Clearly Morrison was not influenced by, if familiar with, The Progress of Poesy and The Bard. His ode is Pindaric in the late seventeenth-century sense. In his brief preface he explains that he has sought to please us “with a little variety of wild music,” believing “that the perpetual recurrence of the same measure in such a multiplicity of stanzas would have been rather languid and fatiguing.” An examination of the poem shows that Morrison has carried his desire for variety to the extreme. The poem consists of thirty-five stanzas, not one of which repeats both the metrical pattern and rhyme scheme of any other. The stanzas range from six to eighteen lines in length, and the lines themselves from four short syllables to the long Alexandrine. At times one has the feeling that this love of changing rhythms and rhymes has improperly warped the meaning of a given passage.
The author shows his familiarity with the standard books on aesthetics. In Idler No. 76, published in 1759, Reynolds laughed at those who by mastering a few phrases posed as connoisseurs. He introduced a gentleman who had just returned from Italy, “his mouth full of nothing but the grace of Raffaelle,... and the sublimity and grand contorno of Michael Angelo.” This gentleman criticised a Vandyck because it “had not the flowing line,” and of “St. Paul preaching” said, “what an addition to that nobleness could Raffaelle have given, had the art of contrast been known in his time! but above all, the flowing line.” Morrison is familiar with the jargon, as is seen throughout the ode. At the beginning he displays wit in applying these phrases not to painting but to his verse:
With my easy flowing line
To unite correctness of design.
And at the end he rather neatly twists the famous statement of Appelles into a justification for his writing a poem to add to the reputation of a great painter.
The ode falls into two roughly equal parts. In the first half the poet describes specific examples of what he calls History and Landskip. The battle painting sounds like something by Il Borgognone, the crucifixion perhaps by Guido Reni. The other painters are named--Vanderveld and, inevitably, Claude. The late Miss Manwaring would not have been surprised to learn that more space is devoted to Claude than to the others. Then almost precisely at the half-way point a pleasing trance is interrupted by the portrait of a “hoary sage,” perhaps, Mr. Kirkwood suggests, the portrait Reynolds had recently completed of the Rev. Zachariah Mudge, then seventy-two years of age, who had been since 1737 a fellow prebendary of Morrison’s at Exeter, and whom Reynolds described as “the wisest man he had ever met.” From this point on the poet addresses Reynolds and incidentally describes with skill two of his most popular portraits, “Lady Sarah Bunbury sacrificing to the Graces” (exhibited in 1765) and “Garrick between Tragedy and Comedy” (exhibited in 1762). Garrick was then at the height of his fame, and this was the most notable of the many portraits painted of him. Lady Sarah, “the bright Lenox” of stanza XXIII, was equally celebrated in her sphere. Among the bridesmaids at the wedding of George III she was, in Walpole’s opinion, the “chief angel.” “With neither features nor air, nothing ever looked so charming as Lady Sarah Lenox; she has all the glow of beauty peculiar to her family.” She was the great granddaughter of Charles II; hence Morrison’s regal. And in the poem as in the painting she is feeding the flame which does honor to the Graces.
Johnson’s hostility to “our Pindarick madness” is well known. The “first and obvious defect” of Dryden’s Threnodia “is the irregularity of its metre.” The “lax and lawless versification” of this type of poetry, he wrote in the Life of Cowley, “concealed the deficiencies of the barren, and flattered the laziness of the idle.” One cannot but wonder therefore at his praise of Morrison’s ode. To be sure, Reynolds quotes Johnson as pronouncing it “superior to any Poem of the kind that has been publish’d these many years,” and Johnson may well have considered praise of this sort as he did lapidary inscriptions. It may be worth noting, however, that none of his recorded comments on Pindaric verse antedate the publication of this ode. Conceivably he himself was unaware of his hostility until, more than ten years later, he was forced to criticise the poets who made the English Pindaric popular.
Perhaps too by ordering its publication he was saying indirectly what he had already expressed in many of his writings, for example in Rambler No. 23: “the publick, which is never corrupted, nor often deceived, is to pass the last sentence upon literary claims.” If this is so, a series like the Augustan Reprints necessarily deals with literary failures. And yet Morrison’s ode is well worth reading today as a pleasing example of what I somewhat fearsomely term the baroque, of what the cultured gentleman of that time regarded as a token of good taste. Long dormant, it is here given new life. Who knows but that the prophecy made by Morrison at the end of the poem may after all be fulfilled:
In the long course of rolling years,
When all thy labour disappears,