In 1746 appeared a small volume of odes, fourteen in number, by Joseph Warton, and another by William Collins.[10] The event is thus noticed by Gray in a letter to Thomas Wharton:  “Have you seen the works of two young authors, a Mr. Warton and a Mr. Collins, both writers of odes?  It is odd enough, but each is the half of a considerable man, and one the counterpart of the other.  The first has but little invention, very poetical choice of expression and a good ear.  The second, a fine fancy, modeled upon the antique, a bad ear, a great variety of words and images with no choice at all.  They both deserve to last some years, but will not.”  Gray’s critical acuteness is not altogether at fault in this judgment, but half of his prophecy has failed, and his mention of Collins is singularly inappreciative.  The names of Collins and Gray are now closely associated in literary history, but in life the two men were in no way connected.  Collins and the Wartons, on the other hand, were personal friends.  Joseph Warton and Collins had been schoolfellows at Winchester, and it was at first intended that their odes, which were issued in the same month (December), should be published in a volume together.  Warton’s collection was immediately successful; but Collins’ was a failure, and the author, in his disappointment, burned the unsold copies.

The odes of Warton which most nearly resemble Milton are “To Fancy,” “To Solitude,” and “To the Nightingale,” all in the eight-syllabled couplet.  A single passage will serve as a specimen of their quality: 

    “Me, Goddess, by the right hand lead
    Sometimes through the yellow mead,
    Where Joy and white-robed Peace resort
    And Venus keeps her festive court: 
    Where Mirth and Youth each evening meet,
    And lightly trip with nimble feet,
    Nodding their lily-crowned heads;
    Where Laughter rose-lip’d Hebe leads,” etc.[11]

Collins’ “Ode to Simplicity” is in the stanza of the “Nativity Ode,” and his beautiful “Ode to Evening,” in the unrhymed Sapphics which Milton had employed in his translation of Horace’s “Ode to Pyrrha.”  There are Miltonic reminiscences like “folding-star,” “religious gleams,” “play with the tangles of her hair,” and in the closing couplet of the “Ode to Fear,”

    “His cypress wreath my meed decree,
    And I, O Fear, will dwell with thee.”

But, in general, Collins is much less slavish than Warton in his imitation.

Joseph Warton’s younger brother, Thomas, wrote in 1745, and published in 1747, “The Pleasures of Melancholy,” a blank-verse poem of three hundred and fifteen lines, made up, in nearly equal parts, of Milton and Akenside, with frequent touches of Thomson, Spenser, and Pope’s “Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard.”  Warton was a lad of seventeen when his poem was written:  it was published anonymously and was by some attributed to Akenside, whose “Pleasures of Imagination” (1744) had, of course, suggested the title.  A single extract will suffice to show how well the young poet knew his Milton: