dancing statues, will probably check himself, on the sudden, by recollecting the walking images and peripatetic footstools in Homer. In fact, it is of these very images that the poet has made use. The conclusion of the piece is very quiet and pleasing :

Peace and silence be the guide

To the man, and to the bride.

If there be a joy yet new

In marriage, let it fall on you.

&c.

In the Cœlum Britannicum, which represents the Pagan heaven as having resolved, out of pure emulation of the British court, to lead a better life and rid the constellations of their unworthy occupants, a variety of allegorical persons come before Mercury and Momus to shew the extensiveness of their sovereignty and lay claim to the vacant places. Among others, Poverty

and Pleasure appear, the former of whom is described

as "

a woman of a pale colour, large brims of a hat upon her head, through which her hair started up like a Fury; her robe was of a dark colour full of patches; about one of her hands was tyed a chaine of iron, to which was fastned a weighty stone, which she bore up under her arm." Mercury after hearing her pretensions, which are of the Stoical cast, dismisses her with an invective, which begins thus :—

Thou dost presume too much, poor needy wretch,

To claim a station in the firmament,

Because thy humble cottage, or thy tub,
Nurses some lazy or pedantique virtue,

In the cheap sunshine, or by shady springs,
With roots and pot-herbs; where thy rigid hand,
Tearing those human passions from the mind,
Upon whose stock fair blooming virtues flourish,
Degradeth Nature and benumbeth sense,

And Gorgon-like, turns active men to stone.

The picture of Pleasure is that of "

a young woman

with a smiling face, in a light lascivious habit, adorned

with silver and gold, her temples crowned with a garland of roses, and over that a rainbow circling her head down to her shoulders." Poverty's speech is followed with a dance of Gypsies, Pleasure's with that of the Five Senses: but Mercury dismisses her in like manner, commencing, among other images of a less original complexion, with some that are very lively and forcible :

Bewitching Syren, gilded rottenness,
Thou hast with cunning artifice displayed
Th' enamel'd outside, and the honied verge
Of the fair cup, where deadly poison lurks;
Within, a thousand sorrows dance the round;
And, like a shell, Pain circles thee without;
Grief is the shadow waiting on thy steps,

Which, as thy joyes 'gin tow'rds their West decline,
Doth to a gyant's spreading form extend

Thy dwarfish stature.

For the third, or lyrical part of the Mask, nothing can equal in point of richness and harmonious variety the songs in Comus,-that, for instance, beginning