_. The work of the printer was
only moderately well done. It will be noted that _whose_ (second line of
stanza V) is obviously a misprint for _whole_, that the second line has
dropped out of stanza XXXIV (Mr. Kirkwood ingeniously suggests that
Morrison wrote: "for every trifler's breast/Is by the hope of future
fame possest"), and that in two places the number of a stanza has been
omitted. And yet the ode, which is physically thinner as well as
historically and aesthetically inferior to Gray's famous odes, is priced
at 1/6, whereas the Strawberry Hill edition of Gray's _Odes_ (1757) sold
for but a shilling.

Clearly Morrison was not influenced by, if familiar with, _The Progress
of Poesy_ and _The Bard_. His ode is Pindaric in the late
seventeenth-century sense. In his brief preface he explains that he has
sought to please us "with a little variety of wild music," believing
"that the perpetual recurrence of the same measure in such a
multiplicity of stanzas would have been rather languid and fatiguing."
An examination of the poem shows that Morrison has carried his desire
for variety to the extreme. The poem consists of thirty-five stanzas,
not one of which repeats both the metrical pattern and rhyme scheme of
any other. The stanzas range from six to eighteen lines in length, and
the lines themselves from four short syllables to the long Alexandrine.
At times one has the feeling that this love of changing rhythms and
rhymes has improperly warped the meaning of a given passage.

The author shows his familiarity with the standard books on aesthetics.
In _Idler_ No. 76, published in 1759, Reynolds laughed at those who by
mastering a few phrases posed as connoisseurs. He introduced a gentleman
who had just returned from Italy, "his mouth full of nothing but the
grace of _Raffaelle_,... and the sublimity and grand contorno of
_Michael Angelo_." This gentleman criticised a Vandyck because it
"had not the flowing line," and of "St. Paul preaching" said, "what an
addition to that nobleness could _Raffaelle_ have given, had the art of
contrast been known in his time! but above all, the flowing line."
Morrison is familiar with the jargon, as is seen throughout the ode. At
the beginning he displays wit in applying these phrases not to painting
but to his verse:

With my easy flowing line
To unite correctness of design.

And at the end he rather neatly twists the famous statement of Appelles
into a justification for his wr