Robert Southey to Horace Walpole Bedford, 24 January - 18 February 1794: 'The Leonidas is a very fine poem in my opinion. J. Warton says it is written with the simplicity of an antient; when Glover wrote that simplicity of diction was the fashion — a more vitiated taste prevails at present, since Johnson sonorized our prose & the imitators of Collins & Gray loaded our poetry with awkard imagery & cumbrous metaphor. into this meretricious stile I know myself frequently to have fallen & am pleased to see myself daily reclaiming. simplicity is all in all. you will read the epics of Glover with renewed pleasure upon every perusal.'