...... was not made to be heard in a crowd, yet Satire will be heard, for all the audience are by nature her friends. What shall I say to Mr. Lowth, Mr. Ridley, Mr. Rolle, the Rev. Mr. Brown, Seward, &c. ...If I say, 'Messieurs! this is not the thing: write prose, write sermons, write nothing at all,' they will disdain me and my advice. Mr. S. Jenyns now and then can write a good line or two, such as these : 'Snatch us from all our little sorrows here, I like Mr. Aston Hervey's Fable; and an Ode the the last of all, by Mr. Mason; a new acquaintance of mine, whose Musaus too seems to carry with it the promise at least of something good to come. I was glad to see you distinguished who poor West was before his charming Ode, and called it any thing rather than a Pindaric. The Town is an owl, if it don't like Lady Mary; and I am surprised at it. We here are owls enough to think her Eclogues very bad but that, I did not wonder at. Our present taste is Sir Thomas Fitzosborne's Letters," &c.* In 1756 Gray left Peter-house, where he had resided above twenty years, on account of some incivilities he met with, which are slightly mentioned in his correspondence. He removed to Pembrokehall, where his most intimate friends resided; and this he describes, "as an era in a life so barren of events as his." * See Walpole's Works, vol. v. p. 393. * July 1757, he took his Odes to London, to ublished. “I found Gray (says H. Walpole) own, last week. He brought his two Odes e printed. I snatched them out of Dodsley's ls, and they are to be the first-fruits of my s." Although the genius of Gray was now its firm and mature age," and though his ical reputation was deservedly celebrated; it ain that these Odes were not favourably reed. "His friends (he says) write to him, that do not succeed," and several amusing critis on them are mentioned in the Letters. Yet e were not wanting some better judges who ired them. They had received the judicious valuable approbation of Mason and of Hurd ;+ if Gray felt any pleasure in the poem which rick wrote in their praise, he must have been more gratified, when Warburton, while he bered on them his honest applause, shewed his gnation at those who condemned, without being to understand them. Of these Odes, a thousand copies were printed at wberry-Hill. It is, I believe, to Gray that Hurd alludes in the Essay he Marks of Imitation, as to the "common friend of on and himself," who had suggested an imitation of ser, by Milton: see vol. iii. p. 48. Gray's Odes were reviewed in the Monthly Review for ', p. 239. They were also reviewed in the Critical Re7, vol. iv. p. 167; in which the critic mistook the Aioλnia (the Eolian lyre), for the Eolian harp, the instru About ten years before this time, the Odes of Collins* were published, and received with the most unmerited neglect. The public had been so long delighted with the wit and satire of Pope, had formed their taste so much on his manner of versification, and had been so accustomed to dwell upon the neat and pointed style of that finished writer; that they were but ill prepared to admire the beauties of the lofty and magnificent language, in which Collins arrayed his sublime conceptions; and which was tasteless to those, who, but a few years before, had received the last book of the Dunciad, from the dying hands of their favourite poet; and who could not pass from wit, and epigram, and satire, to the bold conceptions, the animated descriptions, and the wild grandeur of lyric poetry.† The very ment invented by Kircher about 1649; and, after being forgotten for a century, discovered by Mr. Oswald. A passage in this Review, suggested to Dr. Johnson an objection of which he made use, in his criticism on Gray; viz. "Is there not, (says the Critical Review) a trifling impropriety in this line, Weave the warp, and weave the woof;'-Is not the warp laid, and the woof afterwards woven? Suppose he had written 'Stretch the warp, and weave the woof." Compare Johnson's Life of Gray, vol. xi. p. 377, ed. Murphy. * The Odes of Collins were published in 1746. The open manner in which Goldsmith in his Threnod. Aug. borrowed whole lines and stanzas from Collins, is a strong proof how little Collins' Poems were then known. + See T. Warton's Preface to Milton's Minor Poems, p. 1. 10, for a support of this opinion, and Mason's Life of Whitehead, p. 12. rks which have now raised Gray and Collins to k of our two greatest lyric poets, were either glected, or ridiculed by their contemporaries; ile, to appreciate the justness of their thoughts, harmony of their numbers, and the splendid ations of their genius, was left for the more rect decisions of time. Those who are really competent judges of the rit of poetry, in any age, are necessarily but 7; the great and general mass of poetical readers constantly varying among the favourites of the e; raising with their breath the bubble of that utation to-day, which they take the same pains destroy to-morrow. Quod dedisti Viventi decus, atque sentienti Rari post cineres habent Poeta.t ut a poet who receives the praise of an enlighted age, may with confidence expect its continuce; if he write, not for the fluctuation of taste, r the caprice of fashion; but on his own exaded views of nature, on his own confirmed owledge and experience, and on the solid prinles of the art. He who acquires the admiration the present time, by addressing himself to their te, by following their judgment, and by soliciting eir applause, may be sure that his productions 1 be superseded by the favourite rivals of the See Martial. Eleg. Lib. i. 2, 4, and Bentivoglio's Let, p. 144, and Johnson's Life of Cowley, p. 62. age to come. Πῶς ἂν ὁ μέτ ̓ ἐμὲ πᾶς ἀκούσειεν αἴων, was the sensible advice of Longinus,* to those, who "with a noble ambition aim at immortality.” There is a passage in the Life of Thomson written by his friend, in which he mentions the reason of the discouragement shewn, by some critics of that day, to the poetry of that interesting writer; and which applies equally in the case of Collins and of Gray; as the same cause that impeded the favourable reception of the Seasons, still continued to exert its powerful influence. "The Poem of Winter, (says Mr. Murdoch, who speaks from his own observation,) was no sooner read, than universally admired; those only excepted, who had not been used to feel, or to look for any thing in poetry beyond a point of satirical or epigrammatic wit; a smart antithesis richly trimmed with rhyme; or the softness of an elegiac complaint. To such his manly classical spirit could not readily recommend itself; till after a more attentive perusal, they had got the better of their prejudices, and either acquired, or affected a truer taste. A few others stood aloof, merely because they had long before fixed the articles of their poetical creed, and resigned themselves to an absolute despair of ever seeing any thing new and original." From that time, till after the death of Gray, the strong and almost exclusive influence of Pope's versification * Vide Longinum ερi 'Yous. Sect. XIV. iii. p. 57. |