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A. W. Ward pertinently says, his marvelously vivid reproduction of manners is unsurpassed by any of his contemporaries. "The age lives in his men and women, his country gulls and town gulls, his imposters and skeldering captains, his court ladies and would-be court ladies, his puling poetasters and whining Puritans, and, above all, in the whole ragamuffin rout of his Bartholomew Fair.
He does no more than all schools have done, copy their own masters; as the Greek epicists and Virgil copied Homer; as all succeeding Latin epicists copied Virgil; as Italians copied Ariosto and Tasso; as every one who can copies Shakespeare; as the French school copied, or thought they copied, "The Classics," and as a matter of duty used to justify any bold image in their notes, not by its originality, but by its being already in Claudian, or Lucan, or Virgil, or Ovid; as every poetaster, and a great many who were more than poetasters, twenty years ago, used to copy Scott and Byron, and as all poetasters now are copying the very same models as Mr.
The productions of some poetasters are characterized by an abundance of rare adjectives, which are introduced as well to give an impression of depth of thought as to advertise the author's erudition. However, there are so many good poets that forgiveness is readily extended to the others. The national song of Santo Domingo, an ode to liberty, was written by a school teacher, Emilio Prud'homme.
Before leaving the Aminta it will be worth while straying beyond the strict chronological limits of this inquiry to glance for a moment at the version produced by John Dancer in 1660, for the sake of noting the change which had come over literary hack-work of the kind in the course of some thirty years. Comparing it with Reynolds' translation we are at first struck by the change which long drilling of the language to a variety of uses has accomplished in the work of uninspired poetasters; secondly, by the fact that the conventional respectability of production, which has replaced the halting crudities of an earlier date, is far more inimical to any real touch of poetic inspiration. Equally evident is that spirit of tyranny, happily at no time native to our literature, which seeks to reduce the works of other ages into accordance with the taste of its own day. Thus, having 'improved' Tasso's apostrophe to the bella et
But for ten persons who give you flattery and sneers, you will not find one who will tell you wholesome truths. I will tell you what seems to me true and wholesome. Poetasters and cheap sentimentalists will berhyme and beguile you: I cannot help it; but I will at least attempt to administer the corrective of what should be common sense.
Believe me, my dear, all these adventures that have been made public, and now are turned against our good Louis XV, were kept quite secret at first. If it had not been for a pack of poetasters, scribblers, and moralists, who hung about our waiting-women, and took down their slanders, our epoch would have appeared in literature as a well-conducted age.
The eighteenth century was by no means without such a conception, as the satires of that period testify, being full of allusions to poetasters' physical defects, with the obvious implication that they are indicative of spiritual deformity, and of literary sterility.
If our poetasters talk with Wordsworth of the dignity and pathos of the commonest human things, they will find them there in perfection; if they talk about the cravings of the new time, they will find them there. If they want the truly sublime and awful, they will find them there also.
Petrarch became the model, which every aspirant endeavored to imitate. Hence arose a host of poetasters, who wrote with considerable elegance, but without the least power of imagination.
So I ordered from one of those poetasters to be found in every land, a sort of libretto called, in theatrical parlance, a lyric drama; and to the words of this monstrosity I arranged the very finest airs of my several operas.
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