which won Horace Walpole's ironical praise, ‘to divert ourselves and to say kind things of each other’ (see also Gifford's Introduction to the Mæviad, ed. 1795). Merry rapidly became a recognised figure in Florentine society, and a member of the Della Cruscan Academy. But his social success, and above all his superiority as a versifier, quickened the jealousy and ill-will that underlay the fulsome admiration of the ‘Miscellany;’ his open liaison with the Countess Cowper, and the rivalry of the Grand-duke Leopold, made him an easy target for slander, and he had soon the whole English colony about his ears. He stood his ground for a time, then after lampooning his fellow-rhymers, abruptly quitted Florence in the spring of 1787. The ‘Miscellany’ had kindled curiosity in London, and literary coteries welcomed the poet. On 29 June his ‘Adieu and Recall to Love,’ signed ‘Della Crusca,’ appeared in the ‘World,’ then chiefly conducted by Captain Topham, a fellow-commoner of Merry's at Cambridge, and fellow-officer in the horse guards. ‘I read the beautiful lines,’ Mrs. Hannah Cowley [q. v.] declares, ‘and without rising from the table at which I was sitting answered them.’ Her reply, ‘The Pen,’ signed ‘Anna Matilda,’ was published in the ‘World’ of 12 July, and the correspondence thus started rapidly attracted a crowd of imitators, whose performances, welcomed by the ‘World’ and afterwards by the ‘Oracle,’ first amused and then revolted public taste. Merry's pseudonym gave its name to the Della Cruscan school, which faithfully exaggerated the worst features of his style—his affectation, incredibly foolish misuse of epithet, metaphor, and alliteration, his frantic efforts at sublimity, his obscurity and tasteless ornament. The best and worst of the poems in the ‘World’ were reprinted in the ‘British Album,’ which Bell brought out in 1789. It ran through three editions in the next two years, and the publication of the ‘Baviad,’ Gifford's satire on it, in 1791 sold a fourth and last. But it was mutual disappointment, as much as Gifford's satire, that ended Della Crusca's and Anna Matilda's sentimental versifying. They wrote, according to Mrs. Cowley's statement, without any knowledge of each other's identity until 1789. Then the ardent enthusiasts upon paper met, but the lady was forty-six, the lover thirty-four, and the only fruit of the meeting was one more poem, ‘The Interview,’ by Della Crusca, and some regrets in cloudy verse by Anna Matilda. The stream of nonsense flowed on in the newspapers, but Merry's part in it may fairly be said to have here terminated. When he published the ‘Laurel of Liberty’ next year it was under his own name. Merry had little humour; but if we compare his verses on ‘Fontenoy,’ ‘Werther,’ or ‘The Close of a Year,’ with the address to ‘Laura Maria’ (Mrs. Robinson), which Gifford quotes, it is not easy to avoid the impression that in the latter, as well as in some other flights in the ‘World’ and ‘Oracle,’ he was simply fooling his correspondents to the top of their bent. For the crazy introductions prefixed to the verses, most probably by Bell, the writers themselves can hardly be held responsible (see, for instance, the World of 28 Dec. 1787, 3 and 12 Jan. 1788; Brit. Mus. newspapers).
Merry had meanwhile been engaged in other literary ventures. ‘Paulina,’ a tale in verse, had appeared towards the close of 1787, ‘Diversity,’ a frigid and elaborate ode, in the following year (Monthly Rev. old ser. lxxx. 529–32), and in 1789 the ‘Ambitious Vengeance,’ a drama, which in plot, character, and situation is a mere travesty of Macbeth, was inserted in the ‘British Album.’ It was never acted. In the beginning of the same year he wrote the ode for the recovery of the king recited by Mrs. Siddons on 21 April (Boaden, Memoirs of Mrs. Siddons, ii. 277–8). But the events of the 14th July in Paris gave a new direction to his energies, and coloured the rest of his life. Merry did not judge the French revolution, but judged everything by it—his friends, himself, literature, art, all civil and social relations. He went immediately to Paris, visited the Assembly, where he saw ‘some disorder, but all from zeal,’ and on his return published the ‘Laurel of Liberty.’ The effort has a certain fire; but Della Crusca's defects are still prominent, and Walpole fastens with glee upon his ‘gossamery tears’ and ‘silky oceans.’ He aimed at the laureateship at this time, but his principles, already the talk of the town, made his candidature hopeless; and though the ‘World’ moved mountains on his behalf, the court was all for Pye. In the summer of 1791 he was again in Paris, presented to the convention a treatise on the ‘Nature of a Free Government,’ and resumed an acquaintance with the artist David. On 14 July his ode on the ‘Fall of the Bastille’ was declaimed at a meeting in the Strand of ‘1,500 English gentlemen,’ sympathisers with the French revolution (Gent. Mag. lxi. 673, &c.) Three months previously his ‘Lorenzo,’ a tragedy, had a brief success at Covent Garden (Oulton, London Theatres, ii. 81), and in August 1791 he married the well-known actress Elizabeth Brunton (Madame d'Arblay, Memoirs, 1842, v. 264).
His wife, the daughter of John Brunton, an actor of some provincial fame, and sister
