erning the
history of German poetry and the elder German poets. To my great
astonishment he confessed, that he knew very little on the subject. He
had indeed occasionally read one or two of their elder writers, but not
so as to enable him to speak of their merits. Professor Ebeling, he
said, would probably give me every information of this kind: the subject
had not particularly excited his curiosity. He then talked of Milton and
Glover, and thought Glover's blank verse superiour to Milton's.[226]

[226] _Leonidus_, an epic poem, by R. Glover, first appeared in May,
1737: in the fifth edition, published in 1770, it was corrected and
extended from nine books to twelve. Glover was the author of Boadicea
and Medea, tragedies, which had some success on the stage. I believe
that _Leonidas_ has more merit in the conduct of the design, and in the
delineation of character, than as poetry.

'He write an epic poem,' said Thomson, 'who never saw a mountain!'
Glover had seen the sun and moon, yet he seems to have looked for their
poetical aspects in Homer and Milton, rather than in the sky. 'There is
not a single simile in _Leonidas_,' says Lyttleton, 'that is borrowed
from any of the ancients, and yet there is hardly any poem that has such
a variety of beautiful comparisons.' The similes of Milton come so flat
and dry out of Glover's mangle, that they are indeed quite _another
thing_ from what they appear in the poems of that Immortal: _ex. gr._

Like wintry clouds, which, opening for a time,
Tinge their black folds with gleams of scattered light:--

Is not this Milton's 'silver lining' stretched and mangled?

The Queen of Night
Gleam'd from the centre of th' etherial vault,
And o'er the raven plumes of darkness shed
Her placid light.

This is flattened from the well-known passage in Comus.

Soon will savage Mars
Deform the lovely _ringlets of thy shrubs_.

A genteel improvement upon Milton's 'bush with frizzled hair implicit.'
Then we have

--delicious to the sight
Soft dales meand'ring show their flowery laps
Among rude piles of nature,

spoiled from

--the flowery lap
Of some irriguous valley spread its store.

Thus does this poet shatter and dissolve the blooming sprays of another
man's plantation, instead of pushing through them some new shoots of his
own to crown them with fresh blossoms.

Milton himself borrowed as much as Glover. Aye, ten times more; y