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Changing Taste in the Eighteenth Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Raymond D. Havens
Raymond D. Havens*
Affiliation:
The Johns Hopkins University
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Extract

For some time the conviction has been growing that many of the current generalizations concerning eighteenth-century literature have been arrived at by the à priori, or deductive, method. A few outstanding figures that have been studied with considerable care have furnished the chief and sometimes the only basis for characterizations of the period. The age has suffered, as most ages have, from the tendency to dogmatize as to what the people of the time must have thought, and from the corresponding neglect of that humbler and more arduous task of finding out what, as a matter of fact, they said.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 44 , Issue 2 , June 1929 , pp. 501 - 536
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1929

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References

Note 1 in page 501 I am indebted to my friend, Miss Addie F. Rowe, for generous assistance in the preparation of this article, particularly for listing, some years ago, the contents of each volume of each edition of each Miscellany. To David Pottinger of the Harvard University Press I owe the opportunity of using his copy of W. P. Courteney's privately printed Dodsley's Collection of Poetry, Its Contents and Contributors, 1910.

Note 2 in page 502 In 1712 Gay wrote,

Wouldst thou for miscellanies raise they fame;

And bravely rival Jacob's [i.e., Tonson's] mighty name.

(“Epistle to Lintott,” 11-12, cf. 96) and as late as 1780-1782, John Nichols brought out an eight volume anthology “formed principally,” as the Advertisement acknowledges, “from that of Mr. Dryden.”

Note 3 in page 502 “Your opinion of the Miscellanyes is likewise mine: I will for once lay by the Religio Laid, till another time. But I must also add, that since we are to have nothing but new, I am resolved we will have nothing but good, whomever we disoblige” (Works, ed. Scott-Saintsbury, xviii, 106). Note, however, “The Bookseller to the Reader” (Miscellany, part iii, 1693) signed Jacob Tonson: “I waited upon several Gentlemen to ask their Opinion of a Third Miscellany, who encourag'd me to endeavour it, and have considerably help'd me in it. Many very Ingenious Copies were sent to me upon my giving publick notice of this Design.”

Note 4 in page 503 In 1712, in making suggestions for a miscellany, Gay wrote (“Epistle to Lintott,” 29),

Translations should throughout the work be sown.

Note 5 in page 503 Of the omitted translations, 436 pages are from Ovid, 139 from Lucan, and 57 from Virgil. It is easy to see why Rowe's two long translations from Lucan, which were included in the Miscellany in 1709 and 1716, should be dropped after the publication in 1718 of a complete version of the Pharsalia from the same pen. Similarly, scattered renderings of Virgil by Dryden would have little interest after the publication of the laureate's complete translation. Apparently the numerous extracts from Ovid were removed in anticipation of reprinting them in the complete Metamorphoses “translated by the most eminent hands” that came out in 1717, or in Ovid's Epistles with his Amours published in 1725.

It is fair to assume that Tonson, who was the publisher of all these volumes, may have feared lest the appearance of much the same material in two of his publications might injure the sale of each. There must have been special reasons for dropping these particular translations, since many others were kept and new ones were introduced. Opposition to Virgil or Ovid cannot be the explanation, since—to take only two instances—“Virgil's Eclogues translated by Several Hands,” which filled 92 pages in the first volume, was retained from the first edition to the last, and three new translations from the Metamorphoses were introduced into volume iii in 1706 and kept in later editions. Yet the matter is by no means simple, for one of the three excerpts from Rowe's Lucan was retained in the fifth volume of all editions.

Note 6 in page 504 It will be seen on pages 523-24 below that in the last three volumes of “Dodsley's Miscellany” (1755-8) poems in stanzas occupy nearly twice as many pages as those in couplets. But no single stanza ever enjoyed anything like the vogue of the couplet.

Note 7 in page 505 Aside from the addition—to the second edition only—of Philip's Cyder, the number of lines of blank verse (which fill only thirteen pages of the 1727 edition) remains fairly constant. Half of the volumes contain none at all.

Note 8 in page 505 Actually, 12 pages; but, since the number of lines on a page and the spacing at the beginning and end of a poem vary greatly from one edition to another, it has been necessary, for purposes of comparison, to change all figures having to do with the number of pages that a given kind of poetry occupies in the various editions to the number it fills, or would have filled, in the edition of 1727. This is not an easy thing to do, but is an extremely easy thing, at one point or another, to forget to do; and there are probably instances where I have forgotten.

Note 9 in page 505 Walsh's sonnet on death, added to volume iv in 1708.

Note 10 in page 506 That is, according to the pagination of the first edition. This is equivalent to 65 or 70 pages in the 1727 edition.

Note 11 in page 506 Joseph Trapp condemned them unsparingly as early as 1711 (Praelectiones Poeticae, 3d ed., 1736, i, 103-4), and in 1712 Gay wrote, “Tire not our patience with pindarick lays” (“Epistle to Lintott,” 25).

Note 12 in page 506 Of course, new poets were added to the later volumes of the first edition and to the third edition (the second edition is merely a reprint of the first two volumes of the first edition). Addison and Prior, who receive considerable space, first appear in the third (1693) volume of the first issue, and Pope, Swift, Ambrose Philips, and Tickell in the sixth (1709) volume; five pieces by Etherege were added in 1702 to the second volume; Walsh was given 78 pages in the fourth (1708) volume of the third issue, where John Philips had 89 pages. Some of Dryden's immediate predecessors were added between his death and 1716: Denham in 1702 and 1716 (1727 ed., i, 107-9, v. 73-91, 241-7), and Cowley in 1702, 1704, 1706, and 1716 (ib. ii. 304, v. 181-3, iii. 221-39, ii. 82-4). Poems on Cowley by Sprat and Denham were added in 1708 and 1716 respectively (ib. iv. 288-96, v. 243-6). Some verses “never Printed in any Edition of his Poetry” were published as Waller's in 1694 (iv. 279-81) but dropped in 1716, when two poems by Waller and five on him were added (1727 ed., i. 161-7, iv. 131-49, i. 215-17, 220-22, 226-7, ii. 310-12). Another of his pieces had been added in 1708 (iv. 305-6; 1727 ed., i. 183-4).

Note 13 in page 507 The Miscellany was published as follows:

1st printing, i. 1684, ii. 1685, iii. 1693, iv. 1694, v. 1704, vi. 1709.

2d printing, vols. i and ii only, 1692.

3d printing, vols. i-iv only: i. 1702, ii. n.d., iii. 1706, iv. 1708.

4th printing, 6 vols., 1716.

5th printing, 6 vols., 1727.

The second printing is practically identical with the first impression of volumes i and ii; the third drops many translations and adds much that is new; the fourth drops a number of poems and adds a great many more, notably ballads and important Elizabethan and Stuart productions. The fifth issue is a reprint of the fourth except for some transfers from one volume to another and for a very few omissions and additions.

Note 14 in page 507 See note 12 above.

Note 15 in page 508 Also “To Parson Weeks, an Invitation to London,” by Sir John Mennes (1599-1671), which contains (vi. 296) one of the few references in the literature of the early eighteenth century to the author of the Hesperides:

And that old Sack

Young Herric took to entertain

The Muses in a sprightly Vein.

Note 16 in page 508 The only light I have seen on the interesting questions as to how and by whom these additions were chosen is derived from Thomas Warton's remark (in his edition of Milton's minor poems, 1791, p. x, note) that the selections from Milton were added at the suggestion of Elijah Fenton. From Tonson's addresses “To the Reader” (Miscellany, 1693, iii, and 1709, vi) it is clear that many unpublished contemporary poems were sent in by their authors. In the second of these addresses Tonson expressed the hope that “such Gentlemen as have been so kind to contribute to this or the former Miscellanies, will be pleased to communicate any Copies they are willing to have Publish'd in such a manner.” See also note 3 above.

Note 17 in page 509 Sedley's “Prologue” (“Envy and Faction rule the grumbling Age”) was added in 1702 and his “On the Infanta of Portugal” in 1716 (1727 ed., i. 134-5, 218).

Note 18 in page 509 See page 515 below.

Note 19 in page 509 See R. D. Havens, The Influence of Milton (1922), 480-82; cf. 419-20.

Note 20 in page 509 See note 15 above.

Note 21 in page 509 Most of the authors and many of the specific poems mentioned above as omitted by Tonson are to be found in the Reliques, which, however, contains almost no contemporary poetry.

Note 22 in page 509 Not until 1774 was it finally established that Queen Anne's act of 1709 terminated the perpetual copyright held under the common law by books published before that date.

Note 23 in page 510 Dodsley's Miscellany, i. 3; cf. Dryden's Miscellany, pt. iii (1693), “The Bookseller to the Reader.”

Note 24 in page 510 See John Hoadly's letter to Dodsley, 18 Oct., 1757 (Ralph Straus, Robert Dodsley, London, 1910, p. 140), which begins, “I know of no Property, either Mr. Russell, ye Printer, or his Brother . . . . has in ye Translation of ye Muscipula. I only permitted him to print it as Mr. H[ogarth] had spoken of it so handsomely.” Does this mean that Russell was allowed to print but not to copyright the translation?

Note 25 in page 510 Boswell's Life, ed. Hill, iii. 294. I learned of Mason's suit against Murray from John W. Draper's helpful “Queen Anne's Act, a Note on English Copyright,” MLN, xxxvi. 146-54. Extracts from Murray's pamphlet which throw light on the general question are given in Samuel Smiles's A Publisher and His Friends, 1891, i. 16-17.

Note 26 in page 511 “Chevy Chace” had been added to the 1702 edition of volume ii. The famous Spectator papers on it may have been suggested to Addison by his reading the ballads in the Miscellany or by the brief praise given it in The Muses Mercury for June 1707 (see E. K. Broadus, “Addison's Influence on the Development of Interest in Folk-Poetry,” Modern Philology, viii, 1910, 124 n.); but the chances are that it was included not so much for its own sake as because of the Latin translation that accompanied it.

Note 27 in page 511 Edition of 1727, ii. 284-301; iii. 302-4, 307-13; vi. 276-82. “A Description of the Tombs in Westminster-Abby” (ib. iii. 293-301), apparently an imitation of the ballads, was also added in 1716, and in 1727 “A very ancient Song of the Banishment of the two Dukes of Hereford and Norfolk, in the Time of King Richard the Second” (ib. iii. 372-7).

Note 28 in page 511 Ib. iii. 316-7. On “Gilderoy” see J. W. Ebsworth, Bagford Ballads (Hertford, 1878), i. 101-7.

Note 29 in page 511 Bishop Percy's Folio Manuscript, ed. J. W. Hales and F. J. Furnivall (1868), vol. ii, pp. viii-ix. There is, however, no reason for thinking with Mr. Hales that it was Dryden who added the ballads, since none were included in the editions of the Miscellany published during his lifetime. The 1709 issue of volume vi is prefaced by an address to the reader, signed “Jacob Tonson,” which sounds as if Tonson were the editor. “I have been forced,” it runs, “to omit several of the Copies sent, upon the publick Notice given, otherways this volume would have swell'd beyond the Size of any of the former ones. I shall reserve those for another Volume, which I hope to Publish at the beginning of the next Year.”

Note 30 in page 511 Edition of 1727, vi. 315-20. It was taken from Hickes's recently-published Thesaurus (Oxford, 1705). Presumably the printing of it in the Miscellany is responsible for Percy's including it in his Five Runic Pieces.

Note 31 in page 512 Addison's praise of Chevy Chace excited considerable ridicule (see R. P. McCutcheon, “Another Burlesque of Addison's Ballad Criticism,” Studies in Philology, 1926, xxiii, 451 ff).

Note 32 in page 513 One of these, “A familiar Epistle of Mr. Julian” (1727 ed., vi. 288-91), was attributed to Dryden. Translations of satires are, of course, not included in this count.

Note 33 in page 513 The Miscellany contains a number of epigrams; but, except for a paraphrase of the Lutrin (1727 ed., iii. 345-72), it has few poems that I recognize as parodies.

Note 34 in page 513 I find but 31; of these 2 were added in 1702, 7 in 1704, 3 in 1708, 11 in 1709, 7 in 1716, 1 in 1727. Seven, or nearly a quarter, are elegies. These figures do not, of course, include translations, of which, for example, there are thirteen from Virgil's Eclogues in the first edition of volume I.

Note 35 in page 513 Preface to his Pastorals (Miscellany, 1727 ed., vi. 2). Six of Philips's pastorals and four of Pope's were first published in the first edition of the sixth volume of the collection (1709). Joseph Trapp, first professor of poetry at Oxford, ridiculed the pastorals of his day in his Praelectiones Poeticae (3d ed., 1736, i. 45; the first edition of this volume appeared in 1711) and Gay mocked them three years later in his Shepherd's Week (1714), but Tickell praised them in the Guardian between the 6th and 17th of April, 1713. Johnson's chief condemnations are given in J. E. Brown's Critical Opinions of Samuel Johnson (Princeton, N. J., 1926). See also the index to Hill's edition of the Lives of the Poets.

Note 36 in page 514 For example, “L'Allegro,” “Il Penseroso,” “Lycidas,” and several pieces by Marvel, notably “The Garden.”

Note 37 in page 514 Edition of 1727, i. 252-4. In the lines immediately following those quoted we meet witches, owls, ravens, goblins, and the bones of one who hanged himself for love,—all the paraphernalia (save the cemetery itself) of the graveyard school. The poem was added to the Miscellany in 1716.

Note 38 in page 514 Edition of 1727, i. 256.

Note 39 in page 515 Ib. ii. 373. The poem, which is anonymous, was added in 1716.

Note 40 in page 516 These include three pieces, one by Suckling and two anonymous, entitled “A Session of the Poets” (1727 ed., ii. 85-96); Fr. Knapp's “Epistle to Mr. B—” (ib. iv. 72-5); Addison's “Account of the Greatest English Poets” (ib. iv. 281-5); and “An Epistle from Mr. Charles Hopkins to Mr. Yalden in Oxon” (ib. v. 51-3).

Note 41 in page 517 The Guardian, no. 16, March 30, 1713; reprinted as the preface to The Hive (4th ed., 1732), where it is ascribed to “Mr. Philips.”

Note 42 in page 517 As was pointed out in some ironical lines added in 1716:

But you condemn such lifeless Poetry [as Rymer's],

And wildly talk of nothing else to me

But Spirit, Flame, Rapture, and Ecstasie;

Strange Mystick Things, I understand no more

Than Laity Pax Tecum did of Yore

(Fr. Knapp, “An Epistle to Mr. B—,” 1727 ed., iv. 75).

Note 43 in page 517 Charles Hopkins, “The Story of Ceyx and Halcyone,” ib. iv. 39.

Note 44 in page 518 “Song, To the Fickle Sylvia,” ib. vi. 80.

Note 45 in page 518 “A rant against Cupid,” ib. iv. 114.

Note 46 in page 518 “Upon the Poems of the English Ovid, etc.,” ib. iv. 294. The entire piece is extravagant, “metaphysical,” and interesting.

Note 47 in page 518 “Hunting the Hare” (anon.), ib. iii. 304-6.

Note 48 in page 518 “A Song” (anon.), ib. iv. 260. None of the seven extracts given above appeared in the Miscellany before 1708. The probability that the songs were written in the Elizabethan or the Restoration period does not make them less interesting in the present connection. For us the important thing is that they were added to a popular anthology in 1716.

Note 49 in page 519 Aside from the later work of Gray and Thomas Warton, the chief gain would have been “A Song to David” (1763), “The Traveller” (1764), and “The Deserted Village” (1770).

Note 50 in page 519 The Scottish poets, Allan Ramsay and Hamilton of Bangour, are not included, perhaps because of their dialect but more probably because they were not yet well known south of the Tweed, as Blair's Grave (1743) presumably was not. The length of The Grave was also against it, since the Miscellany includes only complete poems. Copyright may have been responsible for the omission of Young, a writer of such importance that it would not have been safe to “lift” his shorter poems.

Note 51 in page 520 One of the few contemporary borrowings from Collins may be found in the fifth volume of the Miscellany (p. 326) in J. G. Cooper's “Tomb of Shakespear”:

Here Fancy sat, (her dewy fingers cold

Decking with flow'rets fresh th' unsullied sod).

Cf. “How sleep the brave,” lines 3-4.

Note 52 in page 520 Thomas Warton's best poems were not yet written.

Note 53 in page 520 The concluding stanza of which Johnson “repeated, with great emotion” (Boswell's Life, ed. Hill, ii. 452).

Note 54 in page 521 Boswell's Life, ed. Hill, iii. 38. See also Gray's strictures (Letters, ed. Tovey, i. 182-3).

Note 55 in page 521 Postscript to volume vi.

Note 56 in page 523 There is no reason for believing that Dodsley favored the newer poetry rather than the rigidly neo-classic, for he appears to have taken the best he could get wherever he could get it. He certainly was on excellent terms with the leaders of the conservative side; for Pope “assisted” him “with an hundred pounds that he might open a shop,” Johnson (to whom he suggested the idea of the dictionary) called him his “patron,” Chesterfield helped him in various ways, and Spence was one of his intimate acquaintances. All but a handful of the pieces he selected for the first volume of the Miscellany might well have been written under Queen Anne, and the last forty-four pages of volume iii are devoted to the praise of Pope.

Note 57 in page 524 These figures take no account of anapests, sonnets, and epigrams, or of irregular or dramatic works that do not fall into any of the classes named. “If we count the number of poems rather than the number of pages they occupy, we shall likewise find that blank-verse and octosyllabic poetry gained greatly in popularity; for in the first three volumes there are 7 poems in blank verse, 34 in octosyllabics, 77 in stanzas, and 83 in couplets; in the last three, 18 in blank verse, 58 in octosyllabics, 173 in stanzas, and 69 in couplets.” This note and the passage in the text to which it is appended are taken from page 434 of my Influence of Milton.

Note 58 in page 524 That is, according to the pagination of the 1727 edition. This has about one and a half times as many lines on a page as the first edition of Dodsley, to which all my figures refer. If the two Miscellanies had the same number of pages it would be fair to compare a page of one with a page of the other, because, regardless of the number of lines it contained, the one would be the same fraction of its whole as would the other. But, as the 1727 Miscellany averages 370 pages per volume and the first edition of Dodsley 340, the former should have a slightly larger number of pages of each class.

Note 59 in page 524 There is, however, some influence from the Amoretti upon the sonnets of Thomas Edwards. See also notes 63, 68 below.

Note 60 in page 525 Including Collins's “Ode to Evening,” in the meter of Milton's translation from Horace.

Note 61 in page 525 “Monody on the Death of Queen Caroline,” by Gray's friend, Richard West, ii. 278-9. (All references to Dodsley's Miscellany are to the first edition: i-iii, 1748; iv, 1755; v-vi, 1758.) Cf. “Lycidas,” 85-6, 134; “L'Allegro,” 148-50; Paradise Lost, v. 153. “Vacation” (vi. 148-54) copies almost every feature of “L'Allegro” and “Il Penseroso,”—the meter (including the irregular opening and the cadence), the train of personifications, the “hence,” the “come,” the parentage and birth of Vacation, the ending, and the occupations by day and by night. Immediately preceding it, the conclusion of Sneyd Davis's lines “To Thomas Taylor” employs several of these same features from “L'Allegro” and “Il Penseroso” along with a blank verse derived from Paradise Lost. Francis Coventry's “Penshurst” (iv. 50-61) follows Milton's octosyllabics almost as closely as does “Vacation” and with more verbal borrowings.

Note 62 in page 526 There are seven examples of the regular or true Pindaric ode which Gray and Collins favored.

Note 63 in page 526 Nearly every Spenserian imitation in the Miscellany introduces a number of personified abstractions.

Note 64 in page 526 Those by the Yorkes, Gray, and Benjamin Stillingfleet were not yet published. For other sonnets written between 1660 and 1748 see The Influence of Milton, 488-9, 685.

Note 66 in page 526 Ib. 480-82.

Note 66 in page 526 Ib. 495-9, 685-6. Furthermore, Dodsley probably gauged the public taste two shrewdly to include any more, even if more were offered him.

Note 67 in page 527 Although it includes several of the ballads of its own day, Dodsley's Miscellany, unlike Dryden's, is of no significance in the ballad revival. It is an anthology of contemporary verse and reprints few things that antedate 1725.

Note 68 in page 527 Dodsley's Miscellany, ii. 114, 155. West's drama owes a good deal to Comus and makes use of a number of Milton's phrases, as in the 5th and 6th lines quoted above (cf. P.L., vi. 760, v. 185-7). Two pieces by an anonymous author, “An Elegy, written on Valentine Morning” and “The Dowager” (vi. 217-25), also have at times an Elizabethan ring; the first shows the influence of Spenser's “Epithalamion.”

Note 69 in page 527 i. 55 (Tickell); iii. 98 (J. Warton); iv. 62 (Coventry), 225 (T. Warton); vi. 150 (“Vacation”), 326-32 (Gray). Here, as in similar cases throughout this article, figures and references cannot pretend to be complete but only to convey the right impression.

Note 70 in page 527 i. 222, cf. 226-46 (Dyer); iv. 50-51, 55-6 (Coventry), 215, 221, cf. 223-4 (T. Warton), 297-8 (Marriott); vi. 139 (Davies), 221, 224 (“The Dowager”), 319-20 (Mason). Cf. also iii. 109.

Note 71 in page 527 i. 43-62 (Tickell); iii. 105 (J. Warton); iv. 72 (Collins), 188 (Merrick), 351 (Shenstone).

Note 72 in page 527 iii. 97-106, especially 100-102; iv. 208-10, 212 (all by J. Warton). The nearest approach to anything like revolt against the school of Pope is to be found in Joseph Walton's “Enthusiast” and his “Ode . . . . West's Pindar.” In the first he contrasts the “coldly correct” “lays of artful Addison” with “Shakespear's warblings wild”; in the second, “The fearful, frigid lays of cold and creeping Art . . . the courtly, silken lay,” the “verse correctly tame,” with the wild, powerful odes of Pindar. But similar ideas were frequently expressed in Addison's own day.

Note 73 in page 528 To give such definite statistics regarding subjects as indefinite as this is obviously absurd, owing to the difficulty of knowing what poems should be counted. I have paid less attention to the poet's words than to what seems to be his purpose and real interest, and hope that my figures may be substantially true.

Note 74 in page 528 “Ode, On Melancholy,” ib. vi. 320.

Note 75 in page 529 “The Ruins of Rome,” ib. i. 239. Note the preceding eleven lines; also Mason's “Ode” (ib. vi. 319-20) and Cole's “The Arbour” (ib. 92).

Note 76 in page 529 I have noted but five, besides some songs of a pastoral nature by Percy and Shenstone. There are, to be sure, the “Six Town Eclogues” by Lady Mary Montagu, Pope, and Gay; but these are mock pastorals.

Note 77 in page 530 “To Frederick Cornwallis,” ib. vi. 138-9.

Note 78 in page 530 The contrast between imaginative poetry of a high order and pedestrian verse is well illustrated by comparing James Scot's description (“An Ode to Sculpture,” ib. vi. 278-9) of the marble figure of Newton in Trinity College chapel with Wordsworth's lines (Prelude, iii. 58-63) on the same statue.

Note 79 in page 530 “Ode to a Young Lady,” ib. iv. 337. “Rural Elegance” is the characteristic title of an effusion of Shenstone's that contains two of the most real of his descriptive lines (ib. v. 9):

The tangled vetch's purple bloom,

The fragrance of the bean's perfume.

Note 80 in page 530 See his “Verses to Lyttelton,” ib. iv. 343-6; “Upon a Visit in Winter,” ib. v. 26-7; and cf. Richard Jago's “The Swallows,” ib. 72-7, J. Giles's “The Robin,” ib. 90-91, and Miss Ferrer's “Ode to Spring,” ib. 311.

Note 81 in page 530 “An Epistle from a Swiss Officer,” ib. iii. 52.

Note 82 in page 530 “A Winter Thought,” ib. v. 108.

Note 83 in page 531 Markham, “Written upon Leaving Wales,” ib. iv.310.

Note 84 in page 531 Thomas Cole, “The Arbour,” ib. vi. 91. Cf. Coventry's “To a Friend in Wales,” ib. iv. 61, and Warton's “Pleasures of Melancholy,” lines 10-12, ib. 214.

Note 85 in page 531 “The Enthusiast,” ib. iii. 97-106, “Ode to Fancy,” ib. 108; “Ode . . . West's Pindar,” ib. iv. 212, “The Pleasures of Melancholy,” ib. 214-22. See also Coventry's “To a Friend in Wales,” ib. 62, and Marriott's “Ode to Fancy,” ib. 297. Mason attacks the formal garden in “Ode to a Water-Nymph,” ib. iii. 298-301.

Note 86 in page 531 “The Enthusiast,” ib. iii. 103, cf. 104-5. The other instance is the anonymous “Inscription,” ib. 202. These descriptive poems frequently warn against all strong emotions and commend a contented, unambitious, inactive life; none dwell on the joys of physical exertion, of danger, of accomplishment. Such a state of affairs is to be explained not solely by the unadventurous character of the period but also by the conventionality and insincerity of its verse and by the wide gulf that lay between poetry and many aspects of life.

Note 87 in page 532 There is but one romantic narrative, Thomas Lisle's “History of Porsenna, King of Russia” (ib. vi. 178-210), a tale of impossible adventure and an other-world mistress.

Note 88 in page 532 It is sometimes forgotten that the Wartons wrote a few satires and Mason many.

Note 89 in page 532 “Imitations” are free adaptations, like Johnson's London, which sometimes paraphrase the original, sometimes are merely suggested by it.

Note 90 in page 532 In all (counting as one the 11 consecutive translations from Martial's epigrams, which fill but 3 pages) there are in Dodsley, but 21 translations, occupying about 130 pages, and of these only 9, filling about 50 pages, are from the Greek or the Latin. There are only 15 “imitations” of classic authors, which take up between 90 and 95 pages.

Note 91 in page 533 Some excellent songs, of a kind,—Gay's for example and “Sally in our Alley,”—were written in the early eighteenth century; and it is worth noting that The Hive, “a collection of the most celebrated songs,” which was published in 1724, reached a fourth edition in four volumes by 1732-3.

Note 92 in page 534 Dodsley's Collection shows quite as much intellectual depth as would be expected from a miscellany; in emotional depth and sincerity, however, it is lacking.

Note 93 in page 534 Six pieces were given over to literary criticism in Dryden's Miscellany; in Dodsley's there were three times that number

Note 94 in page 534 Preface to Odes, 1746. One aspect of the didacticism of the period is its love of fables, of which the Miscellany has twenty.

Note 95 in page 535 If, however, all the poetry of these writers is studied it will be seen to contain a much larger conservative element than is commonly realized.