hit at the alleged
obscurity of Gray's and Mason's odes.

To illustrate the growth of a retrospective habit in literature Mr.
Perry[14] quotes at length from an essay "On the Prevailing Taste for the
Old English Poets," by Vicesimus Knox, sometimes master of Tunbridge
school, editor of "Elegant Extracts" and honorary doctor of the
University of Pennsylvania. Knox's essays were written while he was an
Oxford undergraduate, and published collectively in 1777. By this time
the romantic movement was in full swing. "The Castle of Otranto" and
Percy's "Reliques" had been out more than ten years; many of the Rowley
poems were in print; and in this very year, Tyrwhitt issued a complete
edition of them, and Warton published the second volume of his "History
of English Poetry." Chatterton and Percy are both mentioned by Knox.

"The antiquarian spirit," he writes, "which was once confined to
inquiries concerning the manners, the buildings, the records, and the
coins of the ages that preceded us, has now extended itself to those
poetical compositions which were popular among our forefathers, but which
have gradually sunk into oblivion through the decay of language and the
prevalence of a correct and polished taste. Books printed in the black
letter are sought for with the same avidity with which the English
antiquary peruses a monumental inscription, or treasures up a Saxon piece
of money. The popular ballad, composed by some illiterate minstrel, and
which has been handed down by tradition for several centuries, is rescued
from the hands of the vulgar, to obtain a place in the collection of the
man of taste. Verses which, a few years past, were thought worthy the
attention of children only, or of the lowest and rudest orders, are now
admired for that artless simplicity which once obtained the name of
coarseness and vulgarity." Early English poetry, continues the essayist,
"has had its day, and the antiquary must not despise us if we cannot
peruse it with patience. He who delights in all such reading as is never
read, may derive some pleasure from the singularity of his taste, but he
ought still to respect the judgment of mankind, which has consigned to
oblivion the works which he admires. While he pores unmolested on
Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate, and Occleve, let him not censure our obstinacy
in adhering to Homer, Virgil, Milton, and Pope. . . Notwithstanding the
incontrovertible merit of many of our ancient relics of poetry