" His versification, too, is decidedly of the Drydenic type. It is a
free, fierce, rushing, sometimes staggering, race across meadow, moor,
and mountain, dreading nothing except repose and languor, the lines
chasing, and sometimes tumbling over each other in their haste, like
impatient hounds at a fox-hunt. But more than Dryden, we think, has
Churchill displayed the genuine poetic faculty, as well as often a
loftier tone of moral indignation. This latter feeling is the inspiration
of "The Candidate," and of "The Times," which, although coarse in
subject, and coarse in style, burns with a fire of righteous indignation,
reminding you of Juvenal. The finest display of his imaginative power is
in "Gotham," which is throughout a glorious rhapsody, resembling some of
the best prose effusions of Christopher North, and abounding in such
lines as these:--
"The cedar, whose top mates the highest cloud,
Whilst his old father Lebanon grows proud
Of such a child, and _his vast body laid
Out many a mile, enjoys the filial shade_."
It is of "Gotham" that Cowper says that few writers have equalled it for
its "bold and daring strokes of fancy; its numbers so hazardously
ventured upon, and so happily finished; its matter so compressed, and yet
so clear; its colouring so sparingly laid on, and yet with such a
beautiful effect.
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