These inquiries into prosody and rhythm formed no unimportant part of the English criticism of the mid-eighteenth century.[155] The two different ways in which they were regarded by contemporaries may be easily guessed, but we have documentary evidence of them in an interesting passage of the dedication to John Gilpin[156] of the second edition of the book in which they culminated, and to which we now come. Mitford’s _Inquiry into the Principles of Harmony in Language_ represents himself as having paid a visit to Pye, afterwards Laureate; and, finding him with books of the kind before him, as having expostulated with “a votary of fancy and the Muses” for his “patience with such dull and uninteresting controversy.” Pye, it seems, replied that “interest in the subject so warmly and extensively taken by English men of letters” had excited his curiosity, which had been gratified by Foster’s elucidation of the subject itself. And Mitford, borrowing the book, soon found his own excited too.[157] The volume of which this was the genesis, appeared first in 1774.[158] The second edition, very carefully revised and extended, was not published till 1804. It may appear at first sight unfortunate, but on reflection will probably be seen to have been a distinct advantage, that even this second edition preceded the appearance of any of the capital works of the new school except the _Lyrical Ballads_. For had it been otherwise, and had Mitford taken any notice of the new poetry, we should in all probability have had either the kind of reactionary protest which often comes from pioneers who have been overtaken and passed, or at best an attempt at awkward adjustment of two very different points of view. As it is, the book, besides exhibiting much original talent, belongs to a distinct school and platform—that of the later but still eighteenth-century Romantic beginners, while at the same time it represents a much greater knowledge of old literature, helped by Ellis’s _Specimens_, by Ritson’s work, and other products of the last years of the century, than had been possible to Shenstone, to Gray, or even to Warton.