Pandora, in Parnell's _Hesiod or the Rise of Woman_, is only a

'shining vengeance...
A pleasing bosom-cheat, a specious ill'

sent by the gods upon earth to punish the race of Prometheus.

The most poetical fables of Greece are desecrated by Gay into mere
miniatures for the decoration of his _Fan_.

Similar instances abound later on. When Armstrong brings in an
apostrophe to the Naiads, it is in the course of a _Poetical Essay on
the Art of Preserving Health_. And again, when Cowper stirs himself to
intone an _Ode to Apollo_, it is in the same mock-heroic vein:

Patron of all those luckless brains,
That to the wrong side leaning
Indite much metre with much pains
And little or no meaning...

Even in Gray's--'Pindaric Gray's'--treatment of classical themes,
there is a sort of pervading _ennui_, or the forced appreciativeness
of a gouty, disappointed man. The daughter of Jove to whom he
dedicates his hymns too often is 'Adversity'. And classical
reminiscences have, even with him, a dull musty tinge which recalls
the antiquarian in his Cambridge college-rooms rather than the visitor
to Florence and Rome. For one thing, his allusions are too many, and
too transitory, to appear anything but artistic tricks and verse-
making tools. The 'Aegean deep', and 'Delphi's steep', and 'Meander's
amber waves', and the 'rosy-crowned Loves', are too cursorily