



Produced by Louise Hope, David Starner, Suzanne Lybarger
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
http://www.pgdp.net





[In the Ode, all dashes were printed as groups of 2-5 hyphens. This
format has been retained. Brackets are in the original unless otherwise
noted.

Joshua Reynolds was knighted in 1769, two years after this work was
published.]




  The Augustan Reprint Society


  THOMAS MORRISON

  _A PINDARICK ODE ON PAINTING_

  _Addressed to Joshua Reynolds, Esq._

  (1767)


  With a preface by
  Frederick W. Hilles
  and a biographical introduction by
  J. T. Kirkwood


  Publication Number 37


  Los Angeles
  William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
  University of California
  1952




GENERAL EDITORS

  H. RICHARD ARCHER, _Clark Memorial Library_
  RICHARD C. BOYS, _University of Michigan_
  RALPH COHEN, _University of California, Los Angeles_
  VINTON A. DEARING, _University of California, Los Angeles_


ASSISTANT EDITOR

  W. EARL BRITTON, _University of Michigan_


ADVISORY EDITORS

  EMMETT L. AVERY, _State College of Washington_
  BENJAMIN BOYCE, _University of Nebraska_
  LOUIS I. BREDVOLD, _University of Michigan_
  JOHN BUTT, _King's College, University of Durham_
  JAMES L. CLIFFORD, _Columbia University_
  ARTHUR FRIEDMAN, _University of Chicago_
  EDWARD NILES HOOKER, _University of California, Los Angeles_
  LOUIS A. LANDA, _Princeton University_
  SAMUEL H. MONK, _University of Minnesota_
  ERNEST MOSSNER, _University of Texas_
  JAMES SUTHERLAND, _Queen Mary College, London_
  H. T. SWEDENBERG, JR., _University of California, Los Angeles_


CORRESPONDING SECRETARY

  EDNA C. DAVIS, _Clark Memorial Library_




PREFACE


The poem here reprinted has remained unread and, with a single
exception, apparently unnoticed from the day it was published until the
present. It is printed from a copy which I acquired many years ago at a
London bookstore and which for a while I thought unique. I did not find
it listed in the catalogues of the chief libraries of England or
America, nor in the various books on anonymous publications. I have
found no mention of it in the newspapers and magazines of the time, no
mention of it in contemporary letters or diaries. The one man in England
who took the trouble to record the ode for posterity was, as might be
expected, Horace Walpole, who in his manuscript Books of Materials
merely noted that the poem had been published in 176_8_ (_Anecdotes of
Painting... Volume the Fifth_, ed. Hilles and Daghlian, Yale University
Press, 1937). When challenged to locate Walpole's copy of the ode,
the greatest of modern collectors was able, after perhaps forty-five
seconds, to say not only that it was in the Houghton Library at Harvard
but that on the title in Walpole's hand was the information that the
poem was published on the sixteenth of May, a fact which would otherwise
be unknown. A third copy was in the possession of the late Professor
Heidbrink of Northwestern, inscribed in a contemporary hand "T. M.,
M.A." and thus, possibly, the author's own. There are, then, three known
copies extant. Doubtless others will be found, bound up with pamphlets
of the same vintage, as yet uncatalogued.

What Walpole did not know was the name of the author, and quite possibly
the ode would have remained unread and unnoticed for another two
centuries had Mr. Kirkwood not brought to light the letters which are
first published in the introduction that follows. From these letters and
a few known facts the history of the ode seems clear enough. Reynolds
had a number of relatives living in Great Torrington. In the summer of
1762 when he and Dr. Johnson went to Devonshire they were entertained by
Morrison. Johnson's published letters prove that he did not forget
Morrison, and Reynolds was soon painting the portrait of Morrison's
daughter. In the summer of 1766 Morrison sent his ode to Reynolds. The
following January he learned that Johnson, "as severe a Critic as old
Dennis," praised it and ordered it to be published. Reynolds himself
must have arranged for the publication.

The publisher selected was William Griffin, who a few years later was to
bring out some of Sir Joshua's _Discourses_. The work of the printer was
only moderately well done. It will be noted that _whose_ (second line of
stanza V) is obviously a misprint for _whole_, that the second line has
dropped out of stanza XXXIV (Mr. Kirkwood ingeniously suggests that
Morrison wrote: "for every trifler's breast/Is by the hope of future
fame possest"), and that in two places the number of a stanza has been
omitted. And yet the ode, which is physically thinner as well as
historically and aesthetically inferior to Gray's famous odes, is priced
at 1/6, whereas the Strawberry Hill edition of Gray's _Odes_ (1757) sold
for but a shilling.

Clearly Morrison was not influenced by, if familiar with, _The Progress
of Poesy_ and _The Bard_. His ode is Pindaric in the late
seventeenth-century sense. In his brief preface he explains that he has
sought to please us "with a little variety of wild music," believing
"that the perpetual recurrence of the same measure in such a
multiplicity of stanzas would have been rather languid and fatiguing."
An examination of the poem shows that Morrison has carried his desire
for variety to the extreme. The poem consists of thirty-five stanzas,
not one of which repeats both the metrical pattern and rhyme scheme of
any other. The stanzas range from six to eighteen lines in length, and
the lines themselves from four short syllables to the long Alexandrine.
At times one has the feeling that this love of changing rhythms and
rhymes has improperly warped the meaning of a given passage.

The author shows his familiarity with the standard books on aesthetics.
In _Idler_ No. 76, published in 1759, Reynolds laughed at those who by
mastering a few phrases posed as connoisseurs. He introduced a gentleman
who had just returned from Italy, "his mouth full of nothing but the
grace of _Raffaelle_,... and the sublimity and grand contorno of
_Michael Angelo_." This gentleman criticised a Vandyck because it
"had not the flowing line," and of "St. Paul preaching" said, "what an
addition to that nobleness could _Raffaelle_ have given, had the art of
contrast been known in his time! but above all, the flowing line."
Morrison is familiar with the jargon, as is seen throughout the ode. At
the beginning he displays wit in applying these phrases not to painting
but to his verse:

  With my easy flowing line
  To unite correctness of design.

And at the end he rather neatly twists the famous statement of Appelles
into a justification for his writing a poem to add to the reputation of
a great painter.

The ode falls into two roughly equal parts. In the first half the poet
describes specific examples of what