E'en so when Parsons pours his lay, Correctly wild, or sweetly strong, Or Greathead charms the listening day, With English or Italian song, Or when, with trembling wing I try, Like some poor wounded bird, to fly, Your fostering smiles you ne'er refuse, But are the Pallas and the Muse! The Parsons and Greathead of this all-round panegyric of Merry's were two members of the “Oziosi” clique: Parsons, a bachelor with a tendency to flirt, to “trifle with Italian dames,” as Mrs. Piozzi poetically put it; Greathead, the newly-married husband of a beautiful wife. Both Parsons and Greathead were voluminous contributors to the society's Album, which soon assumed formidable dimensions. The staple of the contents consisted of high-flown compliments in verse. Parsons, for instance, would write to Greathead's wife:— O blest with taste, with Genius blest, Sole mistress of thy Bertie's breast, Who to his love-enraptured arms are given The rich reward his virtues claim from Heaven. And Bertie, as in duty bound, would reply in kind, bidding the sallow Arno pause and listen to the lays of Parsons. As an alternative to these panegyrics, they wrote _Dithyrambics to Bacchus_, _Odes to the Siroc_, or lines on that latest novelty, Montgolfier's air-balloon. Mrs. Greathead was, in fact, as Parsons informs us, the only member of the society who contributed nothing but the inspiration of her charms. Some of these poems were printed in an _Arno Miscellany_, of which only a few copies were privately circulated. It was a subsequent and larger collection, published in 1785, under the name of _The Florence Miscellany_, which first made its way to England, and drew the attention of the English public to the rising school of versifiers. Horace Walpole characterized their productions as “mere imitations of our best poets,” that is to say, of Milton, Gray, and Collins. How justly, may be inferred from the opening stanza of Merry's _Ode on a distant prospect of Rome_:— When Rome of old, terrific queen, High-placed on Victory's sounding car, With arm sublime and martial mien, Brandished the flaming lance of war, Low crouched in dust lay Afric's swarthy crowd, And silken Asia sank, and barbarous Britain bowed.