His famous _Elegy_, expressing a meditative mood in
language of the choicest perfection, is the representative poem of the
second half of the 18th century, as the _Rape of the Lock_ is of the
first. The romanticists were quietists, and their scenery is
characteristic. They loved solitude and evening, the twilight vale, the
mossy hermitage, ruins, glens, and caves. Their style was elegant and
academic, retaining a little of the stilted poetic diction of their
classical forerunners. Personification and periphrasis were their
favorite mannerisms: Collins's Odes were largely addressed to
abstractions, such as Fear, Pity, Liberty, Mercy and Simplicity. A poet
in their dialect was always a "bard;" a countryman was "the untutored
swain," and a woman was a "nymph" or "the fair," just as in Dryden and
Pope. Thomson is perpetually mindful of Vergil, and afraid to speak
simply. He uses too many Latin epithets, like _amusive_ and
_precipitant_, and calls a fish-line

The floating line snatched from the hoary steed.

They left much for Cowper and Wordsworth to do in the way of infusing
the new blood of a strong, racy English into our exhausted poetic
diction. Their poetry is impersonal, bookish, literary. It lacks
emotional force, except now and then in Gray's immortal _Elegy_, in his
_Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College_, in Collins's lines, _On the
Death of Thomson_, and his little ode beginning, "How sleep the brave."

The new school did not lack critical expounders of its principles and
practice. Joseph Warton published, in 1756, the first volume of his
_Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope_, an elaborate review of
Pope's writings _seriatim_, doing him certainly full justice, but
ranking him below Shakspere, Spenser, and Milton. "Wit and satire,"
wrote Warton, "are transitory and perishable, but nature and passion are
eternal....He stuck to describing modern manners; but those manners,
because they are familiar, artificial, and polished, are, in their very
nature, unfit for any lofty effort of the Muse. Whatever poetical
enthusiasm he actually possessed he withheld and stifled. Surely it is
no narrow and niggardly encomium to say, he is the great Poet of Reason,
the first of Ethical authors in verse." Warton illustrated his critical
positions by quoting freely not only from Spenser and Milton, but from
recent poets, like Thomson, Gray, Collins, and Dyer. He testified that
the _Seasons_ had "been very instrumental