as a y, instead of, what it really is, a mere abbreviation of th.  But in order that this may be so, the language travestied should not be too old.  There would be nothing amusing, for example, in a burlesque imitation of Beowulf, because the Anglo-Saxon of the original is utterly strange to the modern reader.  It is conceivable that quick-witted Athenians of the time of Aristophanes might find something quaint in Homer’s Ionic dialect, akin to that quaintness which we find in Chaucer; but a Grecian of to-day would need to be very Attic indeed, to detect any provocation to mirth in the use of the genitive in-oio, in place of the genitive in-ou.  Again, as one becomes familiar with an old author, he ceases to be conscious of his archaism:  the final e in Chaucer no longer strikes him as funny, nor even the circumstance that he speaks of little birds as smale fowles.  And so it happened, that poets in the eighteenth century who began with burlesque imitation of the “Faerie Queen” soon fell in love with its serious beauties.

The only poems in this series that have gained permanent footing in the literature are Shenstone’s “Schoolmistress” and Thomson’s “Cast of Indolence.”  But a brief review of several other members of the group will be advisable.  Two of them were written at Oxford in honor of the marriage of Frederick, Prince of Wales in 1736:  one by Richard Owen Cambridge;[26] the other by William Thompson, then bachelor of arts and afterward fellow of Queen’s College.  Prince Fred, it will be remembered, was a somewhat flamboyant figure in the literary and personal gossip of his day.  He quarreled with his father, George II, who “hated boetry and bainting,” and who was ironically fed with soft dedication by Pope in his “Epistle to Augustus”; also with his father’s prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole, “Bob, the poet’s foe.”  He left the court in dudgeon and set up an opposition court of his own where he rallied about him men of letters, who had fallen into a neglect that contrasted strangely with their former importance in the reign of Queen Anne.  Frederick’s chief ally in this policy was his secretary, George Lord Lyttelton, the elegant if somewhat amateurish author of “Dialogues of the Dead” and other works; the friend of Fielding, the neighbor of Shenstone at Hagley, and the patron of Thomson, for whom he obtained the sinecure post of Surveyor of the Leeward Islands.

Cambridge’s spousal verses were in a ten-lined stanza.  His “Archimage,” written in the strict Spenserian stanza, illustrates the frequent employment of this form in occasional pieces of a humorous intention.  It describes a domestic boating party on the Thames, one of the oarsmen being a family servant and barber-surgeon, who used to dress the chaplain’s hair: 

    “Als would the blood of ancient beadsman spill,
    Whose hairy scalps he hanged in a row
    Around his cave, sad sight to Christian eyes, I trow.”