ect. Our
poetry had generally become tame and trite; a sort of languid mechanism
had brought it into contempt; it was very little read, and still less
esteemed. This might be not merely the effect, but also the cause of a
deficiency of striking genius in the candidates for the laurel. Collins
and Gray were dead; Mason had hung up the lyre; and Thomas Warton was
then thought too laboured and quaint; Hayley had succeeded beyond
expectation by a return to moral and didactic poetry at a moment when
the public was satiated by vile imitations of lyrical and descriptive
composition; but Cowper gave a new impulse to the curiosity of poetical
readers, by a natural train of thought and the unlaboured effusions of
genuine feeling. There is no doubt that a fearful regard to models
stifles all force and preeminent merit. The burst of the French
Revolution set the faculties of all young persons free. It was dangerous
to secondary talents, and only led them into extravagances and
absurdities. To Wordsworth, Southey, Scott, it was the removal of a
weight, which would have hid the fire of their genius. But the
exuberance of their inexhaustible minds in no degree lessens the value
of the more reserved models of excellence of a tamer age. The contrast
of their varied attractions supplies the reader with opposite kinds of
merit, which delight and improve the more by this very opposition.

Authors seldom estimate each other rightly in their lifetimes. The race
of poets, of whom the last died with the century, had little friendship,
or even acquaintance among themselves; or rather, they broke into little
sets of two and three, which narrowed their opinions and their hearts;
Gray and Mason, Johnson and the two Wartons, Cowper and Hayley, Darwin
and Miss Seward; but Shenstone, Beattie, Akenside, Burns, Mrs. Carter,
Mrs. Smith, &c. stood alone. This is not desirable. Innumerable
advantages spring from frank and generous communication. Collins and
Gray had not the most remote personal knowledge of each other. Gray
never mentions Dr. Sneyd Davies, a poet and an Etonian, nearly
contemporary; nor Nicholas Hardinge, a scholar and a poet also. Mundy,
the author of Needwood Forest, passed a long life in the country,
totally removed from poets and literati, except the small coterie of
Miss Seward, at Litchfield. The lives of poets would be the most amusing
of all biography, if the materials were less scanty: it is strange that
so few of them have left