You shall start up young viceroys,

And have your punks and punketees, my Surly,
And unto thee, I speak it first, BE RICH.
Where is my Subtle, there? Within, ho!

Face. [within] Sir, he'll come to you, by and by.
Mam. That is his Firedrake,

His Lungs, his Zephyrus, he that puffs his coals,
Till he firk nature up in her own centre.

You are not faithful, Sir. This night I'll change
All that is metal in my house to gold:

And early in the morning, will I send
To all the plumbers and the pewterers

And buy their tin and lead up; and to Lothbury,
For all the copper.

Surly. What, and turn that too?

Mam. Yes, and I'll purchase Devonshire and Cornwall, And make them perfect Indies! You admire now ? Surly. No, faith.

Mam. But when you see th' effects of the great medicine, Of which one part projected on a hundred

Of Mercury, or Venus, or the Moon,

Shall turn it to as many of the Sun;

Nay, to a thousand, so ad infinitum;
You will believe me.

Surly. Yes, when I see't, I will—
Mam. Ha! why?

Do you think I fable with you? I assure you,

He that has once the flower of the Sun,

The perfect ruby, which we call Elixir,

Not only can do that, but, by its virtue,
Can confer honour, love, respect, long life;

Give safety, valour, yea, and victory,

To whom he will. In eight and twenty days,
I'll make an old man of fourscore, a child.
Surly. No doubt; he's that already.

Mam. Nay, I mean,

Restore his years, renew him, like an eagle,

To the fifth age; make him get sons and daughters,

Young giants; as our philosophers have done,

The ancient patriarchs, afore the flood,

But taking, once a week, on a knife's point,
The quantity of a grain of mustard of it;

Become stout Marses, and beget young Cupids.

*

*

*

*

You are incredulous.

*

*

Surly. Faith, I have a humour,

I would not willingly be gull'd. Your stone

Cannot transmute me.

Mam. Pertinax Surly,

Mam. Of the philosopher's stone, and in High Dutch.
Surly. Did Adam write, Sir, in High Dutch?

Mam. He did;

Which proves it was the primitive tongue.

*

*

*

*

[Enter Face, as a servant.

How now !

Do we succeed? Is our day come, and holds it?
Face. The evening will set red upon you, Sir:
You have colour for it, crimson; the red ferment
Has done his office: three hours hence prepare you
To see projection.

Mam. Pertinax, my Surly,

Again I say to thee, aloud, Be rich.

This day thou shalt have ingots; and to-morrow
Give lords the affront.

*

* * * Where's thy master ?

Face. At his prayers, Sir, he;

Good man, he's doing his devotions
For the success.

Mam. Lungs, I will set a period

To all thy labours; thou shalt be the master

Of my seraglio . . .

For I do mean

I will have all my beds blown up, not stuft:
Down is too hard; and then, mine oval room
Fill'd with such pictures as Tiberius took
From Elephantis, and dull Aretine
But coldly imitated. Then, my glasses
Cut in more subtle angles, to disperse
And multiply the figures, as I walk.

*

*

* My mists

I'll have of perfume, vapoured about the room
To lose ourselves in; and my baths, like pits
To fall into from whence we will come forth,
And roll us dry in gossamer and roses.
Is it arriv'd at ruby? Where I spy

A wealthy citizen, or a rich lawyer,

Have a sublimed pure wife, unto that fellow

I'll send a thousand pound to be my cuckold.
Face. And I shall carry it?

Mam. No. I'll have no bawds.

But fathers and mothers. They will do it best,
Best of all others, And my flatterers

Shall be the pure and gravest of divines

That I can get for money.

We will be brave, Puffe, now we have the medicine.

My meat shall all come in, in Indian shells,

Dishes of agat set in gold, and studded

With emeralds, sapphires, hyacinths, and rubies.
The tongues of carps, dormice, and camel's heels
Boil'd in the spirit of Sol, and dissolv'd pearl,
Apicius' diet, 'gainst the epilepsy;

And I will eat these broths with spoons of amber,
Headed with diamond and carbuncle.

My footboys shall eat pheasants, calver'd salmons,
Knots, godwits, lampreys; I myself will have
The beards of barbels serv'd instead of salads;
Oil'd mushrooms; and the swelling unctuous paps
Of a fat pregnant sow, newly cut off,

Drest with an exquisite and poignant sauce;
For which I'll say unto my cook, There's gold,
Go forth, and be a knight.

Face. Sir, I'll go look
A little, how it heightens.
Mam. Do. My shirts

I'll have of taffeta-sarsnet, soft and light,
As cobwebs; and for all my other raiment,
It shall be such as might provoke the Persian,
Were he to teach the world riot anew.

My gloves of fishes and birds' skins, perfum'd
With gums of Paradise and eastern air.

Surly. And do you think to have the stone with this?
Mam. No, I do think t' have all this with the stone.
Surly. Why, I have heard, he must be homo frugi,
A pious, holy, and religious man,

One free from mortal sin, a very virgin.

Mam. That makes it, Sir, he is so; but I buy it.
My venture brings it me. He, honest wretch,
A notable, superstitious, good soul,

Has worn his knees bare, and his slippers bald,
With prayer and fasting for it, and, Sir, let him
Do it alone, for me, still; here he comes;
Not a profane word afore him: 'tis poison.'

Act II. scene 1.

Rule

I have only to add a few words on Beaumont and Fletcher. a Wife and Have a Wife, the Chances, and the Wild Goose Chase, the original of the Inconstant, are superior in style and execution to any thing of Ben Jonson's. They are, indeed, some of the best comedies on the stage; and one proof that they are so, is, that they still hold possession of it. They shew the utmost alacrity of in

vention in contriving ludicrous distresses, and the utmost spirit in bearing up against, or impatience and irritation under them. Don John, in the Chances, is the heroic in comedy. Leon, in Rule a Wife and Have a Wife, is a fine exhibition of the born gentleman and natural fool: the Copper Captain is sterling to this hour: his mistress, Estifania, only died the other day with Mrs. Jordan: and the two grotesque females, in the same play, act better than the Witches in Macbeth.

LECTURE III

ON COWLEY, BUTLER, SUCKLING, ETHEREGE, &C. THE metaphysical poets or wits of the age of James and Charles 1. whose style was adopted and carried to a more dazzling and fantastic excess by Cowley in the following reign, after which it declined, and gave place almost entirely to the poetry of observation and reasoning, are thus happily characterised by Dr. Johnson.

'The metaphysical poets were men of learning, and to show their learning was their whole endeavour: but unluckily resolving to show it in rhyme, instead of writing poetry, they only wrote verses, and very often such verses as stood the trial of the finger better than of the ear; for the modulation was so imperfect, that they were only found to be verses by counting the syllables.

"If the father of criticism has rightly denominated poetry réxvn μμntikn, an imitative art, these writers will, without great wrong, lose their right to the name of poets, for they cannot be said to have imitated any thing; they neither copied nature nor life; neither painted the forms of matter, nor represented the operations of intellect.'

The whole of the account is well worth reading: it was a subject for which Dr. Johnson's powers both of thought and expression were better fitted than any other man's. If he had had the same capacity for following the flights of a truly poetic imagination, or for feeling the finer touches of nature, that he had felicity and force in detecting and exposing the aberrations from the broad and beaten path of propriety and common sense, he would have amply deserved the reputation he has acquired as a philosophical critic.

The writers here referred to (such as Donne, Davies, Crashaw, and others) not merely mistook learning for poetry-they thought any thing was poetry that differed from ordinary prose and the natural impression of things, by being intricate, far-fetched, and improbable. Their style was not so properly learned as metaphysical;

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that is to say, whenever, by any violence done to their ideas, they could make out an abstract likeness or possible ground of comparison, they forced the image, whether learned or vulgar, into the service of the Muses. Any thing would do to hitch into a rhyme,' no matter whether striking or agreeable, or not, so that it would puzzle the reader to discover the meaning, and if there was the most remote circumstance, however trifling or vague, for the pretended comparison to hinge upon. They brought ideas together not the most, but the least like; and of which the collision produced not light, but obscurity-served not to strengthen, but to confound. Their mystical verses read like riddles or an allegory. They neither belong to the class of lively or severe poetry. They have not the force of the one, nor the gaiety of the other; but are an ill-assorted, unprofitable union of the two together, applying to serious subjects that quaint and partial style of allusion which fits only what is light and ludicrous, and building the most laboured conclusions on the most fantastical and slender premises. The object of the poetry of imagination is to raise or adorn one idea by another more striking or more beautiful: the object of these writers was to match any one idea with any other idea, for better for worse, as we say, and whether any thing was gained by the change of condition or not. The object of the poetry of the passions again is to illustrate any strong feeling, by shewing the same feeling as connected with objects or circumstances more palpable and touching; but here the object was to strain and distort the immediate feeling into some barely possible consequence or recondite analogy, in which it required the utmost stretch of misapplied ingenuity to trace the smallest connection with the original impression. In short, the poetry of this period was strictly the poetry not of ideas, but of definitions: it proceeded in mode and figure, by genus and specific difference; and was the logic of the schools, or an oblique and forced construction of dry, literal matterof-fact, decked out in a robe of glittering conceits, and clogged with the halting shackles of verse. The imagination of the writers, instead of being conversant with the face of nature, or the secrets of the heart, was lost in the labyrinths of intellectual abstraction, or entangled in the technical quibbles and impertinent intricacies of language. The complaint so often made, and here repeated, is not of the want of power in these men, but of the waste of it; not of the absence of genius, but the abuse of it. They had (many of them) great talents committed to their trust, richness of thought, and depth of feeling; but they chose to hide them (as much as they possibly could) under a false shew of learning and unmeaning subtlety. From the style which they had systematically adopted, they thought nothing done till they had perverted simplicity into affectation, and