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DENHAM.
In his translation of Virgil, written when he was about twenty-one years old, may be still found the old manner of continuing the sense ungracefully from verse to verse.
"Then all those
"Who in the dark our fury did escape,
"Returning, know our borrow'd arms, and shape,
"And differing dialect: then their numbers swell
"And grow upon us; first Chorœbeus fell
"Before Minerva's altar; next did bleed
"Just Ripheus, whom no Trojan did exceed
"In virtue, yet the gods his fate decreed.
"Then Hypanis and Dymas, wounded by
"Their friends; nor thee, Pantheus, thy piety,
"Nor consecrated mitre, from the same
"Ill fate could save; my country's funeral flame
"And Troy's cold ashes I attest, and call
"To witness for myself, that in their fall
"No foes, or death, nor danger I declin'd,
"Did and deserv'd no less, my fate to find."
"Who in the dark our fury did escape,
"Returning, know our borrow'd arms, and shape,
"And differing dialect: then their numbers swell
"And grow upon us; first Chorœbeus fell
"Before Minerva's altar; next did bleed
"Just Ripheus, whom no Trojan did exceed
"In virtue, yet the gods his fate decreed.
"Then Hypanis and Dymas, wounded by
"Their friends; nor thee, Pantheus, thy piety,
"Nor consecrated mitre, from the same
"Ill fate could save; my country's funeral flame
"And Troy's cold ashes I attest, and call
"To witness for myself, that in their fall
"No foes, or death, nor danger I declin'd,
"Did and deserv'd no less, my fate to find."
From this kind of concatenated metre he afterwards refrained, and taught his followers the art of concluding their sense in couplets; which has perhaps been with rather too much constancy pursued.
This passage exhibits one of those triplets which are not infrequent in this first essay,
but
