proved a very useful patron, and afterwards gave the poet a place in the Chancellor's gift, thus assisting him in his way to independence. On Talbot's death Thomson lost this post; but the loss was supplied, first by one, and afterwards by another sinecure, which soon placed him out of the reach of difficulty. With prosperity, however, he did not fulfil the promise of The Seasons. The Castle of Indolence, published in 1748, the year of his death, is a striking exception to the Later works and life. rest of his later work, but it must be regarded as a thread taken up from his earlier life and elaborated in his later years. His huge poem of Liberty (1734-6) was ambitious without being even interesting; and its defects were only too obvious to his declared devotees. Between 1730 and 1740 he "reeled in slippery roads of alien art," with a set of tragedies, the first of which, Sophonisba (1730), has gained a kind of immortality from one atrocious line, "O Sophonisba! Sophonisba, O!" -subsequently altered to "O Sophonisba ! I am wholly thine." But, during these later years of his life, although still a young man, he became extraordinarily lazy and self-indulgent; there was a sensual element in his disposition which needed very little encouragement; and, having once achieved fame, he settled down to sloth. However, he was not without a certain amount of Scottish prudence, and lived in his snug cottage at Richmond with no great extravagance. He was extremely kind and generous, and showed a most amiable devotion to his relatives. His friends loved him, and he does not appear to have had a single enemy or ill-wisher. His death was premature; for, catching cold in a boating expedition on the Thames, he died of a fever when he was only forty-eight. "The style. The Seasons, which, during the happy years of his retirement, he had constantly revised and corrected until, in its intermediate and definitive forms, it became an almost entirely new poem, must always be considered the corner- Seasons stone of his fame. In plan and treatment the poem, (1726-1730). with its four divisions, is entirely original. These Thomson's four detached parts give a general and, at the same time, a minute description of all the phenomena of nature during an English year. The very uncertainty of the English seasons, with their constant and picturesque variety, aided a very difficult undertaking, which would have been almost impossible to a poet living in perpetual sunlight. Thomson watched and knew all the frowns and smiles of an English landscape; and this delicate eye for natural distinctions, this appreciation of the dramatic element in the revolution of the year, makes his poem a complete success. Round his work he cast a cloak of reverence and adoration for nature, in this anticipating Wordsworth to some extent; and it may be remarked that his ecstasy of quietism, his passive content in observing the working of natural forces, renders him, like most ardent nature-worshippers, quite impervious to humour. His blank verse, although Miltonic in ENG. LIT. 2 L its origin, and rich and harmonious in itself, is, when compared with Milton's "organ-voice," pedestrian and artificial. Thomson's love of and perpetual struggle for fine language is his chief defect. When he is evidently pleasing himself best, he is most pompous; when he allows his verse to roll on simply of its own accord, he often produces effects of harmony that never leave the ear. In order to relieve the monotony of a poem entirely devoted to description, he introduces episodes here and there as incidental pictures more or less suggested by his subject. Thus, in Winter, he gives the famous description of the shepherd losing his way and perishing in the snow; in Summer, the story of Musidora, which gave Gainsborough the subject for the charming picture that now hangs on the staircase of our National Gallery ; in Autumn, the narrative of Lavinia, borrowed, and spoiled in the borrowing, from the Scriptural history of Ruth and Boaz. Where Thomson approached the subject of love in these episodes his ill-restrained warmth of feeling broke out rather too fervently. Excellent as the whole of The Seasons is, it is inferior in point of literary finish to The Castle of Indolence. The idea and treatment of this poem are Spenserian; and the use of the Spenserian stanza corresponds admirably with Thomson's rich and luxuriant imagination. The allegory of the enchanted "Land of Drowsihead," in which the unhappy victims of Indolence find themselves hopeless captives, and their delivery from durance by the Knight, Industry, whose pedigree and training are given in exact imitation of Spenser's manner, are relieved with occasional touches of a certain kind of humour, seen in Thomson's portraits of himself and his friends. Spenser himself hardly could have surpassed the rich and dreamy loveliness, or the voluptuous melody of the description of the enchanted castle and its gardens of delight; while the passage of the Æolian harp shows that just harmony of verse and music which is native to the greatest poets. Thomson is not one of these; but, among original poets, his place is high, and he certainly set the fashion in poetry for some years to come. "The Castle of Indolence" (1748). 2. WILLIAM SHENSTONE § 3. The poetry of WILLIAM SHENSTONE is now practically forgotten, but his poem of The Schoolmistress (1742) deserves to retain some celebrity in the history of English verse. Like Thomson's Castle of Indolence, it is written in (1714-1763). the Spenserian stanza, and, with a plentiful use of archaic words, describes playfully and tenderly the dwelling, character, and pursuits of an old village dame who keeps a day-school. Shenstone's Pastoral Ballad (1743) is very tuneful, light, and delicate-eminently the work of a student of limited landscape and slight garden-scenes. Edmund Gosse has admirably said that it "has all the pink and silver grace of a Watteau." Shenstone's poetry is an excellent key to his general taste. He was one of the first Englishmen to cultivate the art of landscape gardening and so emancipate Mr. the English garden from the formality of precise continental methods. In this we see an outward sign of the change which he and the other new poets were bringing to pass in the character of English verse. His own gardens at his villa, the Leasowes, near Hagley, were in his generation as famous as his poetry. In short, Shenstone was, as Boswell said, a "very ingenious and elegant gentleman"; and, if his work languishes for want of readers, the fault lies in its scanty volume. Modern criticism has done its duty nobly by WILLIAM COLLINS, the son of a hatter at Chichester. His poetical genius, ripened by practice and experience, would have COLLINS (1721-1759). given him almost the highest place among English 3 WILLIAM lyric poets. As it was, with an ambition feverish rather than sustained, with a fatal tendency to dissipation, and with a spirit so sensitive that literary disappointment proved his ultimate ruin, he was undeniably the finest lyric poet of his age. This, considering that he had so brilliant a competitor as Gray, is no mean distinction. He was educated at Winchester College, and, going up to Oxford, entered at Queen's, but migrated, like Addison, to Magdalen. In these early years he was full of literary projects, and, while still at Oxford, published his Persian Eclogues (1742) and an Epistle to Sir Thomas Hanmer (1743), the editor of Shakespeare. The Persian Eclogues were, as the name implies, a set of pastorals in which the Strephons and Chloës of the conventional type were translated to the East, and their ordinary occupations and worn-out complaints were supplanted by Oriental subjects. Instead of the lamentations of the shepherd expelled from his native fields, we have the camel-driver who bewails the dangers and solitudes of his desert journey; and, instead of the aimless rustics who, since the age of Theocritus and Virgil, had discoursed suavely to each other on the merits of their respective oaten pipes, we hear the mutual commiserations of two Circassian exiles. However, there is no saying to what end this attempt to give life and colour to the pastoral might have come; we might have had Russian, American, or Algerian editions of the same theme. And, although Collins made a great effort to clothe his novel swains in appropriate costume, and to give his poems all the advantage of local colour, he was no more true to nature than those of his predecessors who had been content with the conventional Arcadia. Although the Eclogues are full of vivid imagery and melodious verse which promised their poet a great future, we must look for the real genius of Collins to his Odes, published at the end of 1746. Although their number is very Collins' small, each polished line has its own value for the student of poetry, and it is almost impossible to point to an otiose phrase or a break in the full current of melody. Collins was still trammelled by the conventions of the classical school, and the casual inspector of anthologies "Odes" (1746). may be tempted to pass over his odes as attempts of the old kind to patch the face of the Hellenic Muse and build up her hair in a formal top-knot. On closer acquaintance we know better. If these odes are chained to an essentially classical form of poetry, if they are full of personified abstractions, they have, at any rate, a range of melody which is a perfectly new thing, and a sense of natural beauty for which Thomson's love of nature is merely a preparation. Everyone knows The Passions, that famous ode which finds a place in every book of English lyrics, and represents Fear, Anger, and the rest, trying their skill upon the lyre of Music. Here Collins is as formal as any of the classical poets could be. The outward form of the poem at once recalls Alexander's Feast, although its tone has nothing of Dryden's rugged energy. But between the two odes there is a space of fifty-nine years, during which Dryden's lyric genius had given way to smooth and temperate effusions like Pope's Ode on St. Cecilia's Day and Vital`spark of heavenly flame. The ardent lyric of the seventeenth century, when it arrived at Collins, had grown merely tepid; but in his hands it received new fire. The harmonies of The Passions are smooth and meditated. The ode is no cascade of impetuous sound, but, in its delicate modulations, its exact adaptation of its melody to its subject, in the hurried quatrain given to Anger, in the slow movement in which Melancholy pours "through the mellow horn her pensive soul," there is a fresh vitality, an expansion of lyric scope, something that takes us back farther quality. than Dryden, to L'Allegro and Il Penseroso. Further, Their in The Passions Collins is thoroughly alive to the landscape charms of landscape. The scenery of the poem is slightly meretricious; its "glades and glooms," its rocks, woods, and vales, are more like Salvator Rosa's attempts to improve on nature than anything in real life; but, where the subject is so closely allied to the vale of Tempe and other well-trodden resorts of the poets, we can hardly expect anything more. That Collins, when face to face with nature and freed from the presence of the nymphs and muses, could approach more nearly to the splendid pictorial effects of Il Penseroso, is seen in the Ode to Evening, which merely alludes in passing to the usual abstractions, and is a soft and intensely real picture of twilight and dusk. Moreover, these unrhymed stanzas are a faultless triumph of music, carrying with them a lingering echo of the sweetest melody. The Ode to Evening is an exceptional piece, it is true, but nowhere else can Collins' place in the evolution of romantic poetry be so thoroughly appreciated. His musical power, which here accomplishes Their melody. a tour de force incapable of repetition, has a more normal form, which is obvious in the exquisite verses, How sleep the brave-a pair of stanzas full of delicate imagination. His love of allegorical personation quite conquered him in this small masterpiece; but the spirit is not that of the Hellenic woods and valleys which we have seen pervading The Passions. Honour becomes a pilgrim, and Freedom is represented by that hermit to whom the new romantic poets, in an age and country emphatically guiltless of hermitages, were so faithful, from Shenstone's "When forc'd from dear Hebe to go" to Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey. In this and kindred poems the pastoral abstractions of Greek mythology give way to a dim medievalism. Something of the same kind may be seen in Collins' Verses to the Memory of Thomson (1748), “In yonder grave a Druid lies." Pope and the poets of his day would not have thought of Druids on such an occasion. Unfortunately, these admirable pieces failed to please the public. Collins, bitterly disappointed, destroyed the surplus copies of the Odes and wrote very little more. In 1749 he dedicated an Ode on the Superstitions of the Highlands to John Home, afterwards the author of Douglas; but, in dealing with this very romantic subject, with which he had no personal acquaintance, he was not altogether at his best. Nevertheless, this ode, in its latter half, is one of the finest things he ever wrote, rising from a faltering beginning to a full appreciation of the grandeur of its theme. Among his later poems this and the exquisite Dirge to Cymbeline (1749) remain; the Ode on the Music of the Grecian Theatre (1750) is lost. The decline of Collins' life was miserable enough; he became melancholy, and, in 1754, went mad. Five years later he died at Chichester, without recovering his reason. GRAY § 4. The work of THOMAS GRAY, to whom, as a discoverer of the picturesque, England owes so much, is, generally speaking, better known than the lyric poetry of Collins. He was the son of a money-scrivener in London, but his 4 THOMAS father was a violent and arbitrary person, and he (1716-1771). owed everything to his mother, who endured cruel treatment from her tyrannical husband. She and her family sent him to Eton, from which he proceeded to Peterhouse at Cambridge. He did not, however, take a degree, but went down in 1738, and, from 1739 to 1741, travelled with Horace Walpole in France and Italy. He had no taste for any profession, and, in 1742, made his home at Cambridge, in spite of his dislike for the prevailing system of education. There he lived for the rest of his days the life of a cultured dilettante, going away from time to time to visit his mother and to make picturesque tours in his native country, whose beauty no man appreciated more thoroughly. In 1756 a mischievous practical joke, played on him by some undergraduates who probably construed his delicacy and refinement into superciliousness, led him to migrate from Peterhouse to Pembroke. The remaining five years of his life were more happily spent; he enjoyed great consideration from the society of his College, and, in 1768, became Regius Professor of Modern History. The historical school at Cambridge was, however, not very flourishing, and |