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BIBLIOGRAPHY. |
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his selection, are forty-three. Of these, more than a third part are either men of no name, as Stone-street, Stafford, Harvey, or of no distinguished reputation in poetry, as Walsh, Tate, Stepney, Dennis, and others. Then the selection is made so unequally, that three of his number, viz. Cowley, Butler's Hudibras, and Dryden, have furnished him with at least three-fifths of the whole. Indeed he appears to have had very little knowledge of our poets, even of those who lived and wrote but fourscore years before himself. Ellis, in his Specimens of the Early English Poets, has given extracts from upwards of forty authors in the reigns of Charles the First and Second, not one of whom is mentioned in Bysshe's catalogue. Here is another proof of the same: he affirms that " we have no entire works composed in verses of twelve syllables ;" he must therefore have been unacquainted with Drayton.
Not long after Glover's Leonidas appeared, Dr. Pemberton, a great friend of the author, published Observations on Poetry', especially epic, occasioned by the late poem on Leonidas, 1738. The versification of that poem is very regular: and the design of the observations, in part, is to justify and extol that regularity; which, in an instance or two, is done without foundation. The sixth section of the Observations is upon the principles of verse; and here his singular notions, and the severe rules he would establish, might startle and discourage a young poet. He disallows all licence, all irregularity. He asserts that no irregular composition |
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