the Shaksperian nor the
Miltonic model. Mason wrote fourteen sonnets at various times between
1748 and 1797; the earlier date is attached, in his collected works, to
"Sonnet I. Sent to a Young Lady with Dodsley's Miscellanies." They are
of the strict Italian or Miltonic form, and abound in Miltonic allusions
and wordings. All but four of Thomas Edwards' fifty sonnets, 1750-65,
are on Milton's model. Thirteen of them were printed in Dodsley's second
volume. They have little value, nor have those of Benjamin
Stillingfleet, some of which appear to have been written before 1750. Of
much greater interest are the sonnets of Thomas Warton, nine in number
and all Miltonic in form. Warton's collected poems were not published
till 1777, and his sonnets are undated, but some of them seem to have
been written as early as 1750. They are graceful in expression and
reflect their author's antiquarian tastes. They were praised by Hazlitt,
Coleridge, and Lamb; and one of them, "To the River Lodon," has been
thought to have suggested Coleridge's "To the River Otter--"

"Dear native stream, wild streamlet of the west--"

as well, perhaps, more remotely Wordsworth's series, "On the River
Duddon."

The poem of Milton which made the deepest impression upon the new school
of poets was "Il Penseroso." This little masterpiece, which sums up in
imagery of "Attic choice" the pleasures that Burton and Fletcher and many
others had found in the indulgence of the atrabilious humor, fell in with
a current of tendency. Pope had died in 1744, Swift in 1745, the last
important survivors of the Queen Anne wits; and already the reaction
against gayety had set in, in the deliberate and exaggerated solemnity
which took possession of all departments of verse, and even invaded the
theater; where Melpomene gradually crowded Thalia off the boards, until
sentimental comedy--_la comedie larmoyante_--was in turn expelled by the
ridicule of Garrick, Goldsmith, and Sheridan. That elegiac mood, that
love of retirement and seclusion, which have been remarked in Shenstone,
became now the dominant note in English poetry. The imaginative
literature of the years 1740-60 was largely the literature of low
spirits. The generation was persuaded, with Fletcher, that

"Nothing's so dainty sweet as lovely melancholy."

But the muse of their inspiration was not the tragic Titaness of Duerer's
painting:

"The Melencolia that transcends all wit."[16]