To have thee bounde in chaynes of sleepe as here; THE CHARME. Sonne of Erebus and Night! Poppy and mandragoras, With like simples not a fewe, Hang for ever droppes of dewe ; With this Greeke no longer keepe. Thrice I charge thee by my wand, Thrice with moly from my hand Doe I touch Ulysses' eyes, And with the jaspis.-Then arise, This is the hepta-syllabic measure which Fletcher rendered so attractive in his Faithful Shepherdess, and which from it's adoption by succeeding writers, particularly Milton, has almost become appropriated to the rhyming speeches of the Mask and Pastoral Drama, as distinguished from their songs and dialogue. With these writers the Mask may be said to have begun and ended; for though a few pieces are to be found under the same title, or that of Operas, in the works of Dryden and others, yet upon the whole, the distinct species of drama, both in character and mode of performance, had gone by :-the witchery that had consented to visit the dreams of an earlier and less sophisticated age, had vanished. The Puritans, who first put an end to them, and who, for the most part, were as disagreeable a body of persons as Liberty could have taken it into her head to make use of, quarrelled with every thing they found established, liberal as well as despotic; and the golden age of English poetry, in it's feeling as well as it's freaks, in it's sublimity and love of nature as well as it's sports and extravagancies, closed at the very moment when it might have given additional lustre to the rise of freedom. The harsh and disputatious period that succeeded, and the still more unfeeling debauchery of the one after, effectually prevented the re-appearance of genuine poetry. The Muse, it is true, had not quite forsaken the land, nor given it up to a hopelessness of better days. In the person of Milton, she had retired into a sacred obscurity, and built herself, as it were, an invisible bower, where the ascension of her voice, and the mingling of her majestic organ, might be heard at intervals by a few favoured ears;—but the rest of the country was occupied with a very different succession of sounds; and after " a sullen interval of war," came in The barbarous dissonance Of Bacchus and his revellers. In short, both Puritan and Cavalier, though in different ways and for different objects, did their best to d substitute words for things, and art for nature; and hence arose in this country all which has been since understood as verse distinguished from poetry. And here might be discerned the real poetical corruption, of which the critics afterwards complained, and which they confounded with every species of exuberant fancy. Masks, which though of a lawless nature in their incidents referred their feelings and expressions to nature, were the exuberance of an age of real poets; it was conceits that first marked the reverse; and the introduction of satire, of declamation, and of what has been called the reasoning spirit in poetry, has maintained the perversion more or less ever since, or at least till within a very late period. But not to lose sight of the main subject.-It is obvious from what has been seen of the nature of Masks, that they contained a good deal of real poetry, and might have been very entertaining to those who nevertheless knew how to set a proper value on the more regular works of imagination. It is equally obvious, however, at the same time, that from the nature of their object in general, they ran a chance of not living beyond their day, or at any rate of passing unnoticed by the great mass of readers among the larger and more ambitious works of their authors. This has accordingly been the case. The only way to secure them a better fate, was to contrive such additional touches of description and human nature, as should supply the loss of the particular interest by what was universally and perpetually engaging. We have seen what prevented the writers in most instances from having sufficient zeal for the composition, and what approaches it made to the chance of vitality in proportion as the object of the panegyric was respectable, the subject capable of natural embellishment, or the writer freed from the trammels of a particular allusion. The want of choice and inclination however usually prevailed over the ambition of the author, who was most likely employed in works of more general interest; and while we can trace the best pieces of this description to the circumstances above-mentioned, as in the instances of Beaumont and Browne, yet there is an air, it must be confessed, of constraint |