s, Ogilvie traces the rise of the religious fable as part of
the inevitable sequence of imaginative development. To account,
therefore, for the irregularity of the ode, for the "enthusiasm,
obscurity and exuberance" (p. xxiv) which continue to characterize it,
he refers to its anciently established character, a character not
susceptible to amelioration by speculative rules. He allows, however,
that both the "Epopee" (or epic) and the drama were gradually improved,
and the informing principle of his historical progressivism is again
patent.

The modifications of the ode are from the fictitious theology of Orpheus
and Museus to the elegance and grace of Anacreon, Horace, and Sappho. It
is mainly Horace whom Ogilvie has in view as the exemplar of the lyric
poet, though "a professed imitator both of Anacreon and Pindar"
(p. xxx). We can distinguish, therefore, several different criteria
which contribute to Ogilvie's criticism: (1) a unity of sentiment
consistent with a variety of emotions; (2) a propriety of the passions
in which vivacity is controlled by the circumstances of character; (3) a
just relation between language and sentiment; (4) elegant and pointed
expression ("sallies and picturesque epithets" [p. xxxi.]) both to
heighten the passions expressed and to draw from them their less obvious
effects. Such distinctions define Ogilvie's typical insistence upon
copying Nature, by which he means that the lyric poet's task is not only
to follow the workings of the mind, but to heighten passion in a way
that is more consistent with the nature of the passion itself than with
its action in any particular mind. His criticism looks to the
representation of "the internal movements of the mind warmed by
imagination," yet "exposed in the happiest and most agreeable attitudes"
(p. xxxv). The relation between the empirical and the ideal is a crux
common to Ogilvie and neoclassic theory, not entirely resolved here by
the practical and referential method of citing Horace's shorter odes.
But it is a subject which comes in for more extended treatment in his
second letter, in my judgment a far more critically ambitious letter and
one in which his very fair critical abilities are more conspicuously
apparent.

The second letter undertakes to explain the rules of lyric poetry, even
as the first was concerned with the defects and causes of the poetry.
Ogilvie rehearses a characteristic later eighteenth-century view of the
imagination and