These faults I think I can defend, and can excuse others; even the great obscurity of the latter, for I do not see it in the first; the subject of it has been taken for music,—­it is the Power and Progress of Harmonious Poetry.  I think his objection to prefixing a title to it was wrong—­that Mr. Cooke published an ode with such a title.  If the Louis the Great, whom Voltaire has discovered in Hungary, had not disappeared from history himself, would not Louis Quatorze have annihilated him?  I was aware that the second would have darknesses, and prevailed for the insertion of what notes there are, and would have had more.  Mr. Gray said, whatever wanted explanation did not deserve it, but that sentence was never so far from being an axiom as in the present case.  Not to mention how he had shackled himself with strophe, antistrophe, and epode (yet acquitting himself nobly), the nature of prophecy forbade him naming his kings.  To me they are apparent enough—­yet I am far from thinking either piece perfect, though with what faults they have, I hold them in the first rank of genius and poetry.  The second strophe of the first Ode is inexcusable, nor do I wonder your Lordship blames it; even when one does understand it, perhaps the last line is too turgid.  I am not fond of the antistrophe that follows.  In the second Ode he made some corrections for the worse. Brave Urion was originally stern:  brave is insipid and commonplace.  In the third antistrophe, leave me unblessed, unpitied, stood at first, leave your despairing Caradoc.  But the capital faults in my opinion are these—­what punishment was it to Edward I to hear that his grandson would conquer France? or is so common an event as Edward III being deserted on his death-bed, worthy of being made part of a curse that was to avenge a nation?  I can’t cast my eye here, without crying out on those beautiful lines that follow, Fair smiles the morn?  Though the images are extremely complicated, what painting in the whirlwind, likened to a lion lying in ambush for his evening prey, in grim repose.  Thirst and hunger mocking Richard II appear to me too ludicrously like the devils in The Tempest, that whisk away the banquet from the shipwrecked Dukes.  From thence to the conclusion of Queen Elizabeth’s portrait, which he has faithfully copied from Speed, in the passage where she humbled the Polish Ambassador, I admire.  I can even allow that image of Rapture hovering like an ancient grotesque, though it strictly has little meaning:  but there I take my leave—­the last stanza has no beauties for me.  I even think its obscurity fortunate, for the allusions to Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, are not only weak, but the two last returning again, after appearing so gloriously in the first Ode, and with so much fainter colours, enervate the whole conclusion.