" (Southey's Life
and Correspondence, III. 193, 194.)
[266] Nash, who has far better claims than Swift to be called the
English Rabelais, thus at once describes and parodies Harvey's
hexameters in prose, "that drunken, staggering kind of verse, which
is all up hill and down hill, like the way betwixt Stamford and
Beechneld, and goes like a horse plunging through the mire in the
deep of winter, now soused up to the saddle, and straight aloft on
his tiptoes." It was a happy thought to satirize (in this inverted
way) prose written in the form of verse.
[267] Edmund Bolton in his _Hypercritica_ says, "The works of Sam
Daniel contained somewhat a flat, but yet withal a very pure and
copious English, and words as warrantable as any man's, and _fitter
perhaps for prose than measure_." I have italicized his second
thought, which chimes curiously with the feeling Daniel leaves in the
mind. (See Haslewood's Ancient Crit. Essays, Vol. II.) Wordsworth, an
excellent judge, much admired Daniel's poem to the Countess of
Cumberland.
[268] Mr. Hales, in the excellent memoir of the poet prefixed to the
Globe edition of his works, puts his birth a year earlier, on the
strength of a line in the sixtieth sonnet.
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