ned spices on Panchaia (p. 147).
Barksted's early and unqualified recognition of Shakespeare's
greatness, and his humbly accurate assessment of his own limited
powers, compared to "neighbor" Shakespeare's, are quite disarming. One
gets the uncomfortable sense, however, that Barksted in both =Mirrha=
and =Hiren=, like H. A. in =The Scourge= after him, is a moral fence
straddler, enjoying vicariously the lasciviousness he so piously
reprehends.

=Hiren= as treated by Barksted is also deficient in imagination of a
high order, but is a more absorbing story than =Mirrha=. As signaled by
his undertaking a more intricately rhymed stanza than he attempted in
his first poem, Barksted's versification and composition in the second
poem are superior. The poet achieves his most telling effects in =Hiren=
not from invention but from the elaboration of such source materials
in Painter as permit him to capture the distinctive glittering
artifice of minor epic. His catalog of the senses (Stanzas 75-79)
serves as an example of this power of embellishment at its best.

Page's =Amos and Laura=, like Gale's =Pyramus and Thisbe=, falls into
bathos near the end when Amos, in an extended comparison, likens
Laura's refusal to cure his love wound to an avaricious doctor's
refusal to set a poor man's leg. Page's failure as a poet is not a
result of temporary lapses, as here, but of his inability to invent
significant conflict. As Amos says, with unintentional irony on page
235:

There are no Seas to separate our joy,
No future danger can our Love annoy.

This is precisely the problem. But in spite of the poem's obvious
weakness, one is drawn to the man who wrote it for his obviously
sincere, self-deprecatory references to his "weake wit" and "inferiour
stile." Fully aware of his limitations, Page, like Barksted and many
another unexceptional talent of his age, was nevertheless drawn to the
composition of poetry like a moth to the flame.

=The Scourge= is a straightforward and lively but undistinguished
redaction, in sing-song verse, of the well-worn Mirrha story. Its
chief but nevertheless dubious merit, over against the epyllionic
tradition, is its no-nonsense approach to the art of minor epic
narration. Although it expands Ovid's speeches and descriptions where
feasible and introduces a degree of invention en route, it is
singularly barren of such adornments as epithets, set descriptions,
and formal digressions. In consequence, it la