..
Even in Gray's--'Pindaric Gray's'--treatment of classical themes,
there is a sort of pervading _ennui_, or the forced appreciativeness
of a gouty, disappointed man. The daughter of Jove to whom he
dedicates his hymns too often is 'Adversity'. And classical
reminiscences have, even with him, a dull musty tinge which recalls
the antiquarian in his Cambridge college-rooms rather than the visitor
to Florence and Rome. For one thing, his allusions are too many, and
too transitory, to appear anything but artistic tricks and verse-
making tools. The 'Aegean deep', and 'Delphi's steep', and 'Meander's
amber waves', and the 'rosy-crowned Loves', are too cursorily
summoned, and dismissed, to suggest that they have been brought in for
their own sweet sakes.
It was thus with all the fine quintessences of ancient lore, with all
the pearl-like accretions of the faiths and fancies of the old world:
they were handled about freely as a kind of curious but not so very
rare coins, which found no currency in the deeper thoughts of our
modern humanity, and could therefore be used as a mere badge of the
learning and taste of a literary 'coterie'.
The very names of the ancient gods and heroes were in fact assuming
that abstract anaemic look which common nouns have in everyday
language.
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