unequal; sometimes swelling into rather full and splendid blank verse, and anon shrinking up into lines stunted and shrivelled, like boughs either touched by frost, or lopped by the axe of the woodman.  Still there are in “Sophy” a force of style, a maturity of mind, an energy of declamation, and, here and there, an appreciation of Shakspeare—­shewn in a generous though hopeless rivalry of his manner—­ which account for the reception it at first met with, and seem to have excited in Denham’s contemporaries expectations which were never fulfilled.  This uprise, as well as that of the Irish (which took place the year before it), turned out, on the whole, abortive.  And yet what fine lines and sentiments are the following, culled from “Sophy” almost ad aperturam libri:—­

        “Fear and guilt
  Are the same thing, and when our actions are not,
  Our fears are crimes. 
      The east and west
  Upon the globe, a mathematic point
  Only divides; thus happiness and misery,
  And all extremes, are still contiguous.

  More gallant actions have been lost, for want of being
  Completely wicked, than have been performed
  By being exactly virtuous.  ’Tis hard to be
  Exact in good, or excellent in ill;
  Our will wants power, or else our power wants skill.

  When in the midst of fears we are surprised
  With unexpected happiness, the first
  Degrees of joy are mere astonishment. 
      Fear, the shadow
  Of danger, like the shadow of our bodies,
  Is greater, then, when that which is the cause
  Is farthest off.”

The blinded prince’s soliloquy, in the first scene of the fifth act, is worthy of Shakspeare.  We must quote the following lines:—­

    “Reason, my soul’s eye, still sees
  Clearly, and clearer for the want of eyes,
  For gazing through the windows of the body
  It met such several, such distracting objects;
  But now confined within itself it sees
  A strange and unknown world, and there discovers
  Torrents of anger, mountains of ambition,
  Gulfs of desire, and towers of hope, large giants,
  Monsters and savage beasts; to vanquish these
  Will be a braver conquest, than the old
  Or the new world.”

Shortly after the appearance of “Sophy,” he was admitted, by the form then usual, Sheriff of Surrey, and appointed governor of Farnham Castle for the king; this important post, however, he soon resigned, and retreated to Oxford, where, in 1643, he published his poem entitled “Cooper’s Hill.”  This instantly became popular, and many who might have seen in “Sophy” greater powers than were disclosed in this new effort, envied its fame, and gave out that he had bought it of a vicar for forty pounds.  For this there was, of course, no proof, and it is only worth mentioning because it is one of a large class of cases, in which envious mediocrity,