The rich reward his virtues claim from Heaven.
And Bertie, as in duty bound, would reply in kind, bidding the sallow Arno pause and listen to the lays of Parsons. As an alternative to these panegyrics, they wrote Dithyrambics to Bacchus, Odes to the Siroc, or lines on that latest novelty, Montgolfier's air-balloon. Mrs. Greathead was, in fact, as Parsons informs us, the only member of the society who contributed nothing but the inspiration of her charms.
Some of these poems were printed in an Arno Miscellany, of which only a few copies were privately circulated. It was a subsequent and larger collection, published in 1785, under the name of The Florence Miscellany, which first made its way to England, and drew the attention of the English public to the rising school of versifiers. Horace Walpole characterized their productions as “mere imitations of our best poets,” that is to say, of Milton, Gray, and Collins. How justly, may be inferred from the opening stanza of Merry's Ode on a distant prospect of Rome:—
When Rome of old, terrific queen,
High-placed on Victory's sounding car,
With arm sublime and martial mien,
Brandished the flaming lance of war,
Low crouched in dust lay Afric's swarthy crowd,
And silken Asia sank, and barbarous Britain bowed.
The imitations of Milton and Collins are of a like description. Such as it was, the book was a success, and samples of its contents were reproduced, after the fashion of the day, in the newspapers and magazines—the Gentleman's, the European, the Universal Magazine, and so forth. Of the quality of the poems, critically considered, and of the Della Cruscan poetry generally, I shall have something to say farther on. In the meantime, it may, perhaps, be worth while to disinter a ludicrous passage in one of Merry's contributions to the Florence Miscellany. The “Oziosi” had one day agreed that each of them should produce by the evening a story or poem which should “excite horror by description.” Mrs. Piozzi's production will be found in her Autobiography, and is by no means devoid of merit. Merry brought a poem (“a very fine one,” says Mrs. Piozzi), in which he introduced the following remarkable ghost, which I commend to the attention of the new Psychical Society:—