190 Whitford Petrarch distilled mimic sighs successfully into poet y, but he thinks the modish poet foolish to try to follow their example. In a speech attributed to Whitehead, the satirist ridicules several poets who in one way or another were associated with the Bath-easton verse-making, among them Jerningham, Lut- trell, Carlisle, Garrick, and Anstey. The passage ends: "Behold their nobler gift: be this preferr'd!" He said; and proudly brandish'd the Goafs beard, Then dropt it in the Vase : immers'd it falls Mid Sonnets, Odes, Acrostics, Madrigals; A motley heap of metaphoric sighs, Laborious griefs, and studied extasies. 90 The sentimentalism which the Bath-easton coterie represented, it appears, was mildly criticized by satirists who saw its weak- ness and smiled. A decade later a new group of sentimental poets suffered the jibes of satirists. Their sentimentality was only a little worse than that of the Bath-easton group, but the satirical criticism which they had to endure was considerably more violent than that of The Wreath of Fashion. An illustration is afforded by the case of Jerningham, who was mentioned by Tickell in his courteous satire and by William Gifford in The Bamad. Tickell wrote: Ah me! if Poets barter for applause How Jerningham will thrive on flimsy gause! 91 Gifford wrote: See snivelling Jerningham at fifty weep O'er love-lorn oxen and deserted sheep. 92 The difference in tone between the two couplets represents the difference between satire's attitude toward sentimentalism in 1770-1780, and satire's attitude toward sentimentalism, and revolutionary ideas which accompanied it, after 1790. The transition from the sort of thing represented by Lady Miller's coterie at Bath-easton to that represented by the Delia Cruscans was by way of the public prints. The sentimental 90 School j or Satire, 154. 91 Ibid., 153.
92 Bailad, 10. Cf. also The Groie, 56.
