followers praised Pudding (1759), Apple Dumpling (1774), Potatoes (1786), and Good Eating in general (1772). Money is the theme not only of the Splendid Shilling, but of the Sick-bed Soliloquy to an Empty Purse (1735), the Empty Purse, a poem in Miltonics (1750),1 the Crooked Sixpence (two poems, 1743 and 1802), the Birmingham Halpenny (1757), the Copper Farthing (1763), and the Soliloquy on the Last Shilling (1773).

With Philips are also connected several of the humorous pictures of school and college life: An Epistle from Oxon (1731), A Day in Vacation at College (written in 1750 by the notorious Dr. Dodd), Woty's Campanalogia (1761), Mrs. Pennington's Copper Farthing (1763), Maurice's School-boy (1775) and Oxonian (1778),2 Lardner's College Gibb (1801), and the none-too-exhilarating Panegyric on Oxford Ale (composed in 1748) in which Thomas Warton follows, "in verse Miltonic,"

the matchless bard, whose lay resounds The SPLENDID SHILLING'S praise.

Philips is likewise partly responsible for the marked tendency of these poems to avoid the elegant society pictured in the Rape of the Lock and to condescend to men and things of low estate, a tendency noticeable in the pieces already mentioned, as well as in Poverty (1748), A Louse (1749), The Street (1764), The Old Shoe (1770), The Bugs (1773), The Sweepers (1774), The Cat (1796), Washing-day (1797), and An Old Pair of Boots (1797). The humor is often broad and sometimes vulgar; but in only three instances is it, like so much of the facetious rimed verse of the day, really indecent.

The Splendid Shilling is not really mock-heroic, nor are any of the other pieces that have been considered; for, although they use the grand style in treating lowly themes, they do not, like the Homeric Battle of the Frogs and the Mice, Boileau's Lutrin, and Pope's Rape of the Lock, parody epic action, speech, or characters. There is, accordingly, no reason why the unrimed mock-heroics, all but one of which are translations,3 should owe anything to Philips. Three are renderings of Edward Holdsworth's popular Muscipula (1709), which tells

1 I know nothing of these two pieces except their titles; they may be under no debt to Philips, and the first may not even be in blank verse.

Campanalogia is dedicated "to the Society of College-Youths," and seems to deal with life at one of the universities. The Copper Farthing, and the School-boy (which Johnson praised, see Maurice's Poems, 1800, p. 23 n.), both sing of the joys and sorrows of a schoolboy, and both are closely patterned after the Splendid Shilling.

Dr. Frank Sayers's amusing Homeric parody, Jack the Giant-Killer (1803), though in blank verse, is not Miltonic. See p. 108 above.

of the invention of the mouse-trap. The first, published by Daniel Bellamy in 1709, is frankly "in imitation of Milton," and at times travesties Paradise Lost as closely as this:

But ONE Y cleped TAFFY, soon up rose,

Great CAMBRIA'S chiefest Pride, who seem'd alone

For Dignity compos'd, and high Exploit;

Both Vulcan and a Senator, whose Tongue

Dropping down Manna, charming to the Ear,

With soft, persuasive Accent thus began.

"If CHEESE, most NOBLE PEERS, our Nation's Boast,
Should be by this intestine Foe destroy'd,

I dread the Consequence." 1

The second, which appeared anonymously six years later, is likewise "done in Milton's stile," but follows Paradise Lost no more closely than does the third (the work of John Hoadly) in this passage:

He spake, and strait the fragments, mouldy scraps,

Reliques of rapine, monuments of theft,

High in their sight uprearing, rous'd their rage;
Now thirst of dire revenge, now lust of fame
Burns emulous, and fires each Patriot breast;
Each meditates to Mouse unheard-of fate,
And ev'ry brain is hamm'ring on a TRAP.2

If Hoadly's poem does not call up the figure of "Laughter holding both his sides," the heavy humor of Bishop Warburton's version of Addison's Latin Battle of the Cranes and Pigmies (1724) certainly will not. The announcement in the title that the translation is "in imitation of Milton's style" is scarcely necessary in view of such borrowings as these: "collected in their might;" "Briarius, Titanian, or Earth-born;" "involv'd in Smoak;'

Hurl'd to, and fro, with Jaculation dire.

Above the rest,

In Shape and Gesture proudly eminent,

Stood like a Giant.

his honest Face

Deep Scars of hostile Tallons had intrench'd.3

Less savoury but more amusing than any of these translations is a description of the war between Pulex and Pediculus (a flea and a

1 Bellamy's Dramatic Pieces, etc. (1739), 21, third pagination; cf. P. L., ii. 106–20. 2 "Dodsley's Miscellany" (1758), v. 262. The translation was made in 1737.

3 Tracts by Warburton, etc. (ed. Samuel Parr, 1789), 60 (cf. P. L., ix. 673), 61 (cf. P. L., i. 198-9, of the Titans' war against Jove in each case), 61 (cf. P. L., i. 236–7), 61 (cf. P. L., vi. 665), 59 (cf. P. L., i. 589–91, 600-601).

louse), which William Woty published in 1770 as The Pediculaiad, or Buckram Triumphant. Although Woty disclaims the muse

Who from the Aonian mount ...

Bore our great Milton with advent'rous wing,

invoking instead the "great Sartoria, cross-legg'd Goddess" of his
tailor-hero Buckram, he travesties Paradise Lost in these lines:
High on his shop-board in exalted state
Pre-eminent sat Buckram, full of thought,
And wan with care. Upon his faded brow,
Entrench'd with many a frown, pale Discontent
Hung lowring. Inward anguish tore his soul
And deep despair. Thrice he essay'd to speak,
And thrice his words fell inward, unpronounc'd.1

It is in the head of Buckram that "sage Pediculus," who deigns not "to inhabit other seat Than the imperial Capitol," has his home, although another "citadel . . . galligaskins hight" is the scene of his mortal combat with Pulex. The Pediculaiad, like its author's other humorous pieces in blank verse, is better than most poems of the kind; and, as Woty published a greater number than any one else (fourteen in all), he is entitled to the modest distinction of being, after Philips, the leading writer in the field. To be sure, poets who are in general of far more importance composed humorous blank verse, Lady Winchilsea, Gay, Thomson, Somervile, Akenside, Cowper, and the laureates Whitehead and Thomas Warton; but none of their productions live or deserve to live, none are even so good as the forgotten pieces that parodied the Allegro-Penseroso movement. For humor, like other things that sparkle, is apt to become flat with the passing of time.

One of Woty's productions, The Spouting-Club, was stolen by a certain Richard Lewis and published in 1758 as his own work. Apparently Lewis did write The Robin Hood Society (1756), “a Satire, with notes Variorum, by Peter Pounce," - stupid doggerel designed

1 Works (1770), i. 142–4; cf. P. I.., ii. 1–5, i. 600-605, 619-21. This piece and several others by Woty have no suggestion of Philips. Nor has Francis Fawkes's Parody on a Passage in Paradise Lost (1761), R. Jephson's Extempore Ludicrous Miltonic Verses (1776) or his Burlesque Miltonic (1778), Thomas Maurice's Oxonian (1778, which contains several borrowings from Paradise Lost), W. O. Lardner's College Gibb (1801), or A. C. Schomberg's Bagley (1777, see above, p. 258, n. 1). For two parodies of the Night Thoughts, see above, p. 159, n. 4.

2 Woty was joint-editor of the Poetical Calendar (12 vols., 1763), and author of at least eight pieces of serious Miltonic blank verse, three of the Allegro-Penseroso type, and four in the meter of the translation from Horace.

See above and below, pp. 15 n. 1, 107-8, 140, 363, 392 n. 1, 163, 159 n. 4, 317. 4 See below, p. 467.

to represent "the Weekly Society for free Enquiry, &c. who meet at the sign of the Robin Hood without Temple-Bar, as an assembly of illiterate, deistical mechanics, and profligate persons; who indulge themselves in an unwarrantable, illegal, abuse of the liberty we enjoy, of freely debating upon sacred subjects." The only unrimed political satire of the period seems to be the anonymous Paradise Regain'd, or the Battle of Adam and the Fox (1780), an imaginative if not a poetic treatment of the duel between William Adam and Charles James Fox, ironically dedicated to Lord North in recognition of his powers of "invention." It relates how Adam, banished from Eden to Scotland (where William Adam lived), is tempted by the serpent to undertake a duel with its enemy, the Fox, who is wounded by Adam. After "endeavouring to flounder through this chaos of half-formed ideas," 2 expressed in a wretched adaptation of the verse of Paradise Lost, the reader will hardly be in the mood for Nathaniel Lancaster's Methodism Triumphant, or the Decisive Battle between the Old Serpent and the Modern Saint (1767); for, according to the Critical Review, Lancaster "writes in Miltonic verse, and his manner is so formal, that in five books he hardly excites one emotion of pleasantry." These three pieces, together with Gascoigne's Steele Glas (1576), seem to be the only satires of any length written in blank verse before 1800 and presumably for a considerable time thereafter. There were, however, several long enough to be published by themselves, and perhaps, like John Carr's Filial Piety (1764), in handsome folio sheets. Carr invokes

HER, whose Hand divine

Pats the sleek Brain of many a mighty Bard;

Whose Names I fain wou'd write, but fear the Worst.
All hail, propitious DULNESS! (who, but yawns
And stretches with congenial Sympathy?)."

A curious kind of burlesque, curious because for fully half the poem the author seems not to have quite made up his mind whether to be quizzically in earnest or good-humoredly to poke fun, is William Shenstone's Economy, a Rhapsody, addressed to Young Poets (1764). Funny the rhapsody rarely is; besides, seven hundred lines of burlesque is too much. Like the Splendid Shilling, it pictures the shifts and privations of impecunious poets, who are urged, in

1 Mo. Rev., xv. 86.

2 Ib. lxii. 323. Regarding the duel, see the Dictionary of National Biography, under "William Adam."

3 xxv. 66-7 (1768). I know the poem only through this review.

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order that the wherewithal necessary for their lavish temperamental natures may be forthcoming, to devote some of the dregs of their time to their accounts and to

Economy! thou good old-aunt! whose mien

Furrow'd with age and care the wise adore.1

Shenstone must have had Philips's original in mind, for some of his phrases clearly burlesque Paradise Lost, a fact the more interesting because, notwithstanding his romantic tastes, his ode-writing, and his imitation of Spenser, Shenstone never wrote sonnets or copied Allegro and Penseroso. Yet he did write two more unrimed poems of some three or four hundred lines each, Love and Honour (a stilted tale of a Spanish captive and a British hero), and The Ruin'd Abby, or the Effects of Superstition, in which his passion for landscape gardening is strangely combined with a chronological survey of the evils brought upon England by Catholicism. "His blank verses," wrote Johnson, "those that can read them may probably find to be like the blank verses of his neighbours," an utterance which is equally applicable to nearly all unrimed humorous poems, and under which, as under an epitaph, they may be allowed to rest.

Yet there is one which, though no better than many others, has unusual contemporary interest because of its date (1914) and because of its appearance in that remarkable production of twentiethcentury America, the Spoon River Anthology (1915). The last piece in Mr. Masters's volume is The Spooniad, a mock-heroic which in three passages parodies Milton. It begins,

1 Works (1764), i. 293. Akenside's Poet (1737) also describes the poverty of hackwriters.

2 For example, "broom never comes, That comes to all" (p. 303, cf. P. L., i. 66–7); "seas of bliss! Seas without shore!" (p. 291, cf. P. L., xi. 749–50); "ballanc'd with friendship... The rival scale of interest kicks the beam" (p. 287, cf. P. L., iv. 997– 1004);

Sweet interchange
Of river, valley, mountain, woods, and plains!