' Excepting for the perfect odes of Cowper
(_post_, pp. 85, 86), in these excellent and affecting verses the
'classic' note is audible for the last time in this book until
we reach the _Iphigeneia_ of Walter Savage Landor, who was a
lad of seven at the date of their composition. They were written
seventeen years after the publication of the _Reliques_ (1765),
and a full quarter century after the appearance of _The Bard_
(1757); but in style they proceed from the age of Pope. For the
rest, the Augustan Muse was an utter stranger to the fighting
inspiration. Her gait was pedestrian, her purpose didactic, her
practice neat and formal: and she prosed of England's greatest
captain, the victor of Blenheim, as tamely as himself had been
'a parson in a tye-wig'--himself, and not the amiable man of
letters who acted as her amanuensis for the nonce.
XXV
_Chevy Chase_ is here preferred to _Otterbourne_ as appealing more
directly to Englishmen. The text is Percy's, and the movement like
that of all the English ballads, is jog-trot enough. Sidney's
confession--that he never heard it, even from a blind fiddler,
but it stirred him like the sound of a trumpet--refers, no doubt,
to an earlier version than the present, which appears to date from
the first quarter of the seventeenth century.
Pages:
255
256
257
258
259
260
261
262
263
264
265
266
267
268
269
270
271
272
273
274
275
276
277
278
279