Page:The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, Volume 2.djvu/37

Rh

"What a wonderful pother is here, to make all these poetical beautifications of a ship! that is a phenix in the first stanza, and but a wasp in the last: nay, to make his humble comparison of a wasp more ridiculous, he does not say it flies upon the waves as nimbly as a wasp, or the like, but it seemed a wasp. But our author at the writing of this was not in his altitudes, to compare ships to floating palaces, a comparison to the purpose, Rh