In the meantime its popularity and its assured position were beginning to be assailed in the coteries by the work of two new poets.
The output of Thomas Gray and William Collins is small; you might almost read the complete poetical works of either in an evening.

But for all that they mark a period; they are the first definite break with the classic convention which had been triumphant for upwards of seventy years when their prime came.

It is a break, however, in style rather than in essentials, and a reader who seeks in them the inspiriting freshness which came later with Wordsworth and Coleridge will be disappointed.

Their carefully drawn still wine tastes insipidly after the "beaded bubbles winking at the brim" of romance.

They are fastidious and academic; they lack the authentic fire; their poetry is "made" poetry like Tennyson's and Matthew Arnold's.