The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 483, April 2, 1831 by Various
page 38 of 50 (76%)
page 38 of 50 (76%)
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incense, that the breath of morning is not more cool and salutary:--
"It falls me here to write of Chastity That fayrest virtue, far above the rest. For which what needs me fetch from Faery, Forreine ensamples it to have exprest, Sith it is shrined in my soveraine's brest, And form'd so lively on each perfect part, That to all ladies, who have it protest, Needs but behold the pourtraict of her part, If pourtray'd it might be by any living art; But living art may not least part expresse, Nor life-resembling pencil it can paint, All it were Zeuxis or Praxiteles-- His dædale hand would faile and greatly faynt, And her perfections with his error taynt; Ne poet's wit that passeth painter farre-- In picturing the parts of beauty daynt," &c. But neither Zeuxis nor Praxiteles was called from the dead to mar her perfections, nor record her negative charms. Poetry was the only art that flourished in the Virgin reign. The pure Gothic, after attaining its full efflorescence under Henry VII., departed, never to return. The Grecian orders were not only absurdly jumbled together, but yet more outrageously conglomerated with the Gothic and Arabesque. "To gild refined gold--to paint the lily," was all the humour of it. A similar inconsistency infected literature. The classic and the romantic (to use those terms, which, though popular, are not logically exact) were interwoven. The Arcadia and the Fairy Queen are glorious offences, which "make defect perfection." Perhaps, Shakspeare's "small Latin and less |
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