[Parnell] appears to me to be the last of that great school that had modeled itself upon the ancients, and taught English poetry to resemble what the generality of mankind have allowed to excel. . .  His productions bear no resemblance to those tawdry things which it has, for some time, been the fashion to admire. . .  His poetical language is not less correct than his subjects are pleasing.  He found it at that period in which it was brought to its highest pitch of refinement; and ever since his time, it has been gradually debasing.  It is, indeed, amazing, after what has been done by Dryden, Addison, and Pope, to improve and harmonize our native tongue, that their successors should have taken so much pains to involve it into pristine barbarity.  These misguided innovators have not been content with restoring antiquated words and phrases, but have indulged themselves in the most licentious transpositions and the harshest constructions; vainly imagining that, the more their writings are unlike prose, the more they resemble poetry.  They have adopted a language of their own, and call upon mankind for admiration.  All those who do not understand them are silent; and those who make out their meaning are willing to praise, to show they understand.”  This last sentence is a 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