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244 been mentioned as probably gaining for him this office, he published in 1714 a set of verses, which he had written and recited at the Public Commencement at Cambridge. When it is remembered that these limping heroics were spoken to an audience, partly composed of ladies, and chiefly addressed to them, their licence seems astonishing. Any extract we might give, would in this age of refinement infallibly place this work in the Index Expurgatorius of all fathers of families. And yet these prurient lines which we dare not quote, but which the curious may see in the Library of the British Museum, were specially composed and repeated for the edification and amusement of some of the noblest and fairest of our great-great-grandmothers. In 1718, Eusden addressed a poem to Her Royal Highness on the birth of a Prince. He soon after produced an "Ode for the New Year." In 1722 three pieces followed; one to the Lord Chancellor on his being created Earl of Macclesfield; the second to Lord Parker on his return from his travels; the third to that nobleman on his matrimonial alliance with Mrs. Mary Lane. What the character of these lucubrations is, some idea may be formed from the nature of their subjects. The warmth of admiration and fervour of flattery is always above fever-heat: the merit below zero.

In Nicholl's select collection his best poems are to be found, and among them some of his translations. Had he employed himself in giving versions of a few of the master-pieces of antiquity, he would have merited a better fame than can be acquired by feeble flatteries of kings and nobles. In translation, he displays some command of language and smoothness of versification. He assisted in a version of Ovid's "Metamorphoses," in which Dryden, Congreve, Addison, Tate, and others were his coadjutors. The whole of one book is by his hand, and so is the story of "Venus and Adonis" in