an artificial increase of dimension, by a minute and tedious enumeration.

IX.

In the three first lines of the ninth stanza is inculcated a serious truth, by way of check to the sneers of grandeur and ambition. But Beauty is forced awkwardly into the company of these scof. fers. As she was no accomplice in their mockery, she is unjustly, as well as unpolitely, involved in their mortification. Of the third line the expression is faulty, because it is obscure. The signification of the word 66 await," is not yet very pointedly ascertained. Whether does the hour of death await

pomp

and beauty? or do they await it ? Both modes of phraseology have examples in our language.

“ Even as the wretch, condemn’d to lose his life,
“ Awaits the falling of the murderous knife,”

We ra

is said by Fairfax. But the other is the
more generally received usage.
ther accustom ourselves to say, that“ the
evil awaits the sufferer;" than that "the
sufferer awaits the evil.” According to
this view, it should be awaits. But, as by
this means the nominative and the verb
would change places in the syntax, and
the arrangement be awkward to an Eng-
lish ear; in several editions, and particu-
larly in Mr Mason's, it has been printed
“ await.” There is a difficulty both ways.
When, in the use of any expression, an
author finds himself thus troubled and
beset, he ought to abandon it altogether,
and substitute one of more undisputed
capability.

The stanza concludes with a conceit. It is not true, that “ the path of glory leads bul to the grave.” Nor is it because it is the path of glory that it leads thither

at all. Parnell's thought, with less conceit, has in it more of interest, and much more of piety

“ Death's but a path that must be trod,
• If man would ever pass to God.”

In a series of stanzas that follow, the author sets himself to expostulate with the proud ; and undertakes to prove the absurdity of the contempt which he supposes them ready to pour on the “unhonoured dead,” for their want of more superb monuments, from a regular succession of common places :

1. It was no “fault” of theirs that they had not such

monuments. 2. They would have stood them in little stead, had they

Lall which topics are handled with tolerable plausibility, and at decent length.

It is in the tenth stanza, that this train of thought commences. But the introduction is not clear of incumbrance.

Impute not to these the fault,” is an affected and inadequate expression for “ don't treat them with scorn." The two last lines are the most majestic 'in the whole Elegy. But they contain an appeal to feelings, which none but those who are so happy as to have been bred up

in a veneration for the solemn forms and service of the National Church, can expect to possess. The palate of a sectary, accustomed to the reception of

slender foods, will nauseate the full meal set before him in these lines ;

Where, through the long-drawn aisle, and fretted vault, The pealing anthem swells the note of praise.

Of this last line, however, criticism must remark, that either the composition of the thought is faulty, or the arrangement of the expression is inverted. It is not the anthem that swells the note, but the agglomeration of notes that swells the anthem. I am content to suppose this to have been his meaning ; communicated in a mode of arrangement, unpleasing to an English reader in his own language, but of which he admits the

propriety in Latin compositions. I have seen this line most correctly transferred into that language in many different modes, all of them meritorious, in a selection from Exercises written by the Boys of the first form in Merchant Taylor's School, and sent to me, with a view, of