and so on.
Five or six years later Mason’s Miltonic imitations appeared—“Il Bellicoso” and “Il Pacifico”—which follow even more slavishly the style of “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso,” so that there is no need for Mason’s footnote to “Il Bellicoso” describing the poem with its companion piece as this “very, very juvenile imitation.”[209] “Il Bellicoso” begins with the usual dismissal:
Hence, dull lethargic Peace
Born in some hoary beadsman’s cell obscure,
and subsequently we are introduced to Pleasure, Courage, Victory, Fancy, etc. There is a similar exorcism in “Il Pacifico,” followed by a faint personification of the subject of the ode, attended by a “social smiling train” of lifeless abstractions.
The pages of Dodsley[210] furnish abundant testimony to the prevalence of this kind of thing. Thus “Penshurst”[211] by F. Coventry is another close imitation of Milton’s companion poems, with the usual crowd of abstractions. The same thing is met with in the anonymous “Vacation,”[212] and in the “Valetudinarian,” said to be written by Dr. Marriott.[213]
It is unnecessary to illustrate further the Milton vogue, which thus produced so large a crop of imitations,[214] except to say that there is significant testimony to the widespread prevalence of the fashion in the fact that a parody written “in the Allegoric, Descriptive, Alliterative, Epithetical, Fantastic, Hyperbolical, and Diabolical Style of our modern Ode writers and monody-mongers”[215] soon appeared. This was the anonymous “Ode to Horror,” a humorous burlesque, especially of the “Pleasures of Melancholy.” The Wartons stand high above the versifiers at whose productions we have just looked, but nevertheless there was some justification for the good-humoured parody called forth by their works.
In 1746 there appeared a small volume entitled “Odes on Various Subjects,” a collection of fourteen odes by Joseph Warton.[216] The influence of Milton is especially seen in the odes “To Fancy,” “To Health,” and to “The Nightingale,” but all betray definitely the source of their inspiration. Thus in the first named:
Me, Goddess, by the right hand lead