Ambrose Philips‘s Pastorals were ridiculed by Pope, and their merit is of an humble kind. They may be said rather to mimic nature than to imitate it. They talk about rural objects, but do not paint them. His verses descriptive of a Northern Winter are better.
Thomson is the best and most original of our descriptive poets. He had nature; but, through indolence or affectation, too often embellished it with the gaudy ornaments of art. Where he gave way to his genuine impulses, he was excellent. He had invention in the choice of his subject (The Seasons), some fancy, wit and humour of a most voluptuous kind; in the Castle of Indolence, great descriptive power. His elegance is tawdriness; his ease slovenliness; he sometimes rises into sublimity, as in his account of the Torrid and Frozen Zones; he has occasional pathos too, as in his Traveller Lost in the Snow; his style is barbarous, and his ear heavy and bad.
Collins, of all our Minor poets, that is, those who have attempted only short pieces, is probably the one who has shown the most of the highest qualities of poetry, and who excites the most intense interest in the bosom of the reader. He soars into the regions of imagination, and occupies the highest peaks of Parnassus. His fancy is glowing, vivid, but at the same time hasty and obscure. Gray’s sublimity was borrowed and mechanical, compared to Collins’s, who has the true inspiration, the vivida vis of the poet. He heats and melts objects in the fervour of his genius, as in a furnace. See his Odes to Fear, On the Poetical Character, and To Evening. The Ode on the Passions is the most popular, but the most artificial of his principal ones. His qualities were fancy, sublimity of conception, and no mean degree of pathos, as in the Eclogues, and the Dirge in Cymbeline.
Dyer‘s Grongar Hill is a beautiful moral and descriptive effusion, with much elegance, and perfect ease of style and versification.
Shenstone was a writer inclined to feebleness and affectation: but when he could divest himself of sickly pretensions, he produces occasional excellence of a high degree. His School-mistress is the perfection of naïve description, and of that mixture of pathos and humour, than which nothing is more delightful or rare.
Mallet was a poet of small merit—but every one has read his Edwin and Emma, and no one ever forgot it.
Akenside is a poet of considerable power, but of little taste or feeling. His thoughts, like his style, are stately and imposing, but turgid and gaudy. In his verse, ‘less is meant than meets the ear.’ He has some merit in the invention of the subject (the Pleasures of Imagination) his poem being the first of a series of similar ones on the faculties of the mind, as the Pleasures of Memory, of Hope, &c.
Young is a poet who has been much over-rated from the popularity of his subject, and the glitter and lofty pretensions of his style. I wished to have made more extracts from the Night Thoughts, but was constantly repelled by the tinsel of expression, the false ornaments, and laboured conceits. Of all writers who have gained a great name, he is the most meretricious and objectionable. His is false wit, false fancy, false sublimity, and mock-tenderness. At least, it appears so to me.
Gray was an author of great pretensions, but of great merit. He has an air of sublimity, if not the reality. He aims at the highest things; and if he fails, it is only by a hair’s-breadth. His pathos is injured, like his sublimity, by too great an ambition after the ornaments and machinery of poetry. His craving after foreign help perhaps shows the want of the internal impulse. His Elegy in a Country Churchyard, which is the most simple, is the best of his productions.
Churchill is a fine rough satirist. He had sense, wit, eloquence, and honesty.