Page:Tixall Poetry.djvu/442

 easy, and rapid flow of the verse, and the variety, and exactness, of the rhymes are very remarkable.

I have found this poem in a miscellany, entitled "Chorus Poetarum; or Poems on Several Occasions. By the Duke of Buckingham, the Lord Rochester, Sir John Denham, Sir George Etherege, Andrew Marvel, Esq.; the famous Spencer, Madam Behn, and several other eminent persons of this age. Never before printed. London, 1674." Prefixed, is an epistle dedicatory, to Sir Fleetwood Shepherd, by Charles Gildon. In this miscellany, this poem is ascribed to a Mr Motteux, who was a French refugee, and much connected with the wits, and scholars, of his time. He is said to have been killed, in some quarrel, in a brothel in London.

A smoke! a flower! a shadow! and a breath! Are real things, compared with life and death: Like bubbles, on the stream of time we pass, Swell, burst, and mingle with the common mass.

P. 241. These lines on "Conscience," were written by Sir Edward Sherburne, Kt. descended from an ancient family, seated at Stonyhurst, near Preston, and Blackburn, in Lancashire. He was born in 1618, was a zealous royalist, and in 1641, was appointed clerk of the ordnance. He was well acquainted with the duties of his station, to the discharge of which he dedicated a long life, and was the principal person concerned in drawing up the "Rules, Orders, and Instructions," given to the office of Ordnance in 1683, which, with very few alterations, have been confirmed at the beginning of every reign since, and are those by which the office is now governed. He died in 1702, and was interred in the chapel belonging to the Tower of London.

Sir E. Sherburne was a Roman Catholic; and the fine old mansion, at Stonyhurst, "half castellated, half monastic," devolved, about the middle of the last