Note 155 — Chapter III · THE ENGLISH PRECURSORS.

Even at this early date Mason was able to quote not a few writers—Pemberton, Manwaring, Malcolm, Gay, who, as well as Geddes, Foster, Galley, and others, had dealt with this subject. In fact, the list of such authors in the eighteenth century is quite long, though few of them are very important. For an excellent reasoned bibliography see Mr T. S. Omond’s English Metrists (Tunbridge Wells, 1903). Henry Pemberton, Gresham Professor of Physic, and a man of various ability, published on the to us surprising subject of Glover’s Leonidas, in 1738, Observations on Poetry, which I had hunted in the catalogues for a long time, when Mr Gregory Smith kindly gave me a copy. It shows, as the election of its text may indicate, and as its date would further suggest, no very enthusiastic or imaginative appreciation of the Muse, but is remarkably learned, not merely in the ancients and the modern Frenchmen, but in Italians like Minturno and Castelvetro. Pemberton deals with Epic and Dramatic poetry—their rise, dignity, fable, sentiment, character, language, and difference; with Versification, where his standpoint may be guessed, from his denouncing “the mixture of iambic and trochaic” as a blemish on L’Allegro and Il Penseroso; with the Sublime. He is not an inspiring or inspired writer, but holds some position, both as influential on the Germans, who not seldom quote him, and in the history of Prosody.