Читать книгу The Collected Works of Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb - Charles Lamb - Страница 106

No busy steps the grass-grown footway tread,

But all the bloomy flush of life is fled—

All but yon widow'd solitary thing,

That feebly bends beside the plashy spring;

She, wretched matron, forced, in age, for bread,

To strip the brook with mantling cresses spread,

Scott

Our author's language, in this place, is very defective in correctness. After mentioning the general privation of the "bloomy flush of life," the exceptionary "all but" includes, as part of that "bloomy flush," an aged decrepit matron; that is to say, in plain prose, "the bloomy flush of life is all fled but one old woman."

Ritson

Yet Milton could write:

Far from all resort of mirth,

Save the cricket on the hearth,

Or the bell-man's drowsy charm—

and I dare say he was right. O never let a quaker, or a woman, try their hand at being witty, any more than a Tom Brown affect to speak by the spirit!

Scott

——Aaron Hill, who, although, in general, a bombastic writer, produced some pieces of merit, particularly the Caveat, an allegorical satire on Pope.

Ritson

Say rather his verses on John Dennis, beginning "Adieu, unsocial excellence!" which are implicitly a finer satire on Pope than twenty Caveats. All that Pope could or did say against Dennis, is there condensed; and what he should have said, and did not, for him, is there too.[44]

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