Page:The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, Volume 3.djvu/105

Rh Of Florelio it is sufficient to say, that it is an occasional pastoral, which implies some thing neither natural nor artificial, neither comick nor serious.

The next ode is irregular, and therefore defective. As the sentiments are pious, they cannot easily be new; for what can be added to topicks on which successive ages have been employed.

Of the Paraphrase on Isaiah nothing very favourable can be said. Sublime and solemn prose gains little by a change to blank verse; and the paraphrast has deserted his original, by admitting images not Asiatick, at least not Judaical:

Returning Peace, Dove-eyed, and rob’d in white

Of his petty poems some are very trifling, without any thing to be praised either in the thought or expression. He is unlucky in his competition; he tells the same idle tale with Congreve, and does not tell it so well. He translated from Ovid the same epistle as Pope; but I am afraid not with equal happiness.

To examine his performances one by one would be tedious. His translation from Homer Rh