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(1813)

The beard of Gray's Bard, "streaming like a meteor," had always struck me as an injudicious imitation of the Satanic ensign in the Paradise Lost, which

——full high advanced,

Shone like a meteor streaming to the wind:

till the other day I met with a passage in Heywood's old play, The Four Prentices of London, which it is difficult to imagine not to be the origin of the similitude in both poets. The line in Italics Gray has almost verbatim adopted—

In Sion towers hangs his victorious flag.

Blowing defiance this way; and its shews

Like a red meteor in the troubled air, Or like a blazing comet that foretells The fall of princes.

All here is noble, and as it should be. The comparison enlarges the thing compared without stretching it upon a violent rack, till it bursts with ridiculous explosion. The application of such gorgeous imagery to an old man's beard is of a piece with the Bardolfian bombast: "see you these meteors, these exhalations?" or the raptures of an Oriental lover, who should compare his mistress's nose to a watchtower or a steeple. The presageful nature of the meteor, which makes so fine an adjunct of the simile in Heywood, Milton has judiciously omitted, as less proper to his purpose; but he seems not to have overlooked the beauty of it, by his introducing the superstition in a succeeding book—

——like a comet burn'd,

That fires the length of Ophiuchus huge

In th' artic sky, and from his horrid hair

Shakes pestilence and war.