Milton's minor poems, which had hitherto been neglected, exercised a great influence on Collins and Gray. Collins's _Ode to Simplicity_ was written in the stanza of Milton's _Nativity_, and his exquisite unrimed _Ode to Evening_ was a study in versification, after Milton's translation of Horace's _Ode to Pyrrha_, in the original meters. Shakspere began to be studied more reverently: numerous critical editions of his plays were issued, and Garrick restored his pure text to the stage. Collins was an enthusiastic student of Shakspere, and one of his sweetest poems, the _Dirge in Cymbeline_, was inspired by the tragedy of _Cymbeline_. The verse of Gray, Collins, and the Warton brothers abounds in verbal reminiscences of Shakspere; but their genius was not allied to his, being exclusively lyrical and not at all dramatic. The Muse of this romantic school was Fancy rather than Passion. A thoughtful melancholy, a gentle, scholarly pensiveness, the spirit of Milton's _Il Penseroso_, pervades their poetry. Gray was a fastidious scholar, who produced very little, but that little of the finest quality. His famous _Elegy_, expressing a meditative mood in language of the choicest perfection, is the representative poem of the second half of the 18th century, as the _Rape of the Lock_ is of the first. The romanticists were quietists, and their scenery is characteristic. They loved solitude and evening, the twilight vale, the mossy hermitage, ruins, glens, and caves. Their style was elegant and academic, retaining a little of the stilted poetic diction of their classical forerunners. Personification and periphrasis were their favorite mannerisms: Collins's Odes were largely addressed to abstractions, such as Fear, Pity, Liberty, Mercy and Simplicity. A poet in their dialect was always a "bard;" a countryman was "the untutored swain," and a woman was a "nymph" or "the fair," just as in Dryden and Pope. Thomson is perpetually mindful of Vergil, and afraid to speak simply. He uses too many Latin epithets, like _amusive_ and _precipitant_, and calls a fish-line The floating line snatched from the hoary steed. They left much for Cowper and Wordsworth to do in the way of infusing the new blood of a strong, racy English into our exhausted poetic diction. Their poetry is impersonal, bookish, literary. It lacks emotional force, except now and then in Gray's immortal _Elegy_, in his _Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College_, in Collins's lines, _On the Death of Thomson_, and his little ode beginning, "How sleep the brave."