colman george elder robert lloyd (1 Ergebnisse)

4to, pp. [3]-23; bound without the half title; in modern marbled limp boards First edition. These two poems are parodies of odes by William Mason and Thomas Gray, and are among the few examples of the poems composed by members of the Nonsense Club. The club was a small group of young men who had been at Westminster School together Lloyd and Colman were joined by Bonnell Thornton, William Cowper, Charles Churchill and two others and they dined together every Thursday when in London. In this publication the two most talented comic writers of the group took the opportunity to mock the solemn pretensions of an older generation of writers, with the pindaric odes of Mason and Gray their target. Mason is parodied in the 'Ode to Oblivion', and Gray's Progress of Poesy and The Bard are played with in the opening piece: Daughter of Chaos and old Night! Cimmerian Muse, all hail! That wrapt in never-twinkling gloom canst write, And shadowest meaning with thy dusky veil! Heard ye the din of Modern Rhimers bray? It is cool M-----n: or warm G---y Involv'd in tenfold smoke. (pp. 5-6) Woodcuts on the title page and p. 15 also seem to be mocking the solemn poets: on the title, a bearded druid plays the harp in a wild landscape; and on p. 15 a winged horse knocks a man (whose wig goes flying) off a rocky eminence. A manuscript note in a contemporary hand on the verso of the title page reads: 'Dr Johnson said that Colman never produced a luckier thing that his first Ode in imitation of Gray. A considerable part of it may be numbered among those felicities, which no man has twice attained'.