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... inspires Collins' Ode to Liberty, Gray's Bard & Progress of Poesy, and much of Akenside's writing. It is noticeable that Collins was a republican, Akenside had republican sympathies and Gray was a pronounced Whig. Over the personal emotions Collins & Akenside had no mastery, & Gray only shows it occasionally as in the Elegy & then only over the most general of all of them, the love of life and the melancholy... description & elegiac moralising, consisting of Thomson, Dyer, Green, Young and other inferior writers. (2) The school of Miltonic Hellenists, begun by Warton &consisting besides of Gray, Collins, Akenside and a number of followers. (3) The school of Johnson, Goldsmith & Churchill, who continued the eighteenth-century style tho' some of them tried to infuse it with emotion, directness and greater simplicity... Thomsonian school however broke off suddenly about the middle of the century & was replaced by the school of Gray. School of Gray There are considerable differences between Gray, Collins and Akenside, who are the chief representatives of the school, but they all resemble each other in certain main tendencies. The general aim of all seems to have been to return to the Miltonic style of writing ...