gown from some resort of the Oxford watermen to follow the lure of a drum. The influence of the Wartons, Mason, Collins, and particularly of Gray was very strong from 1745 to 1800. Although ridiculed and parodied by men of the Johnson-Goldsmith school, who still vigorously maintained the entire pseudo-classic tradition, they were the guides of such writers as were turning towards newer things. Eighteenth-century poets usually followed the fashion, and these men said what the fashion was to be. They admired, praised, and imitated Allegro and Penseroso, and their friends, admirers, and imitators did the same. As a result, the poems that had lain "in a sort of obscurity" for nearly a century sprang into a popularity which they have never since attained. They became the vogue, and for a time shared with the Miltonic sonnet the distinction of furnishing the models most generally used for occasional verse. They enjoyed to the full the flattering ridicule of parody, -- as, for instance, in the Garrulous Man, a Parody upon L'Allegro (1777), in Barron Field's La Ciriegia, an Austere Imitation of L'Allegro (1807), and Horace Twiss's Fashion, a Paraphrase of L'Allegro (1814). An Ode to Horror, "in the Allegoric, Descriptive, Alliterative, Epithetical, Fantastic, Hyperbolical, and Diabolical Style of our modern Ode-wrights, and Monody-mongers" (1751),' which employs the meter and structure of the companion pieces and invokes the "mild Miltonic maid," is directed principally at the Wartons. Colman and Lloyd's joint odes To Obscurity and To Oblivion (1759) laugh at the work of Gray and Mason; Mason and others are burlesqued in five poems of the same type in the Probationary Odes (1785), and fun is made of Gray's work in the Anti-Jacobin (1798). All these pieces belong to the Allegro-Penseroso type, and therefore ridicule the extensive use which the poets in question made of Milton's octosyllabics. For us the most significant of such burlesques are those contained in two widely-read satires of the day. The second book of Churchill's Ghost (1762) begins with an attack upon the custom of invocation in poetry, which, however, since it is the fashion, the satirist himself follows: Hither, O hither, condescend, ETERNAL TRUTH, thy steps to bend. . . . Far from thy seemly Matron train With THEE let formal DULNESS come, The other satire, called The Birth of Fashion, a Specimen of a Modern Ode, forms the third "letter" in Christopher Anstey's amusing New Bath Guide (1766). The closeness with which Anstey follows Allegro indicates that he realized how much the "modern ode" derived from Milton: Come then, Nymph of various Mien. . . . To the motley PROTEUS bore; ... ... Come, but don't forget the Gloves.... Then, O sweet Goddess, bring with Thee Laughter, Freedom, Mirth, and Ease, And all the smiling Deities. Such parodies must have been more numerous than has been realized; for in 1780 the Critical Review spoke of one "apparently designed, as a hundred others have been before it, to ridicule odewriting," and this hundred does not include the twenty-three "Probationary Odes" (supposed to have been submitted in competition for the laureateship) which make fun of the would-be lyricists of the day. One of these burlesques has the lines, 1 xlix. 396. Geography, terraqueous maid, Descend from globes to statesmen's aid! Truths unheard, tho' not untold: Come, and once more unlock this vasty world.1 In the same volume a "Table of Instructions for the Rev. Thomas Warton," the successful candidate, suggests that, as invocations "have of late years been considered by the Muses as mere cards of compliment, and of course have been but rarely accepted, you must not waste more than twenty lines in invoking the Nine, nor repeat the word Hail more than fifteen times at farthest." As early as 1758 the Critical Review had remarked that the "mixture of newfangled and unintelligible epithets, wild thoughts, and affected phrases" which it found in the anonymous Fancy, an Irregular Ode "must mean (if they mean any thing) to ridicule the fashionable species of poetry, called ode-writing"; and in 1797, after condemning the "prettyism," "tinsel," and "imbecillity" of a volume of contemporary English Lyricks, it observed, "Gray and Collins . . . have produced such tribes of imitators, that we are weary of this species of composition. . . . Avaunt such frippery!" Meanwhile, in 1782 the Monthly Review had declared: "No species of composition appears to be more at enmity with common sense than the modern ode. The Pindars of the present hour seem to think that the personification of a few abstract ideas, no matter whether they are brought together in any order or connection, completes the whole of what is expected from them." Apparently, contemporary readers saw quite as clearly as we do to-day the failure of the lyric efforts of the later eighteenth century. To follow the subsequent course of the Allegro-Penseroso movement in the same detail as we have studied its beginnings would be tiresome and profitless. The poems affected do not differ materially from those we have examined, and from a literary standpoint they are usually not so good. The rise and fall of the fad - for fad it became can be traced in the number of pieces that show the influence of the companion pieces. From 1740 to 1750 I have found 41; from 1750 to 1760, 46; 1760 to 1770, 71; 1770 to 1780, 68; 1780 to 1790, 75; 1790 to 1800, 61; 1800 to 1810, 40; 1810 to 1820, 6. That is, their popularity was at its height from 1760 to 1790, declined rapidly after 1800, and by 1810 had practically disappeared. These 1 Ode IX (by Richard Tickell?), in Probationary Odes for the Laureatship (1785), 39. 2 Ib. 130. 4 New arrangement, xxi. 340. 3 v. 162. 5 lxvii. 387. figures, it should be understood, are conservative; they by no means include every piece that shows any influence from Allegro or Penseroso; if they did, if they took into account every production that belongs in a general way to the type or that borrows a few expressions from Milton's octosyllabics, they would embrace, along with many miscellaneous poems, nearly every ode to an abstraction published in the latter half of the century. In the work of Mrs. Mary Robinson, for example, the "Perdita" who still smiles on us from the canvases of Reynolds, Romney, and Gainsborough with the charm that brought the Prince of Wales to her feet, nearly one hundred and forty pages are devoted to odes on subjects like The Muse, Della Crusca, Genius, Reflection, Envy, Health, Vanity, Melancholy, Despair, Beauty, Eloquence, the Moon, Meditation, Valour, Night, Hope, Humanity, Winter, Peace, Apathy.1 Nearly all of these odes are affected by the companion pieces in one way or another, but only a third of them seem to me close enough to Milton to belong in the appended bibliography. Likewise, in other eighteenth-century poems almost every conceivable kind and degree of influence from the octosyllabics may be found. Often it is limited to a phrase or two; frequently only the first few lines or a single stanza or a short passage are Miltonic; perhaps the influence extends throughout the piece but is confined to the meter and cadence. Many poems do not employ tetrameter at all but show their indebtedness in the "hence" or "come," the personification, the train, the occupations, or other points. There are some doublets and even some triplets, and a few pieces are as slavish copies as Mason's Il Bellicoso and Il Pacifico. So great, indeed, was the vogue of Milton's octosyllabics that traces of their influence crept into the most unexpected places. A dramatic pastoral of Robert Lloyd's, for instance, which shows no other connection with Milton, has the couplet, Hither haste, and bring along A humorous blank-verse piece, Upon a Birmingham Halpenny, begins, In another unrimed production we come suddenly on the lines, Come then, O Night! and with thee, by the hand, Thy younger sister, Melancholy, bring, In sable vestment clad; 1 Poetical Works (1806), i. 81–218. 2 Arcadia (1761), act i. 3 Gent. Mag., xxvii. 325 (1757). and a page farther on, Then let me still with Melancholy live, And haunt the hermit Contemplation's cell.1 There is no other suggestion of Milton's octosyllabics in the poems, or, until we read these lines near the end, in the eight pages that Sneyd Davies addressed to the Rev. Timothy Thomas in 1744: But chiefly thou, divine Philosophy, Shed thy blest Influence; with thy Train appear See crouching Insolence, Spleen and Revenge The most distinguished piece of blank verse into which the Allegro structure penetrated is the Pleasures of Imagination, in the tenth line of which Akenside invokes "Indulgent Fancy" and, as her companion, Let Fiction come, upon her vagrant wings Wafting ten thousand colours through the air. ... And join this festive train? for with thee comes... Sonnets likewise were affected, for the first of those "written in the Highlands of Scotland" by Hugh Downman begins, "Hence Sickness... where the Night-raven sings." Even Greek tragedy was not exempt: in a chorus of his translation of Aeschylus Robert Potter introduces the lines, Thou, son of Maia, come, and with thee lead Success, that crowns the daring deed;3 1 Mrs. Hampden Pye, Philanthe (written 1758; in Poems, 2d ed., 1772, PP. 42, 43). John Whaley, Collection of Original Poems (1745), 334-5. Cf. also Crabbe's Borough, beginning of letter xi; J. G. Cooper's Power of Harmony, beginning of the first and second books; Christopher Smart's Hop-Garden, i. 257–69; William Woty's Tankard of Porter, near the end, and Chimney-Corner, 49-50; Robert Fergusson's Good Eating (Works, 1851, p. 215); S. J. Pratt's Landscapes in Verse (Sympathy, etc., 1807, pp. 81, 117); James Hurdis's Elmer and Ophelia (Poems, 1790, pp. 57-9); Henry Moore's Private Life (1795?), 15-17. 3 The Choephorae (Tragedies of Aeschylus, Norwich, 1777, p. 365). Potter's Ode to Sympathy is slightly, and his Ode to Health decidedly, influenced by Allegro (see Poetical Amusements near Bath, 1781, iv. 112-23). His Farewell Hymne to the Country, in the manner of Spenser's Epithalamion (1749, reprinted in Bell's Classical Arrangement, 1790, xi. 105-19), contains at least four borrowings from Milton, and his Kymber (1759) is a close imitation of Lycidas. |