had no precise knowledge of early English, or even of Chaucer.  His method of working was as follows.  He made himself a manuscript glossary of the words marked as archaic in Bailey’s and Kersey’s English dictionaries, composed his poems first in modern language, and then turned them into ancient spelling, and substituted here and there the old words in his glossary for their modern equivalents.  Naturally he made many mistakes, and though Horace Walpole, to whom he sent some of his pieces, was unable to detect the forgery, his friends, Gray and Mason, to whom he submitted them, at once pronounced them spurious.  Nevertheless there was a controversy over Rowley hardly less obstinate than that over Ossian, a controversy made possible only by the then almost universal ignorance of the forms, scansion, and vocabulary of early English poetry.  Chatterton’s poems are of little value in themselves, but they are the record of an industry and imitative quickness marvelous in a mere child, and they show how, with the instinct of genius, he threw himself into the main literary current of his time.  Discarding the couplet of Pope, the poets now went back for models to the Elizabethan writers.  Thomas Warton published in 1753 his Observations on the Faerie Queene.  Beattie’s Minstrel, Thomson’s Castle of Indolence, and William Shenstone’s Schoolmistress were all written in the Spenserian stanza.  Shenstone gave a partly humorous effect to his poem by imitating Spenser’s archaisms, and Thomson reproduced in many passages the copious harmony and luxuriant imagery of the Faerie Queene.  John Dyer’s Fleece was a poem in blank verse on English wool-growing, after the fashion of Vergil’s Georgics.  The subject was unfortunate, for, as Dr. Johnson said, it is impossible to make poetry out of serges and druggets.  Dyer’s Grongar Hill, which mingles reflection with natural description in the manner of Gray’s Elegy written in a Country Churchyard, was composed in the octosyllabic verse of Milton’s L’Allegro and Il Penseroso.  Milton’s minor poems, which had hitherto been neglected, exercised a great influence on Collins and Gray.  Collins’s Ode to Simplicity was written in the stanza of Milton’s Nativity, and his exquisite unrimed Ode to Evening was a study in versification, after Milton’s translation of Horace’s Ode to Pyrrha, in the original meters.  Shakspere began to be studied more reverently:  numerous critical editions of his plays were issued, and Garrick restored his pure text to the stage.  Collins was an enthusiastic student of Shakspere, and one of his sweetest poems, the Dirge in Cymbeline, was inspired by the tragedy of Cymbeline.  The verse of Gray, Collins, and the Warton brothers abounds in verbal reminiscences of Shakspere; but their genius was not allied to his, being exclusively lyrical and not at all dramatic.  The Muse of this romantic