Excerpt from Original Ballads by Living Authors, 1850 Augustan age, and was accordingly stilted into an eclogue in decasyllabic couplets. The age acknowledged no excellence in what was not imitated from classical models, as it designated distorted French casts of them. For the bag-wigs, buckles, and liveries of the Westminster dormitory differed not more from the pallia and tunics of the Ludi Megalenses, than Racine and Corneille from Sophocles and Euripides. Yet did English Poets receive law from Versailles while they imagined they were inspired from Parnassus, and allowed no existence to any other inspiration. Among the few poets of the last age, it would not perhaps be possible to name one beside Thomson, Collins, and Gray, whose inspiration was quafi'ed from the pure founts of antiquity: and the rest are neither numerous nor conspicuous enough to warrant the conclusion that contempt of ballad literature results from the ascendency of a purer and loftier poetry. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.