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example of great felicity of genius and uncommon amplitude of acquisitions, of a young mind stored with images, and much exercised in combining and comparing them.

With the philosophical or religious tenets of the author I have 15 nothing to do; my business is with his poetry. The subject is well chosen, as it includes all images that can strike or please, and thus comprises every species of poetical delight. The only difficulty is in the choice of examples and illustrations, and it is not easy in such exuberance of matter to find the middle point between penury and satiety. The parts seem artificially disposed, with sufficient coherence, so as that they cannot change their places without injury to the general design.

His images are displayed with such luxuriance of expression 16 that they are hidden, like Butler's Moon, by a 'Veil of Light''; they are forms fantastically lost under superfluity of dress. 'Pars minima est ipsa puella sui'.' The words are multiplied till the sense is hardly perceived; attention deserts the mind and settles in the ear. The reader wanders through the gay diffusion, sometimes amazed and sometimes delighted; but after many turnings in the flowery labyrinth comes out as he went in. He remarked little, and laid hold on nothing 3.

To his versification justice requires that praise should not be 17 denied. In the general fabrication of his lines he is perhaps superior to any other writer of blank verse; his flow is smooth and his pauses are musical, but the concatenation of his verses* is commonly too long continued, and the full close does not recur with sufficient frequency. The sense is carried on through a long intertexture of complicated clauses, and as nothing is distinguished, nothing is remembered.

The exemption which blank verse affords from the necessity of 18 closing the sense with the couplet, betrays luxuriant and active minds into such self-indulgence that they pile image upon image, ornament upon ornament, and are not easily persuaded to close the sense at all 5. Blank verse will therefore, I fear, be too often

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found in description exuberant, in argument loquacious, and in narration tiresome.

19 His diction is certainly poetical as it is not prosaick, and elegant as it is not vulgar'. He is to be commended as having fewer artifices of disgust than most of his brethren of the blank song2. He rarely either recalls old phrases or twists his metre into harsh inversions. The sense, however, of his words is strained; when 'he views the Ganges from Alpine heights 3,' that is, from mountains like the Alps. And the pedant surely intrudes-but when was blank verse without pedantry?—when he tells how 'Planets absolve the stated round of Time'.'

20 It is generally known to the readers of poetry that he intended to revise and augment this work, but died before he had completed his design 5. The reformed work as he left it, and the additions which he had made, are very properly retained in the late collection. He seems to have somewhat contracted his diffusion; but I know not whether he has gained in closeness what he has lost in splendour. In the additional book The Tale of Solon is too long?.

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One great defect of his poem is very properly censured by

which would extend itself too far on every subject, did not the labour which is required to well-turned and polished rhyme set bounds to it.' Neander replies :-'Verse is a rule and line by which the master-workman keeps his building compact and even, which otherwise lawless imagination would raise either irregularly or loosely.' Works, xv. 360, 376.

In the first edition :-'His diction is certainly so far poetical as it is not prosaick, and so far valuable as it is not common.'

''Of Dodsley's Publick Virtue Johnson said, "It was fine blank' (meaning to express his usual contempt for blank verse).' Boswell's Johnson, iv. 20. See also ante, MILTON, 274.

3 'Who that from Alpine heights his
labouring eye

Shoots round the wide horizon, to
survey

Nilus or Ganges rolling his bright
Bk. i. 1. 177.

wave.'
In the revised version :-

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Mr. Walker', unless it may be said in his defence that what he has omitted was not properly in his plan. 'His picture of man is grand and beautiful, but unfinished. The immortality of the soul, which is the natural consequence of the appetites and powers she is invested with, is scarcely once hinted throughout the poem 2. This deficiency is amply supplied by the masterly pencil of Dr. Young, who, like a good philosopher, has invincibly proved the immortality of man, from the grandeur of his conceptions and the meanness and misery of his state; for this reason a few passages are selected from the Night Thoughts, which, with those from Akenside, seem to form a complete view of the powers, situation, and end of man.' Exercises for Improvement in Elocution, p. 66 [p. 67].

His other poems are now to be considered; but a short con- 22 sideration will dispatch them. It is not easy to guess why he addicted himself so diligently to lyrick poetry, having neither the ease and airiness of the lighter, nor the vehemence and elevation of the grander ode. When he lays his ill-fated hand upon his harp his former powers seem to desert him: he has no longer his luxuriance of expression nor variety of images. His thoughts are cold and his words inelegant. Yet such was his love of lyricks that, having written with great vigour and poignancy his Epistle to Curio, he transformed it afterwards into an ode disgraceful only to its author3.

Of his odes nothing favourable can be said: the sentiments 23 commonly want force, nature, or novelty; the diction is sometimes harsh and uncouth, the stanzas ill-constructed and unpleasant, and the rhymes dissonant or unskilfully disposed, too

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3

Eng. Poets, Ixiv. 29, 151. Smollett says of the physician in Peregrine Pickle (ch. 43):-'He was strangely possessed with the opinion that he himself was inspired by the soul of Pindar.'

Macaulay says of the Epistle :'If Akenside had left lyric composition to Gray and Collins, and had employed his powers in grave and elevated satire, he might have disputed the pre-eminence of Dryden.' Essays, ii. 133. This praise is extravagant.

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distant from each other or arranged with too little regard to established use, and therefore perplexing to the ear, which in a short composition has not time to grow familiar with an innovation '.

To examine such compositions singly cannot be required; they have doubtless brighter and darker parts: but when they are once found to be generally dull all further labour may be spared, for to what use can the work be criticised that will not be read 2?

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'Jostle in the dark' is in Act iv. sc. I of Oedipus, written by Lee (ante, DRYDEN, 81):

'Through all the inmost chambers of the sky

May there not be a glimpse, one starry spark,

But gods meet gods, and jostle in the dark.'

Dryden's Works, vi. 219.

Gray wrote on March 8, 1758, of Dodsley's Coll.:-'The two last volumes are worse than the four first; particularly Dr. Akenside is in a deplorable way.' Mason's Gray, ii. 139. In vol. vi. pp. 15, 25, are two of his Odes. He was one year earlier than Collins, and two than Gray, in publishing Odes. 'He was not a good reader of his own verse.' Dyce, p. 53. For bad readers among the poets see ante, SWIFT, 119 n.

The motto to Wordsworth's Yarrow Revisited and Other Poems, 1835, is from Akenside's Pleasures of the Imagination, iv. 102.

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Poets... dwell on earth

To clothe whate'er the soul admires and [or] loves

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With language and with numbers.'

THO

GRAY'

HOMAS GRAY, the son of Mr. Philip Gray, a scrivener of 1 London, was born in Cornhill 3, November 26, 1716. His grammatical education he received at Eton under the care of Mr. Antrobus, his mother's brother, then assistant to Dr. George, and when he left school, in 1734, entered a pensioner at Peterhouse in Cambridge.

The transition from the school to the college is, to most young 2 scholars, the time from which they date their years of manhood, liberty, and happiness; but Gray seems to have been very little delighted with academical gratifications: he liked at Cambridge neither the mode of life nor the fashion of study, and lived sullenly on to the time when his attendance on lectures was no longer required. As he intended to profess the Common Law he took no degree 7.

Boswell, speaking of this Life, mentions the clamour which has been raised, as if Johnson had been culpably injurious to the merit of that bard, and had been actuated by envy.' Boswell's Johnson, i. 404. See also ib. iv. 64.

Walpole wrote on Jan. 27, 1781 :— 'Johnson's Life [of Gray], or rather criticism on his Odes, is come out; a most wretched, dull, tasteless, verbal criticism-yet timid too.' Letters, vii. 505.

2

Ante, MILTON, 4.

It

3 The house, with eighty more, was burnt down on March 25, 1748. Gent. Mag. 1748, pp. 138, 149, 392; Gray's Letters, ed. D. C. Tovey, i. 175. was on the south side of Cornhill, being the second house west of St. Michael's Alley.' N. & Q. 6 S. x. 256.

On Dec. 26. On Dec. 27, 1746, he wrote to Wharton:-'I was 30 years old yesterday. What is it o'clock by you?' Gray's Letters, i. 154.

5 His father was a cruel brute. The son was almost entirely supported by

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The Vanity of Human Wishes, l. 135. 'He wrote in Dec. 1736:-'You must know that I do not take degrees, and, after this term, shall have nothing more of College impertinences to undergo.... Surely it was of this place, now Cambridge, but formerly known by the name of Babylon, that the prophet spoke.' He goes on to quote Isaiah xiii. 21, xxxii. 14, xxxiv. 14, 15. Letters, i. 3.

In his Hymn to Ignorance, speaking of Cambridge, he writes:'Glad I revisit thy neglected reign.'

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