school was Fancy rather than Passion.  A thoughtful melancholy, a gentle, scholarly pensiveness, the spirit of Milton’s Il Penseroso, pervades their poetry.  Gray was a fastidious scholar, who produced very little, but that little of the finest quality.  His famous Elegy, expressing a meditative mood in language of the choicest perfection, is the representative poem of the second half of the 18th century, as the Rape of the Lock is of the first.  The romanticists were quietists, and their scenery is characteristic.  They loved solitude and evening, the twilight vale, the mossy hermitage, ruins, glens, and caves.  Their style was elegant and academic, retaining a little of the stilted poetic diction of their classical forerunners.  Personification and periphrasis were their favorite mannerisms:  Collins’s Odes were largely addressed to abstractions, such as Fear, Pity, Liberty, Mercy and Simplicity.  A poet in their dialect was always a “bard;” a countryman was “the untutored swain,” and a woman was a “nymph” or “the fair,” just as in Dryden and Pope.  Thomson is perpetually mindful of Vergil, and afraid to speak simply.  He uses too many Latin epithets, like amusive and precipitant, and calls a fish-line

  The floating line snatched from the hoary steed.

They left much for Cowper and Wordsworth to do in the way of infusing the new blood of a strong, racy English into our exhausted poetic diction.  Their poetry is impersonal, bookish, literary.  It lacks emotional force, except now and then in Gray’s immortal Elegy, in his Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College, in Collins’s lines, On the Death of Thomson, and his little ode beginning, “How sleep the brave.”

The new school did not lack critical expounders of its principles and practice.  Joseph Warton published, in 1756, the first volume of his Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope, an elaborate review of Pope’s writings seriatim, doing him certainly full justice, but ranking him below Shakspere, Spenser, and Milton.  “Wit and satire,” wrote Warton, “are transitory and perishable, but nature and passion are eternal....He stuck to describing modern manners; but those manners, because they are familiar, artificial, and polished, are, in their very nature, unfit for any lofty effort of the Muse.  Whatever poetical enthusiasm he actually possessed he withheld and stifled.  Surely it is no narrow and niggardly encomium to say, he is the great Poet of Reason, the first of Ethical authors in verse.”  Warton illustrated his critical positions by quoting freely not only from Spenser and Milton, but from recent poets, like Thomson, Gray, Collins, and Dyer.  He testified that the Seasons had “been very instrumental in diffusing a general taste for the beauties of nature and landscape.”  It was symptomatic of the change in literary taste that the natural or English school of landscape gardening