When the two odes were reissued they were styled Pindaric, and they justify their title, being constructed in a series of strophe, antistrophe, and epode like the odes of Pindar. Ben Jonson had furnished one example in the ode to the memory of Sir Lucius Cary and Sir Henry Morrison, one strophe of which is the often-quoted stanza beginning, ‘It is not growing like a tree.’ But the name ‘Pindarique’ had been abused by Cowley, who, holding the theory that ‘the lost excellences of another language’ should be supplied by others of our own, had substituted an expansive eloquence, one might almost say loquacity, for the terse musical phrase of his model, and had entirely ignored the interrelation of strophe and antistrophe. Gray recovered for the Pindaric ode both the music of phrase and the balance of its parts. Gray’s second ode cannot be reckoned as unequivocal a success as its companion. It is founded on a tradition of the murder of the Welsh bards by Edward I, and the earlier portion, which consists of the spirited and justifiable curses of the last survivor on the king’s progeny to the third and fourth generation, is proper to the subject, and contains much fine rhetoric and a few passages of a nobler quality. But having written the first three groups of stanzas, Gray held his hand for a couple of years; and the conclusion does not carry out the scheme originally proposed. From the argument, which Mason printed from Gray’s commonplace book, we learn that the Bard was to predict that all the king’s cruelty ‘shall never extinguish the noble ardour of poetic genius in this island; and that men shall never be wanting to celebrate true virtue and valour in immortal strains, to expose vice and infamous pleasure, and boldly censure tyranny and oppression.’ When Gray resumed the Ode he had changed his plan, and the present conclusion can appeal to none but Welshmen, for whom it is certain that Gray did not specially write. The consolation which the Bard finds in the future is the prospect of a line of Welsh kings, the Tudors, culminating in Elizabeth: In the midst a Form divine Her eye proclaims her of the Briton-line; Her lyon-port, her awe-commanding face, Attemper’d sweet to virgin-grace.’ Elizabeth’s reign is to be marked by a revival of poetry in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton, and an unending line beyond them. It must be allowed that the skill of the poet has disguised the weakness of the argument. For to make the consolation effective the efflorescence of poetry should have occurred under the first Tudor sovereign, in which case it might poetically have been presumed to be due to him; and the Bard should not have overlooked Chaucer, who flourished under the sway of Edward’s direct descendant Richard II, of whose accession the Bard sings in the only passage of the Ode which has passed into popular currency: