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."

Thompson's experiments, on the contrary, were quite serious. He had
genuine poetic feeling, but little talent. In trying to reproduce
Spenser's richness of imagery and the soft modulation of his verse, he
succeeds only in becoming tediously ornate. His stanzas are nerveless,
though not unmusical. His college exercise, "The Nativity," 1736, is a
Christmas vision which comes to the shepherd boy Thomalin, as he is
piping on the banks of Isis. It employs the pastoral machinery, includes
a masque of virtues,--Faith, Hope, Mercy, etc.,--and closes with a
compliment to Pope's "Messiah." The preface to his "Hymn to May," has
some bearing upon our inquiries: "As Spenser is the most descriptive and
florid of all our English writers, I attempted to imitate his manner in
the following vernal poem. I have been very sparing of the antiquated
words which are too frequent in most of the imitations of this
author. . . His lines are most musically sweet, and his descriptions
most delicately abundant, even to a wantonness of painting, but still it
is the music and painting of nature. We find no ambitious ornaments or
epigrammatical turns in his writings, but a beautiful simplicity which
pleases far above the glitter of pointed wit." The "Hymn to May" is in
the seven-lined stanza of Phineas Fletcher's "Purple Island"; a poem,
says Thompson, "scarce heard of in this age, yet the best in the