position very much resembles
Thomas Twining's view that the "description of passions and emotions by
their sensible effects ... [is what] principally deserves the name of
imitative."[6]

In accord with the psychological bias informing his essay, Ogilvie tends
to reduce the importance of narrative events in favor of vivid and
picturesque descriptions, for the latter most immediately communicate
themselves to the reader and most expressly realize the translation from
thought to feeling. Once again it is the uniqueness of rendering that he
has in mind, the innovative cast of the poet's mind which transforms the
familiar and by so doing gives it a newly affective power. It is
important to recognize that Ogilvie shares with his contemporaries a
more limited sense of the varieties of subject-matter than we are likely
to grant. But as this is so for him, and as indeed this condition is a
function of eighteenth-century historiography, it helps to explain the
emphasis he places upon the uniqueness with which the subject is
realized. Over and again such an interest shapes his inquiries and
becomes both an attribute and a test of a poet's capacity. These remarks
need to be qualified only by his inquiry into personification: for here
it is the expectation of the mind that must not be disappointed, and
that which is iconographically established (the figure of Time, for
example) should not be violated.

While Ogilvie is not a major critic a good part of his charm and
interest for us stems from a mind that is not in the least doctrinaire.
His method is inductive, his appeal is always to the human psychology as
that can be known experientially, and his standards are Aristotelian (if
by such a reference we mean to signify a procedure based upon the known
effects of known works). While there is nothing in these letters that
deviates from the psychological tradition in later eighteenth-century
criticism, it is also evident that Ogilvie is not really an
associationist, and that he is less interested in the creative
functioning of the poet's imagination than in the precepts of a
psychological humanism which underscore his criteria and give validity
to his remarks on the range and appeal of lyric poetry. In sum, his
historicism exists as a justification for his defense of lyric poetry
and is intended to provide a basis for the psychological bias of his
argument.

Duke University

NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION

[Footnote 1: _B