blank verse, modelled on Thomson's. But in the labored descriptions of scenery he is much less definite in his pictures than Thomson; in fact, Glover's descriptions show all the faults of the conventional style : "The plain beyond Thermopyla is girt Half round by mountains, half by Neptune laved. Spercheos, boasting once his poplars tall, Foams down a stony bed. Throughout the face To rich Thessalia's confines they extend. Then after enumerating the shrubs, flowerets, ivy, lawn, poplar groves torn up, cut down, trampled by the barbarian invaders, he goes on: "Yet unpolluted, is a part reserved In this deep vale, a patrimonial spot To Xerxes, reign'd in Thessaly. There glow Inviolate the shrubs. There branch the trees, Sons of the forest. Over downy moss, Smooth walks and fragrant, lucid here and broad, Wind to retreats delectable, to grots, To silvan structures, bow'rs, and cooling dells However long you study this description, you will not be able to realize any landscape that was definitely before the poet's vision when he wrote; there is a cer tain vague framework of scenery, but when the poet comes to details, he puts us off with conventional oftrepeated phrases for natural grandeurs and beautiesthe laving Neptune, arduous ridges, pellucid and sonorous streams, winding floods, Nature's varied beauties, downy moss, retreats delectable, grots, sylvan structure, bowers, and cooling dells. The poet, in short, only gives us musical phrases for what the senses. find in nature, thus dressing these charms to advantage; there is nothing in his landscapes of the life that the human imagination in moments of excitement is apt to ascribe to the face of Nature. Read the Prologue to act iv. of "Henry V." and you will understand the difference. There is one poem of Glover's,-" London, or the Progress of Commerce,"-that illustrates the fashionable poetical style of the Queen Anne time-the prevalent idea as to how Nature was to be dressed to advantage. As a London merchant, Glover no doubt felt his heart swell within him as he looked at the bustle of many nations on the London wharves, and saw ships from many distant regions crowding up the Thames. How did he give expression to this exaltation of mind? He could not present the coarse and vulgar details of trade to a fine Queen Anne gentleman; he asks his reader to look at them through a fine allegorical veil, transports us to the regions of mythology, and gives a long narrative of a love affair between the seagod Neptune and the nymph named Phoenice, the guardian spirit of the Phoenicians. The beautiful nymph Commerce was the offspring of this Union. This is the poet's way of relating the prosaic fact that the Phoenicians were the first great traders by sea; and the events in the subsequent history of Commerce are given as incidents in the life of the nymph Commerce, from her cradle and nursery till the time when she fixed her abode in Great Britain. Among the followers of Pope in Satire there is only one name of distinction, Samuel Johnson, afterward the great prose moralist, critic, and lexicographer. The critic made his mark in literature by a poem; but he is one of the exceptions to the saying that the critics are the men who have failed in literature, for his imitation of Juvenal was a success. It was natural that Johnson should choose Juvenal as his model while Pope adopted the style of Horace. Horace was the gay, light-hearted satirist of the foibles of the literary and fashionable society of Rome; whereas Juvenal took a more stern and gloomy view of life, lashed the vices of his age in a spirit of moral indignation, contrasted the miseries of the poor with the ostentatious splendor of the rich in Roman society, and denounced heartlessness, dishonesty, sycophancy, all the vices of a wealthy and showy civilization, with bitter and unsparing scorn. There was nearly as much difference between them as between Tom Moore and Carlyle. Pope, himself in easy circumstances, and the friend of noblemen and statesmen, naturally had most sympathy with Horace's view of life; while Johnson, then living in London, as Carlyle describes him, on fourpence halfpenny a day, and earning a precarious livelihood as a bookseller's drudge, as naturally thought of Juvenal as a model, and resolved to apply to modern circumstances the sarcasms of this satirist on the Roman metropolis. "Slow rises worth by poverty depressed," is one of the lines in Johnson's "London." He had fitter experience of the fact in the insolence and indifference of busy employers, too closely occupied with other affairs to have time, if they had had the insight, to detect his great talent. As far as versification goes, Johnson proved himself an apt pupil of Pope; nobody since has equalled him in combining Pope's terseness with Pope's smoothness. And in one respect Johnson GRAY AND COLLINS 91 even might be said to have surpassed Pope, if Pope's object had been merely to imitate the ancient Roman. Johnson is at more pains to find exact modern parallels to the ancient situations, and is always felicitous in the turn he gives to Juvenal's phrases. But the truth is that he went to work rather as a scholar than as a satirist. Indignation at the vices satirized was much less a motive with him than the scholar's ambition to make a clever adaptation of the original. Hence, although his "London" attracted some attention, and Pope, always generous as well as right in his judg ments of genuine literary merit, prophesied that the author would not long remain unknown, there was little real vitality in the poem. It was really an imitation, owing much of its interest to the original, and often appearing destitute of motive when not read in connection with the original. Pope's so-called imitations, on the other hand, are equally interesting to the reader whether or not he is acquainted with Horace; the reader perhaps may get additional pleasure from observing the cleverness of the parallel, but the satire has independent point and relish. There is more of Johnson's genuine sentiment in the "Vanity of Human Wishes," another imitation of Juvenal, published ten years later. For eminence in poetry, novelty and distinction are first requisites; and during Pope's closing years the only poets that began to show capability of poetic work that should be at once distinctive in power or spirit and high in quality were Gray and Collins. The great novelty of their work as compared with Pope's was that it was lyrical; they wrote mostly in that form of poetry which is called the Qde. You are doubtless familiar with some, at least, of Gray's poems. You all know the "Elegy." But the Elegy " was not the work on which he most prided 66 himself, or upon which he would have desired his rank as a poet to be adjudicated. It was instantaneously, and has always since been, popular, but he considered that the popularity was due to the subject as much as to the art of the poet. The "Ode on the Distant Prospect of Eton College," the "Hymn on Adversity," the "Progress of Poesy," and "The Bard," were his masterpieces in point of artistic construction. It may increase your interest in them if I point out a few respects in which these lyrics differ from other lyric poetry in our language―i. e., poetry in which the poet gives expression directly to emotion, instead of describing outward nature, or narrating events, or putting words into the mouths of characters whose actions are represented on the stage. But, perhaps, I had better speak of Collins first, as he is less known, and there is one poem of his which I can confidently recommend to you as certain to yield you the highest delight, if you take the trouble to master its intricate harmonies. Of his life there is little to be told, and that little is painful. Born in 1721, and educated at Oxford, he went to London in 1744, the year of Pope's death, as a literary adventurer, at a time when only one man, and that Pope, had succeeded in making literature a profitable profession. He had not Johnson's endurance, or his practical talents; a youth-strange phenomenon for those who take the conventional view of the eighteenth century-of fantastic imagination, with not a little of the temperament of Shelley, delighting, as Johnson puts it, "to rove through the meanders of enchantment, to gaze on the magnificence of golden palaces, to repose by the waterfalls of Elysian gardens." Two years before he went up to London he had published a volume of poems, "Persian Eclogues," Persian Pastorals, reconciling, as you will observe, the taste of the time for pastorals with the inclination of his own fancy toward the gorgeous East. For such a man the |