Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/199

 Satire's View of Sentimentalism 193 bottom, a series of eight parodies in the style of the poets of the World. A typical quatrain is: Cease, ere my senses are to madness driven By the strong joy! Cease, Delia, lest my soul, Enrapt, already THINK ITSELF IN HEAVEN And burst the feeble Body's frail controul. 9 * These minor pieces are not uninteresting, but the most important satirical criticism of the Delia Cruscans was that of Gifford in The Baviad (1791)" and in The Maemad (1795). The former poem, best known of all the satires of the time, is a free paraphrase of the first of Persius in three hundred and sixty-one heavily annotated lines. The Maeviad, fifty lines longer and even more thoroughly supplied with notes, in which the satirist quotes Delia Cruscan poems by way of evidence in support of the strong assertions of his verses, is a loose imitation of Horace's tenth satire. 100 Their criticisms are in large measure affected by the satirist's ethical bias. Gifford was a classical believer in the doctrine that poetry has a double function, to please and to instruct. And he thought that instruction ought to be in the way of conventional morality. One main fault with the sentimental poetry was, in his opinion, that it had a certain free tendency away from the commonly accepted religious 98 The Poetical Works of Robert Southey (London, 1866), 115. 99 Date from Lowndes' Bibliographers' Manual. 100 Though Gifford's satires were avowedly imitations of the ancients, the influence of his English predecessors was strong upon him. Even his titles, though they are derived from the names of dull poets of the age of Augustus, he may as well have taken from neo-classical as from ancient sources. In 1688 there appeared in London a pasquinade entitled: To Poet Baiius; occasioned by his Satyr he writ in his verses to the King, upon the Queens being delhered of a son. Boileau mentions Bavius and Maevius; see Boileau's Lutrin: a Mock- heroic Poem in six cantos, tr. N. Rowe (London, 1708), 95. Bavius is referred to in the Third Book of The Dunciad, 11. 16, 38, and 315, and to him is devoted a long note of Scriblerus, with quotations from Vergil and John Dennis concern- ing him; see The Dunciad Variorum. With the Prolegomena of Scriblerus. (London, 1729), 54. In 1730-1731, the Grub-street Journal was edited by two physicians under the names of Bavius and Maevius, "and which for some time enlivened the town with excellent design of ridiculing silly authors and stupid critics"; see Curiosities of Literature (New York, 1871), III, 257.