Small, therefore, as is the extent of deliberate critical work which Gray has left us, we may perceive in it nearly all the notes of reformed, revived, we might almost say reborn, criticism. The two dominants of these have been already dwelt upon—to wit, the constant appeal to history, and the readiness to take new matter, whether actually new in time, or new in the sense of having been hitherto neglected, on its own merits; not indeed with any neglect of the ancients—for Gray was saturated with “classical” poetry in every possible sense of the word, with Homer and Virgil, as with Dante and Milton and Dryden—but purely from the acknowledgment at last of the plain and obvious truth, “other times, other ways.” As a deduction from these two we note, as hardly anywhere earlier, a willingness to take literature as it is, and not to prescribe to it what it should be—in short, a mixture of catholicity with tolerance, which simply does not exist anywhere before. Lastly, we may note a special and very particular attention to prosody. This is a matter of so much importance that we must[[111]] ourselves bestow presently some special attention upon it, and may advantageously note some other exercitations of the kind at the time or shortly afterwards.

Shenstone.

Of the rest of the group mentioned above, Shenstone[[112]] is the earliest, the most isolated, and the least directly affected by the mediæval influence. Yet he, too, must have felt it to have engaged, as we know he did, with Percy in that enterprise of the Reliques which his early death cut him off from sharing fully. From his pretty generally known poems no one need have inferred much tendency of the kind in him: for his Spenserian imitation, The Schoolmistress, has as much of burlesque as of discipleship in it. Nor are indications of the kind extremely plentiful in his prose works. But the remarkable Essays on Men and Manners, which give a much higher notion of Shenstone’s power than his excursions into the rococo, whether versified or hortulary, are full of the new germs. Even here, however, he is, after the prevailing manner of his century, much more ethical than literary, and shows deference, if not reverence, to not a few of its literary idols. The mixed character of his remarks on Pope[[113]] (which are, however, on the whole very just) may be set down by the Devil’s Advocate to the kind of jealousy commonly entertained by the “younger generations who are knocking at the door”; and his objection to the plan of Spenser is neo-classically purblind. But his remarks on Prosody[[114]] breathe a new spirit, which, a little later, we shall be able to trace in development. His preference for rhymes that are “long” in pronunciation over snip-snaps like “cat” and “not”; his discovery—herald of the great Coleridgean reaction—that “there is a vast beauty in emphasising in the eighth and ninth place a word that is virtually a dactyl”; the way in which he lays stress on harmony of period and music of style as sources of literary pleasure; and above all the fact, that when examining the “dactylic” idea just given, he urges the absurdity of barring trisyllabic feet in any place, and declares that a person ignorant of Latin can discern Virgil’s harmony, show us the new principles at work. Perhaps his acutest critical passage is the maxim, “Every good poet includes a critic: the reverse will not hold”; his most Romantic, “The words ‘no more’ have a singular pathos, reminding us at once of past pleasure and the future exclusion of it.”[[115]]

Percy.

Shenstone’s colleague in the intended, his executor in the actual, scheme of the Reliques was allowed by Fate to go very much further in the same path. At no time, perhaps, has Bishop Percy had quite fair play. In his own day his friend Johnson laughed at him, and his enemy Ritson attacked him with his usual savagery. In ours the publication at last of his famous Folio Manuscript[[116]] has resulted in a good deal of not exactly violent, but strong language as to his timorous and eclectic use of the precious material he had obtained, and his scarcely pardonable tamperings with such things as he did extract. Nobody indeed less one-sided and fanatical than Ritson himself, or less prejudiced than the great lexicographer, could ignore the vastness of the benefit which the Reliques actually conferred upon English literature, or the enormous influence which it has directly and indirectly exercised; but there has been a slight tendency to confine Percy’s merits to the corners of this acknowledgment.

Yet there is much more, by no means always in the way of mere allowance, to be said for Percy than this. His poetic taste was not perfect: it could not be so. It was unlucky that he had a certain not wholly contemptible faculty for producing as well as for relishing verse, and an itch for exercising this; while he suffered, as everybody did till at least the close of his own life, from failing entirely to comprehend the late and rather decadent principle that you must let ruins alone—that you must not “improve” your original. But a man must either be strangely favoured by the gods, or else have a real genius for the matter, who succeeds, at such a time and in such circumstances, in getting together and publishing such a collection as the Reliques. Nor are Percy’s dissertations destitute of critical as well as of instinctive merit. Modern scholarship—which has the advantage rather of knowing more than Percy could know than of making a better use of what it does know, and which is much too apt to forget that the scholars of all ages are

“Priests that slay the slayer

And shall themselves be slain”—