Pallas grew vap’rish once and odd,
    She would not do the least right thing
  Either for Goddess or for God,
    Nor work, nor play, nor paint, nor sing.

  Jove frown’d, and “Use (he cried) those eyes
    So skilful, and those hands so taper;
  Do something exquisite and wise”—­
    She bow’d, obey’d him, and cut paper.

  This vexing him who gave her birth,
    Thought by all Heaven a burning shame,
  What does she next, but bids on earth
    Her Burlington do just the same?

  Pallas, you give yourself strange airs;
    But sure you’ll find it hard to spoil
  The sense and taste of one that bears
    The name of Savile and of Boyle.

  Alas! one bad example shown,
    How quickly all the sex pursue! 
  See, madam! see the arts o’erthrown
    Between John Overton and you.

It is the prerogative of easy poetry to be understood as long as the language lasts; but modes of speech, which owe their prevalence only to modish folly, or to the eminence of those that use them, die away with their inventors, and their meaning, in a few years, is no longer known.

Easy poetry is commonly sought in petty compositions upon minute subjects; but ease, though it excludes pomp, will admit greatness.  Many lines in Cato’s soliloquy are at once easy and sublime: 

  ’Tis the Divinity that stirs within us;
  ’Tis Heaven itself that points out an hereafter,
  And intimates eternity to man. 
 —­If there’s a Power above us,
  And that there is all Nature cries aloud
  Through all her works, he must delight in virtue,
  And that which he delights in must be happy.

Nor is ease more contrary to wit than to sublimity; the celebrated stanza of Cowley, on a lady elaborately dressed, loses nothing of its freedom by the spirit of the sentiment: 

  Th’ adorning thee with so much art
    Is but a barb’rous skill;
  ’Tis like the pois’ning of a dart,
    Too apt before to kill.

Cowley seems to have possessed the power of writing easily beyond any other of our poets; yet his pursuit of remote thought led him often into harshness of expression.

Waller often attempted, but seldom attained it; for he is too frequently driven into transpositions.  The poets, from the time of Dryden, have gradually advanced in embellishment, and consequently departed from simplicity and ease.

To require from any author many pieces of easy poetry, would be indeed to oppress him with too hard a task.  It is less difficult to write a volume of lines swelled with epithets, brightened by figures, and stiffened by transpositions, than to produce a few couplets graced only by naked elegance and simple purity, which require so much care and skill, that I doubt whether any of our authors have yet been able, for twenty lines together, nicely to observe the true definition of easy poetry.