Tickell was not alone in this belief. In 1766 Dr. J. Gregory wrote to the poet Beattie:
'It is a sentiment that very universally prevails, that poetry is a light kind of reading, which one takes up only for a little amusement, and that therefore it should be so perspicuous as not to require a second reading. This sentiment would bear hard on some of your best things, and on all Gray's except his "Churchyard Elegy", which, he told me, with a good deal of acrimony, owed its popularity entirely to the subject, and that the public would have received it as well if it had been written in prose' (Sir William Forbes, Life of James Beattie, 1824, p. 44).