[24] See his "Life of Collins."

[25] _Spectator_, No. 40.

[26] "The Verse": Preface to "Paradise Lost."


[27] Dedicatory epistle to "The Rival Ladies."

[28] Mr. Gosse says that a sonnet by Pope's friend Walsh is the only one
"written in English between Milton's in 1658, and Warton's about 1750,"
Ward's "English Poets," Vol. III, p. 7. The statement would have been
more precise if he had said published instead of _written_.

[29] "History of the Gothic Revival," pp. 49-50 (edition of 1872).

[30] Palgrave says that the poetry of passion was deformed, after 1660, by
"levity and an artificial time"; and that it lay "almost dormant for the
hundred years between the days of Wither and Suckling and the days of
Burns and Cowper," "Golden Treasury" (Sever and Francis edition, 1866).
pp. 379-80.

[31] Excepting the "Nocturnal Reverie" of Lady Winchelsea, and a passage
or two in the "Windsor Forest" of Pope, the poetry of the period
intervening between the publication of the "Paradise Lost" and the
"Seasons" [1667-1726] does not contain a single new image of external
nature.--_Wordsworth. Appendix to Lyrical Ballads_, (1815).

[32] _Gild_ is a perfect earmark of eighteenth-century descriptive verse:
the shore is gilded and so are groves, clouds, etc. Contentment gilds