altogether just in his scorn of Akenside's lyric verse of which he says:

It is not easy to guess why he addicted himself so diligently to lyric poetry, having neither the ease and airiness of the lighter, nor the vehemence and elevation of the grander ode. When he lays his ill-fated hand upon the harp, his former powers seem to desert him; he has no longer his luxuriance of expression, nor variety of images. His thoughts are cold, and his words inelegant. Yet such was his love of lyrics that, having once written with great vigour and poignancy his Epistle to Curio, he transformed it afterwards into an ode, disgraceful only to its author.

Of his Odes nothing favourable can be said: the sentiments commonly want force, nature, or novelty; the diction is sometimes harsh and uncouth; the stanzas ill-constructed and unpleasant, and the rhymes dissonant or unskilfully disposed, too distant from each other, or arranged with too little regard to established use, and therefore unpleasing to the ear, which, in a short composition, has no time to grow familiar with an innovation.1

Akenside wrote in lyric verse because he desired to express strong philosophic and political sentiments. These were not confined to his own breast, but were the common inheritance of his party; and the matter for his odes therefore lies between the purely personal feeling expressed in the songs of a Court poet like Suckling, and the abstract thought found in the "Pindarics" of Cowley. The "vehemence and elevation of the grander ode" could scarcely be expected in compositions animated by the spirit of Akenside's Odes to the Earl of Huntingdon, Charles Townshend, the Bishop of Winchester, and the Country Gentlemen of England; in all of which may be found the last dying impulse of Whig panegyric, poured forth so abundantly in the previous generation, to celebrate the genius of "great Nassau." The following passage from the Ode To Charles Townshend in the Country will illustrate what Johnson says, with some justice, about the distribution of Akenside's rhymes; but it also shows that the lyrics of the latter are by no means wanting in character and dignity :

VOL. V

1 Lives of the Poets: Akenside.

II. I

Thee, Townshend, not the arms

Of slumbering ease, nor pleasure's rosy chain
Were destined to detain :

No, nor bright Science, nor the Muse's charms.
For them high heaven prepares

Their proper votaries, an humbler band:

And ne'er would Spenser's hand

Have deigned to strike the warbling Tuscan shell,
Nor Harrington to tell

What habit an immortal City wears;

II. 2

Had this been born to shield

The cause which Cromwell's impious hand betrayed,
Or that like Vere displayed

His red-cross banner o'er the Belgian field;

Yet where the will divine

Hath shut those loftiest paths, it next remains
With reason, clad in strains

Of harmony, selected minds t' inspire,
And virtue's living fire

To feed and eternise in hearts like thine.

II. 3

For never shall the herd whom envy sways
So quell my purpose, or my tongue control;
That I should fear illustrious worth to praise,
Because its master's friendship moved my soul.
Yet if this undissembling strain

Should now perhaps thine ear detain

With any pleasing sound,

Remember thou that righteous fame

From hoary age a strict account will claim

Of each auspicious palm with which thy youth was crowned.

Lloyd in his Ode to Genius addresses Akenside as the

Blest bard, around whose sacred brow

Great Pindar's delegated wreath is hung;

and Akenside shares with Congreve, Collins, and Gray the honour of perceiving, what was apparently hidden from Cowley and his followers in the preceding century,

that Pindar's Odes were constructed on a regular musical principle. He had also a keen appreciation of Horace's terse felicity; and in his Ode to Caleb Hardinge, M.D., he strives to reproduce this, with a success which anticipates the work of Tennyson in some of his earlier lyrics :With sordid floods the wintry urn

Hath stained fair Richmond's level green;
Her naked hills the Dryads mourn,

No longer a poetic scene.

No longer there thy raptured eye
The beauteous forms of earth and sky
Surveys, as in their author's mind;
And London shelters from the year
Those whom thy social hours to share
The Attic Muse designed.

From Hampstead's airy summit we,
Her guests, the city shall behold,
What day the people's stern decree
To unbelieving kings is told;

When common men (the dread of fame)
Adjudged, as one of evil name,
Before the sun th' anointed head.
Then seek thou too the pious town,
With no unworthy cares to crown
That evening's awful shade.

Deem not I call thee to deplore
The sacred martyr of the day,
By fast and penitential lore
To purge our ancient guilt away.
For this on humble faith I rest,

That still our advocate, the priest,

From heavenly wrath will save the land:
Nor ask what rites our pardon gain,
Nor how his potent sounds restrain
The thunderer's lifted hand.

No, Hardinge: peace to Church and State!
That evening let the Muse give law,

While I anew the theme relate

Which my first youth enamoured saw.
Then will I oft explore thy thought,

What to reject which Locke hath taught,

What to pursue in Virgil's lay:

Till hope ascends to loftiest things,
Nor envies demagogues or kings

Their frail and vulgar sway.

O versed in all the human frame,

Lead thou where'er my labour lies,

And English fancy's eager flame

To Grecian purity chastise:

While hand in hand at Wisdom's shrine
Beauty with truth I strive to join,

And grave assent with glad applause
To paint the story of the soul,

And Plato's visions to control

With Verulamian laws.

With these four men of original genius the philosophicopolitical impulse which inspired the didactic school of English poetry in the first half of the eighteenth century seems to have exhausted itself. Others studied the metrical forms and the popular taste which the art of these poets had created, but did not succeed in giving to their own compositions the imprint of individual character. John Armstrong (1709-1779), author of The Art of Preserving Health, combines in his poem-which is written in blank verse-some of the descriptive fancy of his friend Thomson with the purer diction of Akenside. David Mallet (1700?-1765), best known as the pretended author of the well-known ballad William and Margaret, and as the editor of Bolingbroke's works, imitated the didactic style of Pope in his essay on Verbal Criticism; and the style of Thomson in his Excursion. In his Amyntor and Theodora, after telling a tale of apparently ancient times, in blank verse, which is a unique example of "the nauseous affectation "to use Warton's phrase-"of expressing everything pompously," he suddenly brings the reader into the previous century by celebrating the landing in Torbay of the "great Nassau":

They fly! he cried, they melt in air away

The clouds that long fair Albion's heaven o'ercast!
With tempest deluged, or with flame devoured
Her drooping plains: while dawning rosy round

A purer morning lights up all her skies!

He comes, behold! the great deliverer comes,
Immortal William, borne triumphant on
From yonder orient o'er propitious seas,
White with the sails of his unnumbered fleet,

A floating forest, stretched from shore to shore! etc. etc.

John Dyer (1700-1758) reproduced in his Fleece (1757) the style of John Philips' Cider, and in his Ruins of Rome (1740) the style of Thomson's Liberty. He exhibits, however, very little of Thomson's political spirit; and on the whole what is most characteristic of his verse is the tendency, visible in all the descriptive poetry of this period, to borrow ideas and terms from the art of painting. Pope's Epistle to Jervas, Thomson's allusions. to the great painters of the classical school in his Castle of Indolence, Walter Harte's Essay on Painting, all bear witness in different ways to the strength of this movement, which may indeed be traced back as far as Dryden's translation of Fresnoy's Art of Painting. Dyer himself early embraced the profession of a painter, and formed the design of his Ruins of Rome while studying the monuments of ancient art in Italy. The poem is inspired by the picturesque rather than by the historic aspect of the imperial city :

Enough of Grongar, and the shady dales
Of winding Towy, Merlin's fabled haunts,
I sing inglorious. Now the love of arts,
And what in metal or in stone remains
Of proud antiquity, through various realms.
And various languages and ages famed,
Bears me remote, o'er Gallia's woody bounds,
O'er the cloud-piercing Alps remote; beyond
The vale of Arno, purpled with the vine,
Beyond the Umbrian and Etruscan hills,
To Latium's wide champaign, forlorn and waste,
Where yellow Tiber his neglected wave
Mournfully rolls. Yet once again, my muse,
Yet once again, and soar a loftier flight:

Lo, the resistless theme, imperial Rome!

Amid the ruins the poet moralises easily on the fate of luxury and the vanity of all human things; but he shows none of the active enthusiasm for English liberty which characterises the poems of Addison and Thomson on the same subject. Time was reducing the English imagination to a mood of æsthetic quietism. The House of Brunswick was every year establishing itself more firmly on the throne. Wealth and refinement constantly increased, and ecstasies over the Whig triumphs of the