Byron and the Scottish Spenserians.

Radcliffe, David Hill

Poems in Series

"I SING THE SOFA," BEGINS THE TASK. COWPER WAS ASSIGNED THIS TOPIC by a lady fond of blank verse: "He obeyed; and having much leisure, connected another subject with it; and pursuing the train of thought, to which his situation and turn of mind led him, brought forth at length, instead of the trifle which he at first intended, a serious affair--a volume" (2:113). (1) Childe Harold, which likewise "makes no pretension to regularity," also begins its meandering course in burlesque (2: 4). (2) These opening frames, Miltonic and Spenserian, set the pitch for the digressive songs to follow. Their peculiar resonance may fail faint on ears more familiar with Milton and Spenser than with minor poetry. Cowper evokes an obscure series of burlesque odes imitating John Philips' The Splendid Shilling, Byron a series of poems on progress developed out of James Thornson's Castle of Indolence. A survey of the Thomson series will elucidate Byron's skills as a reader and emulator as he used insights gleaned from Thomson's Scottish imitators to vault to attention by challenging national confidence in the wake of the Peninsular War. The irregularity of Childe Harold was not without a plan.

Imitations seldom come as singles; they appear in sixes, dozens, scores, or in the case of Milton's "Il Penseroso" and Gray's Elegy, hundreds. Most were ephemeral things, though some became objects of imitation in their own fight. When poets responded to later poems in a series the result would be a sequence of poems developing a common topic or set of issues. Examples include a series of imitations of Collins' "Ode on the Passions" concerned with the fine arts, and a series imitating Gray's Elegy concerned with criminals and the law. When Cowper selected "the sofa" as a topic he contributed to a series of burlesque odes with titles like "The Goose Quill" (1737), "The Razor" (1743), "The Jordan" (1750), "The Blanket" (1757), "Meditations on a Sheet of Writing Paper" (1759), "The Easy Chair" (1760), "A Poem on a Pin" (1762), "On a Pipe of Tobacco" (1762), "The Country Barber's Shop" (1762), "The Wedding Ring" (1763), The Elbow-Chair: a Rhapsody (1765), "The Old Shoe" (1770), "The Needle" (1773), "Tea: a Poem" (1773), and "The Thread-Bare Coat" (1777). (3) There was a parallel series of Philips poems on the subject of liquor, and another on starving poets. The series on common domestic objects was very familiar to readers of The Task in 1785, though it would have been less so a generation later, after Cowper's celebrated poem had eclipsed its rivals and changed the way poets wrote about domestic themes in blank verse.

The situation is analogous with Byron and The Castle of Indolence: Childe Harold overshadowed more ephemeral Thomson imitations and gave a new turn to descriptive verse in Spenserian stanzas. Different series behaved in different ways; there was an inverse relation between the length of the poems and the size of the series, for instance. Full-dress Spenserian burlesques were laborious to compose and are therefore scarcer than odes and elegies. The topic under discussion likewise seems to have had an effect on the way a series would develop: imitations of Gray's Elegy evoked memory by ringing changes on a familiar dirge; the busy Philips imitations, making much of little, took small, trivial objects as subjects for small, trivial poems. The Thomson series, with its theme of indolence, proceeded fitfully, as if retarded by indecision. While Thomson was universally popular, the number of extended imitations of The Castle of Indolence was small and dominated by Scots concerned about the effects of progress and "luxury" on traditional morality. Not the least clever thing about Childe Harold is the way in which Byron makes programmatic use of the (non)progress of the series, turning a liability into an asset: he recapitulates the series' doubts about progress in his opening burlesque and amplifies them throughout Childe Harold. Just as the Miltonic sofa passage that opens The Task would evoke memories of poems concerned with domestic trivia, so the Spenserian "house of pleasure" passage that begins Childe Harold called to mind the moral allegories pursued in eighteenth-century progress poems.

In particular, it would have reminded contemporary readers of three popular Spenserian poems treating the theme of progress and luxury--Thomson's The Castle of Indolence (1748), Mickle's The Concubine (1767), and Beattie's The Minstrel (1771, 1774). (4) These were the cardinal poems in the Thomson series, but there were other imitations of Spenser by Scottish poets that Byron and his readers might have known: John Tait's The Land of Liberty, an Allegorical Poem (1775), James Fordyce's "The Physiognomist: a Descriptive Poem" (1786), Francis Garden's "The Fairy Queen: A Tale" (1791), William Gillespie's The Progress of Refinement, an Allegorical Poem (1805), and William Cameron's "The Minstrel continued on the original Plan of Dr. Beattie" (1813). (5) Though this is a small series it consists of substantial works. While are all Scottish poems, none of its members are explicitly concerned with Scotland. They are Scottish enough for all that: the topics of indolence and industry, culture and civilization, were of particular interest to Scots even before Samuel Johnson's A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775) made the progress of society in the northern kingdom a matter of general debate. A nation that could produce the Works of Ossian (1765) and The Wealth of Nations (1776) was plainly of two minds with respect to progress. (6) The fact that the common topic was not peculiarly Scottish is itself pertinent to the series since "civilization" was a transnational process propelled by exchange with outsiders. (7)

Emulation among the Scottish Literati

Before turning to the poems it would be useful to consider why Byron would be interested in Scottish burlesque poetry in the first place. One motive was emulation. English Bards and Scotch Reviewers makes a thorough survey of contemporary poets; like Pope's Dunciad and Gifford's Baviad (1791) Byron's satire deprecates modern poets by comparison to classical models, but it also displays a shrewd, market-oriented sense of the literary scene at a particular moment. Cumberland and Hayley are well past their prime, Southey and the Lake School are fading, and so forth. Walter Scott was the rising star, having published The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805) and Marmion (1808); his only serious rival was Thomas Campbell, whose Pleasures of Hope (1799) was perhaps the most highly-regarded poem of the day. If Byron was to assume precedence among living poets and win plaudits in Edinburgh, these Scottish writers were the persons he needed to contend with. His rivals were themselves emulators: Campbell would respond to Scott's romances with Gertrude of Wyoming (1809), published shortly before Byron's departure for the East. Like The Lay of the Last Minstrel and Marmion, Gertrude concerns a border skirmish, though the poem is set in America and written in a highly lacquered style that Scott could never hope to compete with. Scott would respond to Gertrude in The Vision of Don Roderick (1811) a poem on colonial themes set in a foreign country and composed in the Spenserian stanza used by Campbell, though in the Gothic manner that was Scott's trademark.

The bard of the Lay and the bard of Hope were not merely personal rivals, they were Tory and Whig poets who occupied ground bitterly contested in Scotland since the seventeenth century. Scott's political vision was not narrowly nationalistic, though rooted in loyalty to persons and places in ways that old Drummond of Hawthornden might have appreciated. Campbell's political vision, while fervently patriotic, was liberal, forward-looking, and pan-European. While their political commitments are never doubtful, both were capable of looking at matters from two sides, Campbell underscoring the tragic consequences of civilization in Gertrude, Scott championing the progress of liberty in Roderick. If Byron, whose commitments were more perplexed, wished to insinuate himself into a poetical conversation between these two Scots, he could hardly have done better than to invent the Childe, a wandering cosmopolite obsessed with locality and haunted by the past. Indeed, Childe Harold seems to have been crafted with emulation in mind: as a "romaut," it engages Scott in narrative; as a topographic poem, it engages Campbell in description. Francis Jeffrey, preferring Campbell to Scott, compared Gertrude favorably to Thomson: "This is of the pitch of the Castle of Indolence, and the finer parts of Spencer" (1). (8) That surely, was an opening: having successfully emulated Pope in his last outing, in his next he might emulate Britain's other major eighteenth-century poet. (9) Given the nationality of his two rivals, it would make sense for Byron also to draw upon the resources of Scottish poetry.

Civilization and its Discontents: Thomson, Mickle, and Beattie

The opening stanzas of Childe Harold evoke Thomson's Castle of Indolence in matter and manner, implicitly comparing Newstead Abbey to the Wizard's Castle:

 Monastic dome! condemn'd to uses vile!
 Where Superstition once had made her den
 Now Paphian girls were known to sing and smile.
 (2: 10)

Poems in a series evoke their predecessors through formal markers (like the distinctive Spenserian stanza) and allusions to a common theme, here the Indolence that incongruously links ancient monks to modern revelers. (10) Thomson himself was looking back to predecessors, and not only Spenser. His Wizard recalls the old Stuart ideology of peace abroad and prosperity at home as presented in Drummond's Spenserian river-poem, Forth Feasting (1617) where Britain's fertility king rains down luxury on his loyal subjects:

 Thy Thulys Amber, with the Ocean Pearles;
 The Tritons, Heards-men of the glassie Field,
 Shall give Thee what farre-distant Shores can yeeld,
 The Serean Fleeces, Erythrean Gemmes,
 Vaste Platas Silver, Gold of Peru Streames,
 Antarticke Parrots, Aethiopian Plumes,
 Sabaean Odours, Myrrhe, and sweet Perfumes.
 (sig. B4) (11))

In The Castle of Indolence the Wizard's display of riches (somewhat diminished in dignity) alludes to Sir Robert Walpole's encouragement of court Whigs to exchange liberty for luxury. The two cantos evoke long-standing Scottish attitudes, the first anticipating Scott's backwards-looking Lay (where the minstrel finds an aristocratic patron) and the second Campbell's forward-looking Hope (celebrating the triumphal march of Freedom). While Whigs like Thomson opposed the legitimate prosperity derived from Industry to the poisoned fruit derived from courtly Indolence, they were not opposed to making off with Egyptian gold: courtly Spenser's picturesque if obsolete style could be safely appropriated through burlesque. There was even a kind of propriety to this; if Walpole's policies reminded Thomson of Tudor and Stuart absolutism, the policies of Lord Liverpool put Byron in mind of those of Walpole. Still, putting new wine into old bottles could lead to unintended consequences: readers have been known to prefer the medium to the morality.

Spenserian burlesque, which enjoyed its heyday in the 1750s and 1760s, was by 1812 an outmoded fashion and an unlikely choice for an ambitious poem. But it serves a strategic purpose in Childe Harold, enabling Byron to bring eighteenth-century satire to bear on nineteenth-century romanticism in a perplexing, Janus-faced way. The opening recursion to Thomson reverberates throughout a poem in which indolence and progress are major themes. Like Harold, Thomson's Knight of Arts and Industry is an emigrant: "Accomplish'd thus he from the Woods issu'd, / Full of great Aims, and bent on bold Emprize" (Thomson 203). To evoke this similarity is to underscore the difference: Thomson's Knight takes Britain as his destination, while Byron's knight takes Britain as a point of departure. As his name implies, Thomson's Knight is a maker and a doer while Byron's Childe wanders as a pilgrim, a spectator only. Thomson's allegory follows the westward march of progress celebrated by eighteenth-century poets; Byron's journey takes the opposite course: "Without a sigh he left, to cross the brine, / And traverse Paynim shores, and pass Earth's central line" (Childe 2:11). Fleeing from over-refined pleasures at home, Harold chronicles the demolition of European civilization in the Peninsular War before proceeding on to observe the triumph of barbarism in the very cradle of civilization. If Byron's pilgrim sometimes makes the trappings of superstition and absolutism seem atavistically attractive, he remains, for the most part, the detached, refined, disinterested spectator of eighteenth-century poetry. Byron's "romaut" is congruent neither with Thomson's Augustan sensibilities nor with Scott or Campbell's sentimental romanticism. Its meanderings are, however, consistent with the vacillations seen in several poems in the Thomson series and congruent too with the divagations taken by the series as such.

That properly begins with the two Spenser imitations by William Julius Mickle and James Beattie. Mickle's journey through life rather resembles that of Smollett's Lishmahago: the son of a Langholm clergyman, he got his start managing an Edinburgh brewery; suffering bankruptcy, he migrated to London to pursue literature but enjoyed none of Thomson's success in attracting patrons. Rejecting a potential career in the East India Company he worked as corrector to the Oxford University Press while completing his magnum opus, a translation of Camoen's mercantile epic, the The Lusiad, or, The Discovery of India (1776). Still unrewarded, Mickle found patronage as a naval secretary; after living in Portugal and amassing a tidy fortune in prize-money, in 1782 he married well and retired to Wheatley in Oxfordshire. Mickle's transformation from Scottish brewer to English squire was replete with reversals of fortune and complex allegiances. He was a Whig and a cosmopolitan Scot but also a staunch defender of orthodox Christianity who believed he was being persecuted by David Hume and Adam Smith; he was a learned and skillful poet whose posthumous literary reputation was founded on the ballad compositions he would never deign to acknowledge. "Cumnor Hall" was used by Scott as the basis for Kennilworth. (12)

Mickle's diverse inclinations towards commerce, Christianity, imperialism, literature, and country life all figure in The Concubine (1767), a poem thrice reprinted (1769, 1771, 1777, the third time as Sir Martyn) before appearing in his collected poems (1794, 1806) and some prominent anthologies (1795, 1798, 1808, 1810). Byron and many of his readers would have been familiar with it. The poem likely owed its success to Mickle's elegant diction and powers of description, for The Concubine is not notable for coherence; Henry Francis Cary later described it as "incongruous and disjointed as the dream of a sick man" (563). (13) It is part Spenserian allegory, part estate poem, and part domestic romance, the whole loosely held together by the main character, a literary peer who like Harold "gives some connexion to the piece" (Childe 2: 5). It opens as a sober-paced Spenser burlesque, a wizard relating the story to the poet in the form of a vision. Mickle defended his design in the second edition: "Some perhaps, misled by the title, have been surprised to find so much attention bestowed on the Knight, and so little on the Concubine: but let it be observed, that the Knight is the proper subject, as the delineation of the character of a Man of Birth, who with every other advantage of natural abilities and amiable disposition, is at once lost to the Public and himself, is evidently proposed. Nor could the Author suspect he had ever lost sight of his cue, through all the excursions he has made; excursions, into which he was led rather from a conviction that they tended to the completion of the character, than from any inattention to the unity of his story" (5). (14) The subsequent change of title indicates readers' continued perplexity about the subject of the poem.

Its relationship to the Castle of Indolence is perhaps obvious enough: In the first canto Sir Martyn is brought to ruin by the wily Kathrin, a commoner who uses an unintended pregnancy to beguile him into marriage. The seductress is distant kin to Thomson's Wizard, though she is a figure for Luxury rather than Indolence. That quality properly belongs to the baron, who in the second canto wanders dreamily about his failing estate, haunted by guilt and remorse. In a magic glass, Shame shows him the image of a man whose private vices have not redounded to the public good:

 Illustrious Cares! befitting Patriot Peer!
 Italian Sing-song and the Eunuchs squall;
 Such Arts as soothd the base unmanly Ear
 Of Greece and Persia bending to their Fall;
 When Freedome bled unwept, and scornd was Glows Call.
 (47)

Though enervated by luxury, Sir Martyn manages occasional bursts of anger at his condition:

 Are these, he murmurs, these my Friends! the best
 That croud my Hall! the Sonnes of madning Noise,
 Whose warmest Friendship with the Revel dies.
 (59)

Eventually he fails into the clutches of Dissipation and, confined to the Cave of Discontent, devotes the remainder of his miserable days to melancholia and despair. Like those falling prey to Thomson's Wizard, Sir Martyn is, in truth, victimized by "A lazie Fiend, SELF IMPOSITION hight" (68). The Concubine reverses the sequence of Thomson's cantos: Mickle's first chronicles the rise of the industrious Kathrin, his second the confinement and demise of her indolent lover. In both cantos the dreary narrative and disjointed episodes are relieved by extended, naturalistic landscape description--as when the peer imagines a sea-girt world beyond the confines of his domestic Hell:

 The Flockes now whiten, now the Ocean bay
 Beneath the Radiance glistens clear and pale,
 And white from farre appeares the frequent Sail
 By Traffick spread. Moord where the Land divides,
 The British Red-Cross waving in the Gale,
 Hulky and black, a gallant Warre Ship rides,
 And over the greene Wave with lordlie Port presides.
 (52)

If the attack on luxury in The Concubine echoes the political rhetoric of Thomson and the country Whigs, its unhappy conclusion may reflect on events since the publication of The Castle of Indolence: the Patriots had proved almost as corrupt as the faction they overthrew. The narrative likely has something to do with George Lyttelton, Thomson's former associate and Mickle's sometimes-patron, latterly retired to his estate at Hagley Park. In his review John Langhorne hints at some such thing: "From some circumstances in this poem, one might be led to think that the Author had a real Sir Martyn in his eye" (353). (15) Lyttelton's biographer, Rose Mary Davis, reports that this pious and poetical peer had been wrongly accused of fathering a child by his housekeeper, and his relations with his second wife were not happy (251-52). (16) But the allegory is stubbornly difficult: we are led to admire the mercantile career pursued by the Knight's ocean-going brother but to condemn the mercantile behavior of the concubine who attempts to modernize an indolent estate that is at once an emblem of political authority and a bar to the exercise of political virtue. Much as the Whig party was foundering on the competing interests of land and liberty, Mickle's story works at cross purposes: is Sir Martyn's failure the product of Kathrin's low-bred industry or his own aristocratic indolence? There appears to be no right answer: instead of a choice between pleasure and virtue, this modern Hercules confronts equivalent paths to destruction. As master of Newstead and a liberal member of Parliament, Byron might well appreciate the Hobson's choice posed by Mickle's cantos.

The Minstrel; or, the Progress of Genius (1771, 1774) was a significant progress-poem for two generations of romantic poets; it was imitated scores of times, becoming, in effect, the place-holder for Wordsworth's yet-unpublished autobiographical poem. (17) Roger Robinson has established that Beattie began composition about 1766 and that The Minstrel originated as a burlesque before taking a more sentimental turn; it was written piecemeal and without a concerted design (230-31). (18) Beattie follows Thomson's example of including a self-portrait, or rather two, since the gregarious youth and the misanthropic hermit are both "Beattie." The poem, however, is supposed to be set in the middle ages. As had been the case with The Castle of Indolence readers preferred the first "Indolence" canto presenting Edwin in his untutored state:

 And yet poor Edwin was no vulgar boy;
 Deep thought oft seem'd to fix his infant eye.
 Dainties he heeded not, nor gaude, nor toy,
 Save one short pipe of rudest minstrelsy.
 Silent when glad; affectionate, though shy;
 And now his look was most demurely sad,
 And now he laugh'd aloud yet none knew why.
 The neighbours stared and sigh'd, yet bless'd the lad:
 Some deem'd him wondrous wise, and some believed him mad.
 (10)

Surely Byron saw a reflection of himself in this talented, impoverished, and melancholy child of Aberdeen. Biography, a decidedly secondary matter in Thomson, becomes a primary subject in The Concubine and The Minstrel, as it would be in Childe Harold.

If Thomson had failed to give due weight to the legitimate claims of imagination and Mickle had muddled the issue, in Beattie's quasi-autobiographical poem the competing moral claims of indolent fancy and industrious refinement are equally if inconsistently valued. The path to progress, we learn in the second canto, is choked with thorns: "'Perish the lore that deadens young desire' / Is the soft tenor of my song no more" (3). Initially reluctant, Edwin studies the classic poets under the Hermit's tutelage and learns to correct his woodnotes wild: "What cannot Art and Industry perform, / When Science plans the progress of their toil!" (27). The narrative then breaks off, a rumored third canto left unwritten. Beattie wrote to Elizabeth Montagu: "I am glad that you are pleased with the additional stanzas of the second canto of the Minstrel; but I fear you are too indulgent. How it will be relished by the public, I cannot even guess. I know all its faults; but I cannot remedy them, for they are faults in the first concoction; they result from the imperfection of the plan." (19) Beattie does not specify what these "faults" are, but one may suppose that they stem from an inability or unwillingness to identify the progress of native genius with the progress of acquired knowledge. Then too, it is difficult to see how Edwin's classical education would accord with his status as a medieval minstrel. Historical incongruity of matter and manner was the stock-in-trade of Spenserian burlesque but it would not do for a sentimental tale, nor does the incipient medievalism in the first canto sit well with Beattie's strictures on poetical refinement in the second.

The very inconsistencies that led Beattie to abandon his narrative ensured that others would take up his poem, some taking their cue from the second canto, but most from the first. The descriptions of village life and lore in The Minstrel recast Thomson's opposition between idleness and industry as an opposition between native tradition and cosmopolitan refinement or (to use the nineteenth-century formulation) culture and civilization. The importance of this is witnessed by the number, quality, and diversity of the poems pursuing the themes of progress and genius, among them Scott's Lay of the Last Minstrel, Campbell's Gertrude of Wyoming, and Byron's Childe Harold. A burgeoning Minstrel series--Spenserian poems concerned with the contention between material progress and spiritual culture (variously conceived as the genius of the poet, the nation, the age) began to take shape in the 1790s. But our immediate concern is with Spenserian burlesque and the Scottish imitations of The Castle of Indolence. None of these acquired classic status (that is, becoming objects of imitation in their own right), nor is it likely that Byron would have known all of them. But they do indicate something of how Thomson was being read and Spenser imitated during the run-up to Childe Harold. The point is not to argue specific influence, but to indicate the range of options available to the imitators and emulators who are the real source of agency in a series of poems.

Later Imitations: Tait, Fordyce, Gardiner, Gillespie, Cameron

James Tait's The Land of Liberty (1775) is a more conventional Spenser burlesque than the poems by Mickle and Beattie. Little is recorded of the poet (1748-1817) other than that he was Writer to the Signet (1781) and judge of the police court in Edinburgh (1805). (20) His resoundingly Whiggish poem was likely published with an eye towards attracting patronage in Edinburgh; the advertisement informs us that it had been composed five years earlier, which is to say, after the publication of The Concubine but before The Minstrel. Tait's hero, Albernad, is prince of an eastern land who is overthrown and forced upon his travels. Led by a guardian angel he visits the islands of Monarchy, Aristocracy, and Democracy, all of which are in disarray. In the second canto the prince discovers the Land of Liberty (Britain) which is, by contrast, a well-ordered place. Nonetheless, this happy island is threatened by Dissention, Discord, and Faction (the latter makes a speech modeled on that of Thomson's Wizard). Justice and Concord intervene, and all is eventually set to rights. Tait's theme is the rule of law. While there is no historical specificity, his first canto seems intended as a synoptic view of ancient history, and in the second Concord may represent the benefits of a mixed modern constitution. If Albernad's journey suggests a conventional progress of liberty, Tait's allegory is remarkably static. In striking contrast to the earlier poems there is little pathos, no nostalgia, and little evocative description. Tait does convey a lively sense of the fragility of civilization (Faction recalls the recent Jacobite eruption); that, along with the political-topographical tour in the first canto, moves the series in the direction of Childe Harold.

James Fordyce's "The Physiognomist: a Descriptive Poem, in imitation of Spenser" (1786) breaks no new ground. Like Beattie and Byron, Fordyce was an Aberdeen poet; after graduating from Marischal College in 1753 he took orders and emigrated to London where he became a popular Presbyterian lecturer and, like Mickle and Beattie, a prominent figure in the movement to promote Christian orthodoxy. Scottish rectitude had southern admirers: Mickle had been offered a living in the Church of England by Bishop Lowth, and Beattie by Bishop Porteus. This was another component of the Thomson series that Byron would engage. Fordyce made his literary reputation with the oft-reprinted Sermons to Young Women (1766); his poetry was written later in life after a rift in his congregation and retirement to Hampshire. (21) "The Physiognomist" seems to have been inspired by the "mirror of vanity" episode in Thomson's first canto; its frame narrative may have been suggested by Mickle. The eponymous wizard teaches the poet to recognize how the ruling passions differ in various walks of life by means of a series of twenty-two Theophrastan characters. It is amusing to see Scottish moral-sense philosophy presented in the guise of a medieval pageant:

 And now an airy Coxcomb trips alone,
 With gogle-Eyne he gazeth all about,
 Gaping and wond'ring at the female throng.
 If he meet harlot gay, O such a rout!
 If modest ladies frown, he perks his snout;
 Now turns, his own dear person to admire;
 Now stands on tip-toe, all those prudes to flout;
 Assur'd each finer wench's heart to fire
 With love and joy, and fondest passion to inspire.
 (196)

Like The Concubine, "The Physiognomist" is the work of a pious expatriate worried about how luxury and corruption were preying upon a commercial nation.

"The Fairy Queen, a Tale" operates in a very different moral register. It is the work of another poet with Aberdeen connections, Francis Garden, Lord Gardenstone (1721-1793), who had been James Beattie's first patron. One imagines that Gardenstone's poems, belatedly published in 1793, would have been congenial to Byron's taste: he was an Augustan satirist who defended Pope against the strictures in Joseph Warton's Essay on the Writings and Genius of Pope (1756). He was also an enlightened, worldly reformer in bad odor with the Kirk--such at least is the explanation offered by his anonymous biographer for the tepid reception of his poems (5: 92). (22) Gardenstone's undated fabliau, written in couplets rather than stanzas, relates the history of Sir Lonval, a Welsh knight whose services to Arthur's court have gone unrewarded. Departing in disgust, he soon encounters a fair lady of easy virtue:

 With accents sweeter than the Syren's song
 She wonder'd he delay'd his route so long ...
 Into a spacious hall she Lonval led,
 Luxurious plenty on the board was spread.
 She warm'd his courage with a bowl of wine,
 He sought no second call to rest and dine.
 His brain with such oppressive pleasure swims;
 The fairy's graceful height, her finely moulded limbs,
 Each look, each motion, sets his soul on fire,
 And every vein is raging with desire.
 (186)

After due dalliance the knight is sent back to court with a purse, a magic ring, and an admonition to dread "the fairy much, the female more." But alas, the treacherous gifts prove inefficacious when Sir Lonval finds himself at cross-purposes with Arthur's lecherous queen. "The Fairy Queen" inverts Thomson's moral, for loyalty to fairy-luxury and not the practice of industry or prudence leads the hero to his final reward. Possibly this story of a disregarded Welsh knight was written in response to the Scotophobia aroused by northern place-seekers in the 1760s and 1770s.

The longest and most ambitious imitation of The Castle of Indolence was The Progress of Refinement, an Allegorical Poem (1805) by William Gillespie, a 1792 graduate of Edinburgh University, and soon-to-be minister of Kells (Rogers 2: 137). Its four-canto allegory, replete with Scottish-school history, economics, and ethnography, strives to bring Thomson up to date. The sprawling design was summarized in the Scots Magazine (to which Gillespie was a contributor):

 The poet begins with the savage state of the first Britons, when
 they roamed the woods without shelter, covering, or any certain
 means of subsistence. In pity of this forlorn condition of her
 children, Britannia sends down among them Science and Art, both in
 their infancy, who gradually lead them on to the pastoral state, of
 which Mr. Gillespie, according to poetical usage, gives a
 captivating description, far more so, we suspect, than is warranted
 by any authentic records in the history of Britain. However, art
 and science having grown up, an intimacy is formed between them, of
 which commerce is the fruit. Here the author seems disposed for
 some time to view with complacency, and gives a description of the
 industry and arts to which she gives birth, the towns she raises,
 and the various improvements she makes on society; till unluckily
 crossing over to America, and taking a walk along the shores of
 Peru, she meets with Wealth, and being seized with a violent
 passion, prevails on him to accompany her to Britain. We are far
 from thinking our author happy in these personifications. We know
 no two persons on whom the imagination can less delight to rest, or
 who are less qualified for appearing in a poetical dress. However,
 their union gives birth to Luxury, of whom our author is a declared
 enemy. The greater part of two cantos is occupied in detailing the
 various evils which arise from her influence. At length these arise
 to such a height, that Britannia thinks a second interference
 necessary, and commissions her attendant nymphs to revive Britain
 from this state of degeneracy. The nymphs obey, and perform their
 commission successfully. Luxury is banished, with her attendants
 Avarice and Care; and Britain is restored to her ancient greatness.
 (534-35) (23)

Progress triumphs in the end. James Manning, writing in the Monthly Review, describes the poem as an imitation of Beattie: "He writes with a mind warmed by the beauties of The Minstrel, and has transfused into his own numbers no inconsiderable portion of the melody of that elegant fragment" (209). (24) One might also trace Gillespie to Mickle and Tait: with The Progress of Refinement the Thomson series acquires a degree of awareness of itself as a series. The poet plainly strives to give a fanciful turn to the hard lessons of political economy--to little avail, it seems, for the Scots Magazine reviewer takes issue with the "unpoetical" personifications of Luxury and Wealth. This objection implies a widening gap between the poetry of material civilization and the poetry of imaginative culture, between Thomson's burlesque satire and Scott or Campbell's sentiment.

The ideological lines are sharply drawn in William Cameron's posthumously published "The Minstrel continued on the original Plan of Dr. Beattie" likely written shortly after Beattie's death in 1803 but published only in 1813. Cameron, who had been Beattie's pupil at Aberdeen, completes the narrative along the lines suggested in Gray's letter to Beattie of 2 July 1770 (Gray 383, Walker 295). (25) Continuing the biographical thread, Cameron interprets the "great and singular service to his country" Gray had proposed as Beattie's own resistance to Hume and infidelity. The challenge to Christian orthodoxy is personated in a speech Cameron cleverly models on the Wizard's address in the Castle of Indolence:

 To Reason only, your devotion pay,
 From her decision, mark the good from ill.
 No more shall phantoms, then, your heart dismay,
 Of future fate, with fearful presage, fill;
 But, free t' obey your own almighty will,
 Thus wisely regulated, then, with scorn
 Of rule superior proud ye shall fulfil
 The end of men, all great and equal born,
 Their dignity maintain, their nature bright adorn.
 (50)

Bowing to "Mammon's filthy fane" (53) the nation has become corrupt, lawless, and violent. Appalled at this turn of events, a chastened Edwin ascends "the Minstrel's seat" to defend traditional piety and imaginative culture: "With harp in hand, aback his robe he threw, / The strings attuned to harmony complete." At this climactic moment he sings "The deeds resounding of our Fathers, fam'd / For patriot spirit" (73) and succeeds in turning back an army of invading--Danes. The Rev. Cameron, we may safely infer, stood at the opposite pole of the political spectrum from the Rev. Gillespie. (26)

In this motley assortment of scarce-remembered Scottish poems one hears burlesque tones that readers of the opening stanzas of Childe Harold would be expected to recognize. But there is more: a poetical peer lacerated by melancholy, the pilgrimage device, aristocratic airs and autobiographical analogies, misogyny and misanthropy, atavism and ethnography. There is an extended conversation about the uncertain status of progress and civilization in which the voices of Scottish Whigs and Scottish Tories are clearly discernable. If it was Byron's original purpose in Childe Harold to emulate Scott and Campbell, he would have found in the Scottish Spenserians a wealth of material ready to be worked up into a poem on their common theme of civilization and its discontents. He had only to add another title to a well-established series. But if he were to be a successful emulator he had to discover a path not taken by Thomson's imitators and apply it to the concerns of the hour, a time in which the likes of Gillespie and Cameron were dropping any pretence of ambivalence, and Campbell and Scott, albeit in more nuanced ways, were likewise appealing to readers along the old ideological lines. Looking at matters retrospectively, we can see that it was a very good time to address the public in a major Spenserian poem on the subject of progress and the uncertain fate of Europe.

Byron's Reading of the Scottish Spenserians

As irregular as it otherwise is, Childe Harold is consistent in its remorseless attack on the idea of progress epitomized by Thomson's Knight of Industry. Byron reads the Thomson series against the grain, turning his predecessors' perceived limitations to his own advantage. Where others regarded Beattie's unwillingness to complete his narrative as a fault, Byron grasped the possibility of a "progress of Indolence" continued as an open-ended chronicle of his life and times. Where other imitators had tried to resolve the dilemma posed by The Minstrel by subordinating civilization to culture, or culture to civilization, Byron made the unresolved conflict the basis for much of his poem. The 1812 preface quotes a recently-published letter by Beattie that reinforces his own reading of the poem: "Not long ago I began a poem in the style and stanza of Spenser [writes Beattie], in which I propose to give full scope to my inclination, and be either droll or pathetic, descriptive or sentimental, tender or satirical, as the humour strikes me" (Childe 2: 4). Childe Harold extends this willful variety from style to substance, embracing the contradictions Beattie had fallen into by accident. Byron is, by turns, pious, agnostic, and skeptical; he lashes out at monarchy and weeps over Princess Charlotte; he is liberated from family ties yet deeply concerned about ancestors and progeny. The "imperfection of the plan" Beattie came to lament becomes a programmatic element in Byron's satire on British triumphalism. The nation was not the coherent thing that Whigs--or Tories--imagined.

Byron's urbane distaste for nationality helps to explain his high regard for The Minstrel; like Byron, Beattie was attracted to romantic atavism and yet was unwilling to let go of a humanist's trans-national standards. Much as The Minstrel had led readers to expect something in the manner of Percy's Reliques, so Byron's "romaut" led readers to expect a tale of chivalry. But neither poet cared much for historicism and Byron in particular had no use for the chauvinism and chivalry on display in works like the laureate's Carmen Triumphale, for the Commencement of the Year 1814 or Scott's The Field of Waterloo (1815). From its outset Childe Harold had discounted the notion that there was something unique or essential to national genius: the finer points of dress and weaponry aside, Byron's Portuguese and Albanian mountaineers could just as well be Highlanders. Byron underscores the superficiality of national distinctions by implicitly comparing the River Tagus to the River Tweed:

 But these between a silver streamlet glides,
 And scarce a name distinguisheth the brook,
 Though rival kingdoms press its verdant sides.
 Here leans the idle shepherd on his crook,
 And vacant on the rippling waves doth look,
 That peaceful still 'twixt bitterest foeman flow;
 For proud each peasant as the noblest duke;
 Well doth the Spaniard hind the difference know
 'Twixt him and Lusian slave, the lowest of the low.
 (2: 23)

Like idle shepherds, national prejudice can be found always and everywhere. But where Beattie skates over differences of time and place, Byron offers copious detail, perplexing his reader by vacillating between the competing claims of local culture and trans-national civilization. To illustrate the untutored taste for ballad poetry Beattie foregoes the local product and cites "The Children of the Woods," an English ballad popularized by the polite Addison (Book the First, 24). In his "Good Night" the cosmopolitan Childe declares that he has no "care what land thou bear'st me to"--in a ballad ironically adapted from Walter Scott's place-specific Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (2:15). Beattie's casual indifference to locality reflects a commitment to the values of civilization; Byron's programmatic indifference, while it may spring from similar sentiments, requires contrivance and specificity. As with place, so with time: the Hermit's curriculum is casually anachronistic; not so the Jacobite songs Byron ascribes to the British troops marching out to encounter Napoleon (2: 86): this anachronism is functional, a sly poke at Walter Scott and defenders of "British" liberty.

The opposition between culture and civilization developed in Scottish Spenserian poetry might be expressed as a distinction between "being in" and "moving through." Scott's Borderers are attached to persons and places; by contrast, Campbell's Wyoming is settled by freedom-loving exiles from across Europe. This Tory-Whig topographical dialectic is already visible in The Castle of Indolence where the Wizard holds sleepy sway within close boundaries while Industry strides across epochs and continents. The Land of Liberty progresses through a sequence of islands stultified by a genius of the place. In Cameron's ultra-Tory continuation of The Minstrel a traditional society is threatened by Jacobinical "improvers" from abroad. The other poems develop the dialectic in less consistent but more interesting ways: we have Edwin's reluctance to abandon village innocence, the opposing goods represented by land and commerce in Mickle's poem, the divine intervention Gillespie invokes to preserve Britain from the bane of imported Luxury. Byron is consistent only in the irony with which he manages juxtapositions of time and place. He invokes the genius of locality to castigate Lord Elgin: "The last, the worst, dull spoiler, who was he? / Blush, Caledonia! such thy son could be!" (2: 47). Mistaking material for spiritual goods, this "modern Pict" has reenacted the transmigration of Liberty! In the third canto Byron performs a moving-through from the ruins of civilization to the glories of nature; in the fourth canto a moving-back from commercial Venice to classical Rome (both corrupt, both noble). Amid those venerable surroundings Byron discovers the famous dying gladiator: "He reck'd not of the life he lost nor prize, / But where his rude hut by the Danube lay" (2:171). The passage underscores the viciousness of civilization and the innocence of barbarism, leaving the reader, like Beattie's Edwin, unsure which way to turn: are we to embrace North or South, romanticism or classicism? But this, too, seems a distinction without a difference: earlier in the canto the romantic Ariosto had been presented as the "Southern Scott" and Walter Scott as the "Ariosto of the North" (2: 137). Like the series of Thomson imitations of which it is a part, Childe Harold is "all over the map" when it comes to the competing virtues of locality and civilization.

This practice of reading against the grain also appears in Byron's eidolon, Childe Harold. There is precedent in the series for Harold's taken-from-the-life contrariety. If The Castle of Indolence champions Industry, Thomson's verse-portrait enlists the poet among the idle: "A Bard here dwelt, more fat than Bard beseems," etc. (195). Byron, like Langhorne, would have supposed that the attractively-repulsive Sir Martyn was modeled on some estimable if flawed original, and having read Beattie's letters he would have recognized the self-portrait in the contrary characters of Edwin and the Hermit. As a contributor to the series it was inevitable that he would sit for his own portrait; the striking thing is how he accomplishes this by walking widdershins around his predecessors. It was conventional to prefer Thomson's Indolence canto of course, but it required a degree of temerity to model Harold on Mickle's unreformed rake:

 Yet not himselfe, but Heavens Great King he blamd,
 And dard his Wisdom and his Will arraign;
 For boldly he the Ways of God blasphemd,
 And of blinde Governaunce did loudlie plain,
 And vild selfe-pity would his eyes distain....
 (72)

Harold's religious opinions were calculated to give great offense to pious Scots like Mickle. At a time when Beattie's Edwin was regarded as the paragon of poetic characters, Byron seems to have empathized more with the classicizing Hermit. In the second canto innocent Edwin is shocked by this stranger's confession:

 Like them, abandon'd to Ambition's sway,
 I sought for glory in the paths of guile;
 And fawn'd and smiled, to plunder and betray,
 Myself betray'd and plunder'd all the while;
 So gnaw'd the viper the corroding file.
 But now with pangs of keen remorse I rue
 Those years of trouble and debasement vile.
 (8)

If significant elements of Harold's character were already present in Thomson's lazy poet, Mickle's guilt-ridden peer, and Beattie's alienated humanist, no one but Byron would have, could have conflated such disparate characters--though being who he was and reading the series as he did, Harold does seem the proper choice for "giving some connexion to the piece" (2: 4). Common to all is the melancholia Byron uses with devastatingly equivocal effect to explode the progress of genius:

 Self-exiled Harold wanders forth again,
 With nought of hope left, but with less of gloom;
 The very knowledge that he lived in vain,
 That all was over on this side the tomb,
 Had made Despair a smilingness assume....
 (2: 82)

Melancholia had been a touchstone of Spenserian poetry since the first appearance of Colin Clout. While the extent to which Byron studied The Faerie Queene is debatable, he was an attentive, critical reader of the eighteenth-century Spenserians.

Conclusion

Within the Thomson series Childe Harold innovated with its open-ended structure, its handling of the theme of genius, and its treatment of the opposition between civilization and culture. It required resourceful reading to discover latent possibilities in the series and a mastery of imitation to use them to overtake such skilful emulators as Campbell and Scott. The Castle of Indolence, the Concubine, and the Minstrel all suffered from problems of closure: Thomson left readers dissatisfied with the destruction of the castle and Mickle left readers wondering what had become of the concubine. Beattie never attempted closure, suggesting to Byron the possibility of an open-ended, "experimental" poem that would make a virtue of his predecessor's defect. Would Harold repent, would he progress? No, as it turns out: he merely oscillates uncertainly between the black melancholia of the vicious Sir Martyn and the white melancholia of the virtuous Edwin. Genius was a heated topic among Scottish philosophers, Thomas Blackwell regarding it as the spirit of the age and William Duff as inspired individuality; Beattie had tried to split the difference by making Edwin both medieval bard and modern wunderkind. (27) This was not persuasive. By contrast, Byron's Harold, like Blackwell's Homer, appears the representative voice of his times even as, like Duff's Shakespeare, he demonstrates his individuality by making "no pretension to regularity." In his genius for vacillation Harold became the mirror of his times by being all things to all people: Whigs and Tories alike believed that he was of their party; libertines relished his wicked wit and pious Christians anticipated his return to the fold. Byron's acceptance of willful inconsistency set up his third innovation, which was to embrace both sides in the contention between indolence and art, culture and civilization, rootedness and cosmopolitanism: on these subjects, what right-minded person would not be inconsistent? Childe Harold resolved nothing, but it did render the intellectual conundrums posed by the Thomson imitations viscerally immediate.

Byron innovated by attending less to what the poets said than to what the series did, which was to underscore the inability of Scottish writers to arrive at a consensus about progress. Byron's satire takes inconsistency as an organizing principle, the Spenserian burlesque of the opening stanzas setting the tone for more profound anachronisms to follow. Childe Harold undermined both sides in the debate over progress by incongruously juxtaposing things near and far, ancient and contemporary. As a rhetorical strategy, juxtaposition turns on immediacy, a solvent calculated to vex both liberals tracing a progress of refinement and conservatives tracing a regress of tradition. Consider how the journalistic immediacy of Childe Harold enabled Byron to overgo the Spenserian poems recently published by Campbell and Scott. The descriptions in Gertrude of Wyoming are pleasingly romantic, but it is a mistake to place flamingoes in Pennsylvania. Byron, writing on site in Albania, was at once distantly remote and more immediately present, a modern Englishman stepping incongruously into a feudal society as compelling as any of Scott's. In The Vision of Don Roderick Scott attempted to render the Peninsular War historically sublime; Childe Harold renders the scene contemporaneously antiheroic with its on-the-spot account of the proceedings at Cintra. If Byron's juxtaposition of modern warfare with traditional bull-fighting did not settle the debate over progress, it was at least calculated to unsettle both partisans of progress and partisans of tradition.

Yet for all its thrilling immediacy, no one could mistake Childe Harold for mere journalism. The Spenserian stanza bestowed a pleasing grandeur on the descriptions, like the faux-varnish of a Claude-glass. Its aura of antiquity accorded with the general incongruity of the poem and served other functions as well, like setting up the intertextual conversation about progress with Scott, Campbell, and the earlier Scottish Spenserians. Emulative poets did not become imitators out of indolence; to achieve classic status through imitation was a difficult and worthy thing. There is a reason why Gillespie's Progress of Refinement is no longer read: it made no significant innovations and left no progeny. By contrast, the Spenser imitations composed by Thomson, Beattie, and Byron changed the ways readers thought about progress and the ways poets wrote poetry. As a consequence of the Thomson series, the Spenserian stanza was already shifting status from "obsolete" to "classic" when Byron spoke of it as "sanctioned by the practice of Ariosto, Thomson, and Beattie" (2: 5). If the stanza gave Childe Harold a venerable look, actual classic stature could be granted only by later imitators. The reviews of Childe Harold had little worthwhile to say about its literary pedigree. The poetry tells a different story. The first imitation, Childe Alarique (1813) by Robert Pearse Gillies, obviously reads Byron as an imitator of the Castle of Indolence; more common were biographical "progress of genius" poems that read Byron through Beattie (or vice versa). Most common of all were the scores of Byronic odes and topographic poems in Spenserian stanzas ruminating on the fall of empire--nineteenth-century treatments of the conflict between Indolence and Industry that ultimately derive from Thomson and the Scottish Spenserians. The resources of imitation and emulation have seldom been used more effectively than in Childe Harold.

Virginia Tech

(1.) William Cowper, The Poems of William Cowper, ed. John D. Baird, Charles Ryskamp, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980).

(2.) George Gordon, Lord Byron, The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann, 7 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980), hereafter cited by volume and page in the text.

(3.) "The Goose Quill," London Magazine 6 (1737): 268-69; "The Razor, a Poem," American Magazine and Historical Chronicle I (1743): 120-22; "The Thread-Bare Coat," London Magazine 46 (1777): 431-32; Richard Atwood, "The Blanket, in Imitation of Milton," Literary Magazine or Universal Review 2 (1757): 357-58; C. B., "The Easy Chair," Universal Chronicle, or Weekly Gazette 3 (1760): 48; Edward Cooper, The Elbow-Chair: A Rhapsody (London: F. Newbery, 1765); Robert Fergusson, "Tea. A Poem," Weekly Magazine or Edinburgh Amusement 21 (1773): 177-78; G., "The Country Barber's Shop," Lloyd's Evening Post (1762): 106; John Knight, "The Needle: A Poem," Weekly Miscellany or Instructive Entertainer l (1773): 249-52; John Nichols, "The Wedding Ring," London Magazine 32 (1763): 608; Christopher Pitt, "An Imitation of Spenser [The Jordan]," The Student or Oxford and Cambridge Monthly Miscellany I (1750): 198-99; S. R., "On a Pipe of Tobacco," Gazetteer and London Daily Advertiser (1762); William Woty, "Meditations on a Sheet of Writing Paper," Universal Chronicle, or Weekly Gazette 2 (1759): 113-14; William Woty, "A Poem on a Pin," Lloyd's Evening Post (1762): 574; William Woty. "The Old Shoe," Poetical Works (London: Flexney, 1770) 2: 156-60.

(4.) James Thomson, Liberty, the Castle of Indolence, and Other Poems, ed. James Sambrook (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), William Julius Mickle, The Concubine: A Poem in Two Cantos. In the Manner of Spenser (Oxford: Daniel Prince, J. Rivington, T. Payne, J. Dodsley, 1767), James Beattie, The Minstrel; or, the Progress of Genius. A Poem. Book the First (London: E. & C. Dilly, and A. Kincaid & J. Bell, 1771), James Beattie, The Minstrel; or, the Progress of Genius. A Poem. The Second Book (London: Edward and Charles Dilly, William Creech, 1774).

(5.) John Tait, The Land of Liberty, an Allegorical Poem, in the Manner of Spencer. In Two Cantos (London: T. Davies, 1775); James Fordyce, "The Physiognomist: A Descriptive Poem, in Imitation of Spenser," Poems (London: T. Cadell, 1786) 181-201; Francis Garden, "The Fairy Queen: A Tale," Miscellanies in Prose and Verse (Edinburgh: J. Robertson, 1791) 184-91; William Gillespie, "The Progress of Refinement," The Progress of Refinement, an Allegorical Poem, with Other Poems (Edinburgh: Mundell and Son, 1805) 3-115; William Cameron, "The Minstrel continued on the original Plan of Dr. Beattie," Poems on Several Occasions (Edinburgh: A. Constable, 1813) 45-84.

(6.) On Thomson's ambivalence in The Castle of Indolence, see Mary Jane W. Scott, James Thomson, Anglo-Scot (Athens: U of Georgia P, 1988) 275-78. On the furious debates over reform in the Edinburgh where Mickle spent his youth, see James Buchan, Crowded with Genius: the Scottish Enlightenment: Edinburgh's Moment of the Mind (New York: HarperCollins, 2003) 56-59 & ff. On the discussions of history at Aberdeen when Beattie was a student, see Fiona J. Stafford, The Sublime Savage: A Study of James Macpherson and the Poems of Ossian (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1988) 24-37.

(7.) Corey Andrews finds it objectionable that "many critics of eighteenth-century Scottish poetry have concentrated only on the Scots poems, entirely dismissing those in English," "'Almost the Same, but Not Quite'": English Poetry by Eighteenth-Century Scots," The Eighteenth Century 47.1 (2006): 61. If Scottish poets imitating English sources have not received their due, the phenomenon of English poets imitating Scots has received even less attention; Byron was hardly the first to imitate Thomson and Beattie.

(8.) Francis Jeffrey, "Gertrude of Wyoming," Edinburgh Review 14 (1809): 1-19.

(9.) Byron, a great admirer of eighteenth century poetry, would have been highly flattered by what the Gentleman's Magazine had said of his recent poem: "It unites much of the judgment of the Essay on Criticism, the playful yet poignant smile and frown of indignation and ridicule of the Dunciad, with the versification of the Epistle to Arbuthnot, and the acuteness of the Imitations of Horace" (79 [March 1809]: 248). The preface to Childe Harold speaks in the highest terms of Thomson and Beattie, yet even a critic as knowledgeable in eighteenth-century Spenserianism as Greg Kucich elects to take The Faerie Queene as Byron's primary model: "Harold is much closer in his stated role to Spenser's chivalric questers than Beattie's wandering minstrel or Thomson's indolent bard" Keats, Shelley, and Romantic Spenserianism (University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1991) 115. Thomson and Beattie are not mentioned at all in Michael G. Cooke's essay on Byron in the Spenser Encyclopedia, ed. A. C. Hamilton (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1990) 125-26.

(10.) Patricia Parker traces the topic of "indolence" as a theme in Spenserian poetry, and Michael Vicario underscores the importance of the two-canto structure adopted in the first installment of Childe Harold (Patricia Parker, "The Progress of Phaedria's Bower: Spenser to Coleridge," English Literary History 40 [1973]: 372-97; Michael Vicario, "The Implication of Form in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage," Keats-Shelley Journal 33 [1984]: 112-13). For the use of the Spenserian stanza as a series-marker, see the front-matter in my database (which includes full texts of the poems discussed in this essay), "English Poetry 1579-1830: Spenser and the Tradition" (2006). URL: englishpoetry.org.

(11.) William Drummond, Forth Feasting. A Panegyricke to the Kings Most Excellent Majestie (Edinburgh: Andro Hart, 1617).

(12.) The most complete life of Mickle is by John Sire, editor of Poetical Works (1806); he is a subject worthy of a modern biography. Mickle marked the occasion of Hume's death with anonymous verses in the Saint James' s Chronicle attacking the philosopher's imperviousness to the beauties of poetry: "Shall gentle Spenser's injur'd Muse / For him attune the Lay? / No, none of these o'er his cold Grave / Shall strew one Leaf of Bay" (8 November 1776).

(13.) Henry Francis Cary, "William Julius Mickle," London Magazine 5 (1822): 559-64.

(14.) William Julius Mickle, The Concubine: A Poem in Two Cantos. In the Manner of Spenser. A New Edition, with Alterations (London: T. Davies, T. Payne, J. Wilkie, 1769); hereafter cited by page in the text.

(15.) John Langhorne, "The Concubine," Monthly Review 36 (1767): 352-55.

(16.) Rose Mary Davis, The Good Lord Lyttelton: A Study in Eighteenth Century Politics (Bethlehem, PA: Times Publishing Company, 1939).

(17.) Greg Kucich (71) Everard H. King, James Beattie's the Minstrel and the Origins of Romantic Autobiography (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen P, 1992), David Hill Radcliffe, "Completing James Beattie's The Minstrel," Studies in Philology 100.4 (2003): 534-63.

(18.) Roger Robinson, "The Origins and Composition of James Beattie's The Minstrel," Romanticism 4 (1998): 222-40.

(19.) William Forbes, An Account of the Life and Writings of James Beattie, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: Constable, 1806) 1: 352.

(20.) Charles Rogers, The Modern Scottish Minstrel: Or, the Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century, 6 vols. (Edinburgh: 1855) 1: 170-71.

(21.) Alexander Chalmers, The General Biographical Dictionary, 32 vols. (London: J. Nichols, 1812) 14: 470-73.

(22.) Lives of the Scottish Poets by the Society of Ancient Scots, ed. Joseph Robertson, 6 vols. in 3 vols. (London: T. Boys, 1822) 5: 82-103.

(23.) "The Progress of Refinement," Scots Magazine 67 (July 1805): 209-11.

(24.) James Manning, "The Progress of Refinement," Monthly Review NS 54 (October 1807): 209-11.

(25.) Thomas Gray, The Poems of Mr. Gray. To Which Are Prefixed Memoirs of His Life and Writings, ed. William Mason (York: J. Dodsley, J. Todd, 1775), William Walker, "William Cameron," The Bards of Bon Accord, 1375-1860 (Aberdeen: J. & J. P. Edmond & Spark, 1887) 290-300.

(26.) Gillespie's politics got him into trouble during the coronation affair; see "Arrest of a Clergyman for praying for her Majesty" The Star (11 August 1820).

(27.) Beattie's teacher Thomas Blackwell, argued that the genius of the poet is a product of the genius of his place and time, that "the Effects of Culture and Education" are capable of "new-moulding human Creatures, and transforming them more than Urganda or Circe" (An Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer [London: G. Scoten, 1735] 10); William Duff argued that "A man of Genius is really a kind of different being from the rest of his species" (Critical Observations on the Writings of the most celebrated Original Geniuses in Poetry [London: T. Becket, 1770] 339).