Worthy Owen, us, and you.
Shirley Brooks. 1861.
Gray’s Pindaric Odes were not very favorably received, their chief fault being obscurity. Gray was pressed by his friends to append explanatory notes, which, for a long time, he declined to do, writing “I would not have put another note to save the souls of all the owls in London. It is extremely well as it is—nobody understands me, and I am perfectly satisfied.” In 1760 there appeared two burlesque odes by G. Colman and R. Lloyd, one inscribed to “Obscurity”—That, said Gray, is me—the other to “Oblivion,” which was directed against Mason. In these parodies the friends Gray and Mason, are treated with contempt both as men and poets. Gray wrote to his fellow victim, “Lest people should not understand the humour, letters come out in Lloyd’s Evening Post to tell them who and what it was that he meant, and says it is like to produce a great combustion in the literary world. So if you have any mind to combustle about it, well and good, for me, I am neither so literary nor so combustible.” He also informed Dr. Wharton that a bookseller to whom he was unknown, had recommended him to purchase the satire upon himself as “a very pretty thing.” Gray was too proud to show that he was hurt by these satires, but he was too sensitive not to be annoyed at the ridicule, and except a single piece which was written upon compulsion (the Ode for the Installation of the Duke of Grafton), he attempted no more serious verse. These “Odes to Obscurity and Oblivion” are not now of sufficient interest to be reprinted in full:—
Daughter of Chaos and old Night,
Cimmerian Muse! all hail!
That wrapt in never-twinkling gloom canst write,
And shadowest meaning with thy dusky veil!
What poet sings, and strikes the strings?
It was the mighty Theban spoke.