His friend Lord Lyttleton
wrote the prologue to his play of _Coriolanus_, which was acted after the
poet's death, in which he says:
"--His chaste Muse employed her heaven-taught lyre
None but the noblest missions to inspire,
Not one immoral, one corrupted thought,
_One line which, dying, he could wish to blot_."
The praise accorded him in this much-quoted line is justly his due: it is
greater praise that he was opening a new pathway in English Literature,
and supplying better food than the preceding age had given. His _Seasons_
supplied a want of the age: it was a series of beautiful pastorals. The
descriptions of nature will always be read and quoted with pleasure; the
little episodes, if they affect the unity, relieve the monotony of the
subject, and, like figures introduced by the painter into his landscape,
take away the sense of loneliness, and give us a standard at once of
judgment, of measurement, and of sympathetic enjoyment; they display, too,
at once the workings of his own mind in his production, and the manners
and sentiments of the age in which he wrote.
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