were in their full fame in 1687, the omissions are quite startling.  Not a word is here about Otway, Lee, or Crowne; Butler is not mentioned, nor the Matchless Orinda, nor Roscommon, nor Sir Charles Sedley.  A careful examination of the dates of works which Winstanley refers to, produces a curious result.  There is not mentioned, so far as I can trace, a single poem or play which was published later than 1675, although the date on the title-page of the Lives of the English Poets is 1687.  Rather an elaborate list of Dryden’s publications is given, but it stops at Amboyna (1673).  On this I think it is not too bold to build a theory, which may last until Winstanley’s entry of burial is discovered in some country church, that he died soon after 1675.  If this were the case, the recantations in his English Worthies of 1684 would be so many posthumous outrages committed on his blameless tomb, and the infamous sentence about Milton may well have been foisted into a posthumous volume by the same wicked hand.  If we could think that Samuel Manship, at the Sign of the Black Bull, was the obsequious rogue who did it, that would be one more sin to be numbered against the sad race of publishers.

In studying old books about the poets, it sometimes occurs to us to wonder whether the readers of two hundred years ago appreciated the same qualities in good verse which are now admired.  Did the ringing and romantic cadences of Shakespeare affect their senses as they do ours?  We know that they praised Carew and Suckling, but was it “Ask me no more where June bestows,” and “Hast thou seen the down in the air,” which gave them pleasure?  It would sometimes seem, from the phrases they use and the passages they quote, that if poetry was the same two centuries ago, its readers had very different ears from ours.  Of Herrick Winstanley says that he was “one of the Scholars of Apollo of the middle Form, yet something above George Withers, in a pretty Flowry and Pastoral Gale of Fancy, in a vernal Prospect of some Hill, Cave, Rock, or Fountain; which but for the interruption of other trivial Passages, might have made up none of the worst Poetick Landskips,” and then he quotes, as a sample of Herrick, a tiresome” epigram,” in the poet’s worst style.  This is not delicate or acute criticism, as we judge nowadays; but I would give a good deal to meet Winstanley at a coffee-house, and go through the Hesperides with him over a dish of chocolate.  It would be wonderfully interesting to discover which passages in Herrick really struck the contemporary mind as “flowery,” and which as “trivial.”  But this is just what all seventeenth-century criticism, even Dryden’s, omits to explain to us.  The personal note in poetical criticism, the appeal to definite taste, to the experience of eye and ear, is not met with, even in suggestion, until we reach the pamphlets of John Dennis.