In nature’s breathing paint, the dreary waste
Of Buxton” . . .
he sighs in An Hymn to the Nymph of Bristol; and, for all the bathos of its expression, the admiration is genuine.
William Hamilton wrote A Soliloquy in Imitation of Hamlet, a paraphrase of the famous speech, almost as bald as that from which Shakespeare copied his. But the effort is doubtless more of a literary exercise than an attempt at improvement of the original, for Hamilton shows at various points in his works a fairly intimate knowledge and real regard for Shakespeare’s genius.
Mallet read his Shakespeare intelligently, as witness his Edwin and Emma, a love ballad, with its text taken from Twelfth Night. And William Shenstone shows the right spirit in this very passable stanza from The Schoolmistress, happily describing a village school:
“Yet nurs’d with skill, what dazzling fruits appear!
Ev’n now sagacious foresight points to show
A little bench of heedless bishops here,
And there a chancellor in embryo,