Contemplative desire! desire to be
In contemplation that may master thee!
_Decipit exemplar vitiis imitabile_: if Shakespeare ever saw or heard
these pretty lines, he should have felt the unconscious rebuke implied in
such close and facile imitation of his own early elegiacs. As a serious
mimicry of his first manner, a critical parody summing up in little space
the sweet faults of his poetic nonage, with its barren overgrowth of
unprofitable flowers,--bright point, soft metaphor, and sweet elaborate
antithesis--this is as good of its kind as anything between Aristophanes
and Horace Smith. Indeed, it may remind us of that parody on the soft,
superfluous, flowery and frothy style of Agathon, which at the opening of
the _Thesmophoriazusae_ cannot but make the youngest and most ignorant
reader laugh, though the oldest and most learned has never set eyes on a
line of the original verses which supplied the incarnate god of comic
song with matter for such exquisite burlesque.
To the speech above cited the reply of the Countess is even gracefuller,
and closer to the same general model of fanciful elegiac dialogue:--
Let not thy presence, like the April sun,
Flatter our earth, and suddenly be done:
More happy do not make our outward wall
Than thou wilt grace our inward house withal.
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