XII.

Intended for Sir ISAAC NEWTON.
In Westminster-Abbey.

ISAACUS NEWTONIUS:
Quem Immortalem

Teftantur, Tempus, Natura, Calum:
Mortalem

Hoc marmor fatetur.

Nature, and Nature's laws, lay hid in night,
God faid, Let Newton be! And all was light.

Of this epitaph, short as it is, the faults seem not to be very few. Why part should be Latin and part English, it is not easy to discover. In the Latin, the oppofition of Immortalis and Mortalis, is a mere found, or a mere quibble; he is not immortal in any fenfe contrary to that in which he is mortal.

In the verses the thought is obvious, and the words night and light are too nearly allied.

XIII.

On EDMUND Duke of BUCKINGHAM, died in the 19th Year of his Age, 1735.

who

If modeft youth, with cool reflection crown'd, And every opening virtue blooming round, Could fave a parent's jufteft pride from fate, Or add one patriot to a finking state; This weeping marble had not ask'd thy tear, Or fadly told, how many hopes lie here! The living virtue now had fhone approv'd, The fenate heard him, and his country lov'd, Yet fofter honours, and lefs noify fame Attend the shade of gentle Buckingham: In whom a race, for courage fam'd and art, Ends in the milder merit of the heart; And chiefs or fages long to Britain given, Pays the laft tribute of a faint to heaven.

This epitaph Mr. Warburton prefers to the rest, but I know not for what reason. To crown with reflection is furely a mode of fpeech approaching to nonfenfe. Opening virtues blooming round, is fomething like tauand tology; the fix following lines are poor profaick. Art is in another couplet ufed for arts, that a rhyme may be had to heart. The

The fix laft lines are the best, but not excellent.

The rest of his fepulchral performances hardly deferve the notice of criticifm. The contemptible Dialogue between HE and SHE should have been fuppreffed for the author's fake.

In his last epitaph on himself, in which he attempts to be jocular upon one of the few things that make wife men ferious, he confounds the living man with the dead:

Under this stone, or under this fill,
Or under this turf, &c.

When a man is once buried, the question, under what he is buried, is easily decided. He forgot that though he wrote the epitaph in a state of uncertainty, yet it could not be laid over him till his grave was made. Such is the folly of wit when it is ill employed.

The world has but little new; even this wretchednefs feems to have been borrowed from the following tunelefs lines:

Ludovici

Ludovici Areofti humantur offa
Sub hoc marmore, vel fub hac humo, feu
Sub quicquid voluit benignus hæres
Sive hærede benignior comes, feu
Opportunius incidens Viator;
Nam fcire haud potuit futura, fed nec
Tanti erat vacuum fibi cadaver
Ut utnam cuperet parare vivens,
Vivens ifta tamen fibi paravit.
Quæ infcribi voluit fuo fepulchro
Olim fiquod haberetis fepulchrum.

Surely Ariofto did not venture to expect that his trifle would have ever had fuch an illuftrious imitator.

PITT.

PIT T.

C

HRISTOPHER PITT, of whom whatever I fhall relate, more than has been already published, I owe to the kind communication of Dr. Warton, was born in 1699 at Blandford, the fon of a physician much esteemed.

He was, in 1714, received as a scholar into Winchester College, where he was diftinguished by exercises of uncommon elegance; and, at his removal to New College in 1719, presented to the electors, as the product of his private and voluntary studies, a compleat

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