The Augustan Reprint Society

PREFACE

The poem here reprinted has remained unread and, with a single exception, apparently unnoticed from the day it was published until the present. It is printed from a copy which I acquired many years ago at a London bookstore and which for a while I thought unique. I did not find it listed in the catalogues of the chief libraries of England or America, nor in the various books on anonymous publications. I have found no mention of it in the newspapers and magazines of the time, no mention of it in contemporary letters or diaries. The one man in England who took the trouble to record the ode for posterity was, as might be expected, Horace Walpole, who in his manuscript Books of Materials merely noted that the poem had been published in 1768 (Anecdotes of Painting ... Volume the Fifth, ed. Hilles and Daghlian, Yale University Press, 1937). When challenged to locate Walpole’s copy of the ode, the greatest of modern collectors was able, after perhaps forty-five seconds, to say not only that it was in the Houghton Library at Harvard but that on the title in Walpole’s hand was the information that the poem was published on the sixteenth of May, a fact which would otherwise be unknown. A third copy was in the possession of the late Professor Heidbrink of Northwestern, inscribed in a contemporary hand “T. M., M.A.” and thus, possibly, the author’s own. There are, then, three known copies extant. Doubtless others will be found, bound up with pamphlets of the same vintage, as yet uncatalogued.

What Walpole did not know was the name of the author, and quite possibly the ode would have remained unread and unnoticed for another two centuries had Mr. Kirkwood not brought to light the letters which are first published in the introduction that follows. From these letters and a few known facts the history of the ode seems clear enough. Reynolds had a number of relatives living in Great Torrington. In the summer of 1762 when he and Dr. Johnson went to Devonshire they were entertained by Morrison. Johnson’s published letters prove that he did not forget Morrison, and Reynolds was soon painting the portrait of Morrison’s daughter. In the summer of 1766 Morrison sent his ode to Reynolds. The following January he learned that Johnson, “as severe a Critic as old Dennis,” praised it and ordered it to be published. Reynolds himself must have arranged for the publication.

The publisher selected was William Griffin, who a few years later was to bring out some of Sir Joshua’s Discourses. The work of the printer was only moderately well done. It will be noted that whose (second line of stanza V) is obviously a misprint for whole, that the second line has dropped out of stanza XXXIV (Mr. Kirkwood ingeniously suggests that Morrison wrote: “for every trifler’s breast/Is by the hope of future fame possest”), and that in two places the number of a stanza has been omitted. And yet the ode, which is physically thinner as well as historically and aesthetically inferior to Gray’s famous odes, is priced at 1/6, whereas the Strawberry Hill edition of Gray’s Odes (1757) sold for but a shilling.

Clearly Morrison was not influenced by, if familiar with, The Progress of Poesy and The Bard. His ode is Pindaric in the late seventeenth-century sense. In his brief preface he explains that he has sought to please us “with a little variety of wild music,” believing “that the perpetual recurrence of the same measure in such a multiplicity of stanzas would have been rather languid and fatiguing.” An examination of the poem shows that Morrison has carried his desire for variety to the extreme. The poem consists of thirty-five stanzas, not one of which repeats both the metrical pattern and rhyme scheme of any other. The stanzas range from six to eighteen lines in length, and the lines themselves from four short syllables to the long Alexandrine. At times one has the feeling that this love of changing rhythms and rhymes has improperly warped the meaning of a given passage.

The author shows his familiarity with the standard books on aesthetics. In Idler No. 76, published in 1759, Reynolds laughed at those who by mastering a few phrases posed as connoisseurs. He introduced a gentleman who had just returned from Italy, “his mouth full of nothing but the grace of Raffaelle,... and the sublimity and grand contorno of Michael Angelo.” This gentleman criticised a Vandyck because it