though imitative always in their verse, have an independent and not inconsiderable position in criticism and literary scholarship, and I shall return to them later in that connection.  Mason, whose “English Garden” has been reviewed in chapter iv, was a small poet and a somewhat absurd person.  He aped, first Milton and afterward Gray, so closely that his work often seems like parody.  In general the Miltonic revival made itself manifest in a more dispersed and indirect fashion than the Spenserian; but there was no lack of formal imitations, also, and it will be advisable to notice a few of these here in the order of their dates.

In 1740 Joseph Warton, then an Oxford undergraduate, wrote his blank-verse poem “The Enthusiast, or the Lover of Nature.”  The work of a boy of eighteen, it had that instinct of the future, of the set of the literary current, not uncommon in youthful artists, of which Chatterton’s precocious verses are a remarkable instance.  Composed only ten years later than the completed “Seasons,” and five years before Shenstone began to lay out his miniature wilderness at the Leasowes, it is more distinctly modern and romantic in its preference of wild nature to cultivated landscape, and of the literature of fancy to the literature of reasons.

    “What are the lays of artful Addison,
    Coldly correct, to Shakspere’s warblings wild?”

asks the young enthusiast, in Milton’s own phrase.  And again

    “Can Kent design like Nature?. . . 
    Though he, by rules unfettered, boldly scorns
    Formality and method, round and square
    Disdaining, plans irregularly great?. . .

                “Versailles
    May boast a thousand fountains that can cast
    The tortured waters to the distant heavens;
    Yet let me choose some pine-topped precipice
    Abrupt and shaggy, whence a foamy stream,
    Like Anio, tumbling roars; or some black heath
    Where straggling stands the mournful juniper,
    Or yew tree scathed.”

The enthusiast haunts “dark forests” and loves to listen to “hollow winds and ever-beating waves” and “sea-mew’s clang.”  Milton appears at every turn, not only in single epithets like “Lydian airs,” “the level brine,” “low-thoughted cares,” “the light fantastic dance,” but in the entire spirit, imagery, and diction of the poem.  A few lines illustrate this better than any description.

    “Ye green-robed Dryads, oft at dusky eve
    By wondering shepherds seen; to forest brown,
    To unfrequented meads and pathless wilds
    Lead me from gardens decked with art’s vain pomp. . . 
    But let me never fall in cloudless night,
    When silent Cynthia in her silver car
    Through the blue concave slides,. . . 
    To seek some level mead, and there invoke
    Old midnight’s sister, contemplation sage
    (Queen of the rugged brow and stern-fixed eye),
    To lift my soul above this little earth,
    This folly-fettered world:  to purge my ears,
    That I may hear the rolling planet’s song
    And tuneful turning spheres.”