appreciated as it deserved, a competent reader might have pronounced without hesitation; the immediate acceptation which it obtained was what the most sanguine friend of the author could not have anticipated, nor had the author himself regarded it as a possibility any dream of hope.

in

But the poem appeared,.. if the expression may be permitted, .. just at the fullness of time, when the way had been prepared for it. A taste for descriptive poetry, of which none was produced in the school of Pope and Dryden, and which professional critics had vilified and condemned, had been revived by Thomson. So little was it favoured in his time, that it was long before he could find a publisher for his Winter (the first part of the Seasons that was printed); and when, upon Mallet's recommendation, a bookseller ventured to print it, the impression lay like waste paper in his warehouse, and was in danger of being sold as such, when one Mr. Whatley, .. (his name deserves to be recorded) happened to take up a copy which was lying on the publisher's stall. He was a lover of poetry, and, as it appears, a man of reputation among town wits, for he brought the poem into notice by spreading its praise through the coffee-houses; and the edition was sold in consequence of the zeal with which he commended a poem good enough to bear out his commendation.

Other poets also had, in different lines, and with more or less success, introduced a taste for something different from the conventional poetry of the dominant school. Glover's Leonidas, though only party spirit could have extolled it as a work of genius, obtained

no inconsiderable sale, and a reputation 68 which flourished for half a century. It has a place now in the two great general collections, and deserves to hold it. The author has the merit of having departed from bad models, rejected all false ornaments and tricks of style, and trusted to the dignity of his subject. And though the poem is cold and bald, stately rather than strong in its best parts, and in general rather stiff than stately, there is in its very nakedness a sort of Spartan severity that commands respect.

Another proof that the school of Pope was gradually losing its influence is, that almost every poem of any considerable length, which obtained any celebrity during the half century between Pope and Cowper, was written in blank verse. With the single exception of Falconer's Shipwreck, it would be in vain to look for any rhymed poem of that age and of equal extent which is held in equal estimation with the works of Young, Thomson, Glover, Somervile, Dyer, Akenside, and Armstrong. Johnson said truly, that

rhyme can never be spared, but when the subject is able to support itself ":" but he was never more mistaken, nor did he ever advance an opinion

68 In a letter dated May, 1737, Swift asks Pope," Who is that Mr. Glover, who wrote the poem called Leonidas, which is reprinting here, and hath great vogue?" Pope's answer does not appear: "it would have been curious," says Dr. Warton, "to have known his opinion concerning a poem that is written in a taste and manner so different from his own, in a style formed on the Grecian school, and with the simplicity of an ancient."-Essay on Pope, p. 401.

69 Life of Milton.

which is more directly disproved, than when he asserted that "those who hope to please, must condescend to rhyme 70"

Gray and Mason are among the writers who, by raising the tone of poetry, contributed to excite a taste for something better than the school of Pope. In one of his first poems, Mason had in a puerile fiction, ranked Chaucer and Spenser and Milton below Pope, which is like comparing a garden shrub with the oaks of the forest. But he would have maintained no such absurdity in his riper years, for Mason lived to perceive and correct both his errors of opinion, and his faults of style. It was something in that sickly age of tragedy to produce two such dramas as Elfrida and Caractacus ; the success of which, when Colman (much to his honour) made the bold experiment of bringing them on the stage, proved that although the public had long been dieted upon trash, they could relish something of a worthier kind than Tamerlane, the Revenge, and the Grecian Daughter. Mason composed his plays upon an artificial model, and in a gorgeous diction, because he thought Shakespeare had precluded all hope of excellence in any other form of drama. He has ingenuously confessed that he was too much elated by popular applause; but he did not allow his judgement to be warped by supposing that what the public had applauded must necessarily be good. He learned to think that the romantic or mixed drama is that which is best suited to the English stage, and he gradually weeded his style.

The piece which he composed upon what he called 70 Life of Milton.

S. C.-2.

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"the old English model," lay by him some thirty years, and was not published till towards the close of his life. He was the only person in those days who ventured to follow our old dramatists; for the revival of Shakespeare's plays upon the stage produced no visible effect upon contemporary play-wrights. But when Garrick had made the name of Shakespeare popular, a race of Shakespearean commentators arose, who introduced a sort of taste for the books of Shakespeare's age; and as they worked in the rubbish, buried treasures, of which they were not in search, were brought to light, for those who could understand their value. Thus, though in their cumbrous annotations, the last labourer always added more rubbish to the heaps which his predecessors had accumulated, they did good service by directing attention to our earlier literature. The very homage which they paid to Shakespeare tended to impress the multitude with an opinion of the paramount importance of his works, and a belief in excellencies of which they could have no perception. They who had any books for show considered Shakespeare, from this time, as a necessary part of the furniture of their shelves. Even the Jubilee, and its after representation at the theatres, contributed to confirm this useful persuasion. Thousands who had not seen one of his plays, nor read a line of them, heard of Shakespeare, and understood that his name was one of those of which it became Englishmen to be proud.

Two works which appeared in the interval between Churchill and Cowper, promoted, beyond any others, this growth of a better taste than had prevailed for the hundred years preceding. These were Warton's His

tory of English Poetry, and Percy's Reliques, the publication of which must form an epoch in the continuation of that history. They only who have made themselves well acquainted with the current poetry and criticism of those days, can understand or imagine how thoroughly both had been corrupted and debased. Books which are now justly regarded as among the treasures of English literature, which are the delight of the old and the young, the learned and the unlearned, the high and the low, were then spoken of with contempt; the Pilgrim's Progress as fit only for the ignorant and vulgar, Robinson Crusoe for children; and if any one but an angler condescended to look in Izaak Walton", it must be for the sake of finding something in the book to laugh at! And for Spenser,.. if the tiresome uniformity of his measure did not render the Faery Queen insupportable, that poem would be laid down in disgust almost as soon as it was taken up, because of the filthy images and loathsome allegories with which it abounds! These things were said,.. and said by those who had seated themselves in the chair of the critic, and assumed the office of directing and controlling public taste!

Even those who found some attractions in the imagery and story of this great poem, complained of its versification and its style. "It is great pity," said Oldmixon, "Spenser fell into that kind of versifying; and very odd that after it had been so generally and justly condemned, a poet in our time should think to

71 The Monthly Reviewers, in 1777, said, we have sometimes amused ourselves by dipping into honest Izaak Walton's Complete Angler, merely as a rum book.”