Rochester’s poetry is the poetry of wit combined with the love of pleasure, of thought with licentiousness.  His extravagant heedless levity has a sort of passionate enthusiasm in it; his contempt for every thing that others respect, almost amounts to sublimity.  His poem upon Nothing is itself no trifling work.  His epigrams were the bitterest, the least laboured, and the truest, that ever were written.

Sir John Suckling was of the same mercurial stamp, but with a greater fund of animal spirits; as witty, but less malicious.  His Ballad on a Wedding is perfect in its kind, and has a spirit of high enjoyment in it, of sportive fancy, a liveliness of description, and a truth of nature, that never were surpassed.  It is superior to either Gay or Prior; for with all their naivete and terseness, it has a Shakspearian grace and luxuriance about it, which they could not have reached.

Denham and Cowley belong to the same period, but were quite distinct from each other:  the one was grave and prosing, the other melancholy and fantastical.  There are a number of good lines and good thoughts in the Cooper’s Hill.  And in Cowley there is an inexhaustible fund of sense and ingenuity, buried in inextricable conceits, and entangled in the cobwebs of the schools.  He was a great man, not a great poet.  But I shall say no more on this subject.  I never wish to meddle with names that are sacred, unless when they stand in the way of things that are more sacred.

Withers is a name now almost forgotten, and his works seldom read; but his poetry is not unfrequently distinguished by a tender and pastoral turn of thought; and there is one passage of exquisite feeling, describing the consolations of poetry in the following terms: 

        “She doth tell me where to borrow
      Comfort in the midst of sorrow;
      Makes the desolatest place [6]
      To her presence be a grace;
      And the blackest discontents
      Be her fairest ornaments. 
      In my former days of bliss
      Her divine skill taught me this,
      That from every thing I saw,
      I could some invention draw;
      And raise pleasure to her height,
      Through the meanest object’s sight,
      By the murmur of a spring,
      Or the least bough’s rusteling,
      By a daisy whose leaves spread
      Shut when Titan goes to bed;
      Or a shady bush or tree,
      She could more infuse in me,
      Than all Nature’s beauties can,
      In some other wiser man. 
      By her help I also now
      Make this churlish place allow
      Some things that may sweeten gladness
      In the very gall of sadness. 
      The dull loneness, the black shade,
      That these hanging vaults have made,
      The strange music of the waves,
      Beating on these hollow caves,
      This black den which rocks emboss,
      Overgrown with