ome hollow compliments, rejected one, called
the Afflicted Father, of which the story appears to have been too
shocking for representation. It was that a father had supplied his son,
under sentence of death, with poison, and when too late found that he
was pardoned. Another called the Syrian Queen, which he had imitated
from the Rodogune of Corneille, was refused with more sincerity by
Colman. A third met no better reception from Harris. "Persuaded," as he
says, "by his own sensations that he had a considerable portion of
native poetic fire in his mind, he resolved to display it in a
composition less subject to the caprice of managers, yet more arduous in
its execution. In short, he determined to begin an epic poem." He chose
for his subject the extorting of Magna Charta from King John. The death
of his friend Thornton in 1780, who had watched the progress of this
essay with much solicitude for its success, chiefly induced him to
relinquish a design, which was in truth ill fitted to his powers. In the
Essay on Epic Poetry, he recommended it to Mason, who was not much
better able to accomplish it than himself. I am unwilling to detain my
reader by an account of the numerous poems, which he either did not
complete or did not commit to the press. His unpublished verses, as he
told me a few years before his death, amounted to six times the number
of those in print.

His first publication was the Epistle on Painting to Romney, in 1778.
The two next in the following year were anonymous, the one A
Congratulatory Epistle to Admiral Keppel on his Acquittal; the other An
Essay on the Ancient Greek Model (as he called it) to Bishop Lowth,
remonstrating against the contention which the bishop had entered into
with Warburton, and which he thought unworthy so excellent a prelate. In
1780, he produced besides the Verses on the death of Mr. Thornton, an
Ode to Howard, and the Epistles on History addressed to Gibbon, which
gained him the intimacy of the historian and the philanthropist. The
success of these works encouraged him to project the Triumphs of Temper,
the most popular of all his poems, which he published in 1781. The next
year saw the publication of his Essay on Epic Poetry; in the notes to
which he introduced much information on the poetry of Italy and Spain,
then less known among us than at present; and he endeavoured to rouse
the spirits of Wright the painter at Derby, by an ode, which was printed
for private circulation.