iting a poem to add to the reputation of
a great painter.

The ode falls into two roughly equal parts. In the first half the poet
describes specific examples of what he calls History and Landskip. The
battle painting sounds like something by Il Borgognone, the crucifixion
perhaps by Guido Reni. The other painters are named--Vanderveld and,
inevitably, Claude. The late Miss Manwaring would not have been
surprised to learn that more space is devoted to Claude than to the
others. Then almost precisely at the half-way point a pleasing trance is
interrupted by the portrait of a "hoary sage," perhaps, Mr. Kirkwood
suggests, the portrait Reynolds had recently completed of the Rev.
Zachariah Mudge, then seventy-two years of age, who had been since 1737
a fellow prebendary of Morrison's at Exeter, and whom Reynolds described
as "the wisest man he had ever met." From this point on the poet
addresses Reynolds and incidentally describes with skill two of his most
popular portraits, "Lady Sarah Bunbury sacrificing to the Graces"
(exhibited in 1765) and "Garrick between Tragedy and Comedy" (exhibited
in 1762). Garrick was then at the height of his fame, and this was the
most notable of the many portraits painted of him. Lady Sarah, "the
bright Lenox" of stanza XXIII, was equally celebrated in her sphere.
Among the bridesmaids at the wedding of George III she was, in Walpole's
opinion, the "chief angel." "With neither features nor air, nothing ever
looked so charming as Lady Sarah Lenox; she has all the glow of beauty
peculiar to her family." She was the great granddaughter of Charles II;
hence Morrison's _regal_. And in the poem as in the painting she is
feeding the flame which does honor to the Graces.

Johnson's hostility to "our Pindarick madness" is well known. The "first
and obvious defect" of Dryden's _Threnodia_ "is the irregularity of its
metre." The "lax and lawless versification" of this type of poetry,
he wrote in the _Life of Cowley_, "concealed the deficiencies of the
barren, and flattered the laziness of the idle." One cannot but wonder
therefore at his praise of Morrison's ode. To be sure, Reynolds quotes
Johnson as pronouncing it "superior to any Poem _of the kind_ that has
been publish'd these many years," and Johnson may well have considered
praise of this sort as he did lapidary inscriptions. It may be worth
noting, however, that none of his recorded comments on Pindaric verse
antedate the publication of this ode.