But in general the language of this poem is the most barbarous that can be conceived. Some little excuse he makes for this, in the preface to the second edition. 'I have taken the pains, he says, to peruse these Poems of the Soul, and to lick them into some more tolerable form and smoothness. For I must confess, such was the present haste and eat that I was then hurried in, (dispatching them in fewer months, than some cold-pated gentlemen have conceited me to have spent years about them, and letting them slip from me so suddenly, while I was so immerse in the inward sense and representation of things, that it was even necessary to forget the economy of words, and leave them behind me aloft, to float and run together at random, like chaff and straws on the surface of the water,) that I could not but send them out in so uneven and rude a dress.' In one of his minor poems Cupid reproaches him with his style,
