med _Ode to Evening_ was a study in versification, after
Milton's translation of Horace's _Ode to Pyrrha_, in the original
meters. Shakspere began to to be studied more reverently: numerous
critical editions of his plays were issued, and Garrick restored his
pure text to the stage. Collins was an enthusiastic student of
Shakspere, and one of his sweetest poems, the _Dirge in Cymbeline_, was
inspired by the tragedy of _Cymbeline_. The verse of Gray, Collins,
and the Warton brothers, abounds in verbal reminiscences of Shakspere;
but their genius was not allied to his, being exclusively lyrical, and
not at all dramatic. The Muse of this romantic school was Fancy rather
than Passion. A thoughtful melancholy, a gentle, scholarly
pensiveness, the spirit of Milton's _Il Penseroso_, pervades their
poetry. Gray was a fastidious scholar, who produced very little, but
that little of the finest quality. His famous _Elegy_, expressing a
meditative mood in language of the choicest perfection, is the
representative poem of the second half of the 18th century, as the
_Rape of the Lock_ is of the first. The romanticists were quietists,
and their scenery is characteristic. They loved solitude and evening,
the twilight vale, the mossy hermitage, ruins, glens, and caves. Their
style was elegant and academic, retaining a little of the stilted
poetic diction of their classical {200} forerunners. Personification
and periphrasis were their favorite mannerisms: Collins's Odes were
largely addressed to abstractions, such as Fear, Pity, Liberty, Mercy,
and Simplicity. A poet in their dialect was always a "bard;" a
countryman was "the untutored swain," and a woman was a "nymph" or "the
fair," just as in Dryden and Pope. Thomson is perpetually mindful of
Vergil, and afraid to speak simply. He uses too many Latin epithets,
like _amusive_ and _precipitant_, and calls a fish-line

"The floating line snatched from the hoary steed."

They left much for Cowper and Wordsworth to do in the way of infusing
the new blood of a strong, racy English into our exhausted poetic
diction. Their poetry is impersonal, bookish, literary. It lacks
emotional force, except now and then in Gray's immortal _Elegy_, in his
_Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College_, in Collins's lines, _On
the Death of Thomson_, and his little ode beginning, "How sleep the
brave?"

The new school did not lack critical expounders of its principles and
practice. Joseph W