Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/208

 202 Whitford Twice can't I read her labours, for my blood; So simply mawkish, so sublimely sad: I own Miss Hannah's Life is very good; But then, her Verse and Prose are very bad. No Muse e'er touch'd Miss Hannah's lips with fire; No fountain hers of bright imagination: So little doth a genuine Muse inspire, That Genius will not own her a relation. 1 ** Thus pitilessly was Miss Hannah More satirized for her sentimentalism. But she had as little sympathy for other people's sentimentality as Peter Pindar had for hers. She appealed from the false to what seemed to her the true emotion- alism in these words addressed to Sensibility: She does not feel thy pow'r who boasts thy flame, And rounds her every period with thy name;. . . Who thinks feign' d sorrows all her tears deserve, And weeps o'er WERTER while her children starve. 1 " From the evidence of the preceding pages it appears that sentimentalism, unlike romanticism in such characteristic aspects as contempt for the authority of neo-classical rules, and revival of interest in medieval literature and life, was the object of a large amount of critical comment in English verse-satire of the reign of George the Third. Concerning sentimentalism in the drama, the criticism of The Theatres (1772) and of Gold- smith's Retaliation (1773) was kindly mockery, that of Anthony Pasquin in The Children of Thespis (1786-1788) was vulgarly vigorous condemnation, and that of the poets of the A nti- Jacobin in The Rovers (1798) was intensely bitter irony. The plays criticized in the eighth and ninth decades of the century were conventionally moral domestic productions; those in the last decade were highly unconventional borrowings from foreign authors. In satirical comment upon sentimental lyric poetry there was a similar progression; the Bath-easton coterie were genially and gently derided by Tickell in The Wreath of Fashion (1778), but the Delia Cruscans were heartily damned by Gif- 124 Peter Pindar, IV, 261. 125 Poems by Hannah More (London, 1816), 180.