Adverting to the question of Milton’s influence on the prevalent mania for personification, it is undoubted that the early poems may be held largely responsible. Their influence first began noticeably to make itself felt in the fifth decade of the century, when their inspiration is to be traced in a great deal of the poetic output of the period, including that of Joseph and Thomas Warton, as well as of Collins and Gray. Neglecting for the moment the greater poets who drew inspiration from this source, it will be as well briefly to consider first the influence of Milton’s minor poems on the obscure versifiers, for it is very often the case that the minor poetry of an age reflects most distinctly the peculiarities of a passing literary fashion. As early as 1739 William Hamilton of Bangour[208] imitated Milton in his octosyllabic poem “Contemplation,” and by his predilection for abstraction foreshadowed one of the main characteristics of the Miltonic revival among the lesser lights. A single passage shows this clearly enough: Anger with wild disordered pace And malice pale of famish’d face: Loud-tongued Clamour get thee far Hence, to wrangle at the bar: and so on. Five or six years later Mason’s Miltonic imitations appeared—“Il Bellicoso” and “Il Pacifico”—which follow even more slavishly the style of “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso,” so that there is no need for Mason’s footnote to “Il Bellicoso” describing the poem with its companion piece as this “very, very juvenile imitation.”[209] “Il Bellicoso” begins with the usual dismissal: Hence, dull lethargic Peace Born in some hoary beadsman’s cell obscure, and subsequently we are introduced to Pleasure, Courage, Victory, Fancy, etc. There is a similar exorcism in “Il Pacifico,” followed by a faint personification of the subject of the ode, attended by a “social smiling train” of lifeless abstractions. The pages of Dodsley[210] furnish abundant testimony to the prevalence of this kind of thing. Thus “Penshurst”[211] by F. Coventry is another close imitation of Milton’s companion poems, with the usual crowd of abstractions. The same thing is met with in the anonymous “Vacation,”[212] and in the “Valetudinarian,” said to be written by Dr. Marriott.[213] It is unnecessary to illustrate further the Milton vogue, which thus produced so large a crop of imitations,[214] except to say that there is significant testimony to the widespread prevalence of the fashion in the fact that a parody written “in the Allegoric, Descriptive, Alliterative, Epithetical, Fantastic, Hyperbolical, and Diabolical Style of our modern Ode writers and monody-mongers”[215] soon appeared. This was the anonymous “Ode to Horror,” a humorous burlesque, especially of the “Pleasures of Melancholy.” The Wartons stand high above the versifiers at whose productions we have just looked, but nevertheless there was some justification for the good-humoured parody called forth by their works.