Original Ballads by Living Authors, 1850 (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from Original Ballads by Living Authors, 1850

Augustan age, and was accordingly stilted into an eclogue in decasyllabic couplets. The age acknowledged no excellence in what was not imitated from classical models, as it designated distorted French casts of them. For the bag-wigs, buckles, and liveries of the Westminster dormitory differed not more from the pallia and tunics of the Ludi Megalenses, than Racine and Corneille from Sophocles and Euripides. Yet did English Poets receive law from Versailles while they imagined they were inspired from Parnassus, and allowed no existence to any other inspiration. Among the few poets of the last age, it would not perhaps be possible to name one beside Thomson, Collins, and Gray, whose inspiration was quafi'ed from the pure founts of antiquity: and the rest are neither numerous nor conspicuous enough to warrant the conclusion that contempt of ballad literature results from the ascendency of a purer and loftier poetry.

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