d Lycidas?
For neither were ye playing on the steep
Where your old bards, the famous Druids lie,
Nor on the shaggy top of Mona high,
Nor yet where Deva spreads her wizard stream."

Joseph Warton quotes this passage twice in his "Essay on Pope" (Vol I.,
pp. 7 and 356, 5th ed.), once to assert its superiority to a passage in
Pope's "Pastorals": "The mention of places remarkably romantic, the
supposed habitation of Druids, bards and wizards, is far more pleasing to
the imagination, than the obvious introduction of Cam and Isis." Another
time, to illustrate the following suggestion: "I have frequently wondered
that our modern writers have made so little use of the druidical times
and the traditions of the old bards. . . Milton, we see, was sensible of
the force of such imagery, as we may gather from this short but exquisite
passage." As further illustrations of the poetic capabilities of similar
themes, Warton gives a stanza from Gray's "Bard" and some lines from
Gilbert West's "Institution of the Order of the Garter" which describe
the ghosts of the Druids hovering about their ruined altars at Stonehenge:

"--Mysterious rows
Of rude enormous obelisks, that rise
Orb within orb, stupendous monuments
Of artless architecture, such as now
Oft-times amaze the wandering traveler,
By the pale moon discerned on Sarum's plain."

He then inserts two stanzas, in the Latin of Hickes' "Thesaurus," of an
old Runic ode preserved by Olaus Wormius (Ole Worm) and adds an
observation upon the Scandinavian heroes and their contempt of death.
Druids and bards now begin to abound. Collins' "Ode on the Death of Mr.
Thomson," _e.g._, commences with the line

"In yonder grave a Druid lies."

In his "Ode to Liberty," he alludes to the tradition that Mona, the
druidic stronghold, was long covered with an enchantment of mist--work of
an angry mermaid:

"Mona, once hid from those who search the main,
Where thousand elfin shapes abide."

In Thomas Warton's "Pleasures of Melancholy," Contemplation is fabled to
have been discovered, when a babe, by a Druid

"Far in a hollow glade of Mona's woods,"

and borne by him to his oaken bower, where she

"--loved to lie
Oft deeply listening to the rapid roar
Of wood-hung Menai, stream of druids old."

Mason's "Caractacus" (1759) was a dramatic poem on the Greek model, with
a chorus of British bards, and