Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/194

 188 Whitford (Bath, 1775). Another light satire, Bath. Its Amusements and Beauties, involves this description of the versifying group: But soft behold new game appears in view Observe that busy, fluttering, noisy crew! They're all Apollo's sons, from top to bottom Tho' poor Apollo wonders where he got them! See how they hurry to that hallow'd shrine That sacred seat of Sappho and the Nine! Bless us! what toil, what cost has been bestow'd, To give that prospect of the London road! . . . Within, a mystic vase with laurel crown'd Hence, ye profane! 'tis consecrated ground! Here Sappho's hands the last sad rites dispense To mangl'd poetry, and murder 'd sense; Here jests were heard 'at which e'en Juno smil'd, When crack'd by Jove magnificently mild, ' Jests, so sublimely void of sense and thought, Poor simple mortals cannot find them out; Rhimes like Scotch cousins in such order plac'd The first scarce claims acquaintance with the last! 84 This is interesting, but by far the most important satire upon the Bath-easton coterie is Richard Tickell's Wreath of Fashion (1778). Concerning this poem, Horace Walpole wrote a paragraph in a letter to William Mason on April 18, 1778. 85 It begins: "There is a pretty poem just published called The Wreath of Fashion: it is written by one Tickell, a son of Addison's friend. " And after a sentence of biographical information and another of adverse criticism, it concludes: "The Wreath is a satire on sentimental poets, amongst whom, still more absurdly, he classes Charles Fox; but there is a great deal of wit par cy par la." Though Tickell was a frequent sojourner at Bath and so of his own knowledge knew Lady Miller and her bards, he criti- cized them not for their own sake merely, but as typical of the contemporary taste for insufficiently motivated emotionality. In the prefatory advertisement, he remarks tolerantly upon 54 The New Foundling Hospital for Wit (London, 1784), I, 94-95. The vase was an ancient one, supposedly once the property of Cicero, "having been dug up at his celebrated Tusculan Villa, near Rome"; see Anstey's Works, 227. 86 Letters oj Horace Walpole, ed. Paget Toynbee, X, 222.