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mysterious currents of the Zeitgeist; it was his to represent for all time the outstanding characteristics of the eternal and immutable Englishman, not without a full share of insular prejudices and limitations. Fully half of Johnson's literary career was over with the reign of George II. His influence and Goldsmith's example produced a temporary reaction towards old principles in poetry.

A very noteworthy feature of this early Georgian period is the way in which, while a vernacular Scottish revival was in progress at home, Scotsmen came to the front in English literature, and in poetry, novel writing, philosophic speculation, political and economic thought, and even literary criticism, disputed the pre-eminency with the Southrons on their own ground. Burnet had secured a prominent place as a historian ere he died, just at the close of Anne's reign; and Arbuthnot, who lived till 1735, was the first Scotsman who associated on a footing of perfect equality with the foremost wits in London society. But James Thomson was the first Scotsman to be ranked by Englishmen amongst great English poets. Not merely in England but on the Continent, Hume and Robertson were accepted as great writers and representative English historians. Adam Smith was laying the foundations of a new science, though it was under George III. that the Wealth of Nations appeared. Even Mallet's romantic ballad was a sign of the times; and Macpherson was collecting or inventing the Ossianic poems which had so strange a place in the movement of the century. Smollett had done much of his best work and even been hailed as a rival to Fielding; and Boswell, though not yet the prince of biographers, was writing for the

magazines. Lord Kames had ventured to lay down the laws of literature even to Englishmen, and had written the Elements of Criticism, which became a standard work at the beginning of the next reign. And Hugh Blair had begun at Edinburgh those Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres which moved George III., at the beginning of his reign, to endow a chair of rhetoric for the elegant (rather than eloquent) preacher whose sermons were to be the pious king's favourite reading. Several of these authors attained to their highest fame well on in the second half of the century, but they were all already active or conspicuous under the earlier Georges. And their joint achievement would have been a rich legacy to any country or period. Border raids were over and done; in English literature there was henceforward to be a Scottish occupation in force.

As the eighteenth century progressed, English authors addressed themselves less exclusively to the gentry and the London coteries, and kept more steadily in view the 'general reader.' And before the middle of the century, English literature was becoming a power on the Continent. Voltaire's memorable visit to England took place in 1726-29; Rousseau's not till 1766. The Spectator's influence was telling everywhere, and through the Abbé Prévost's translations of Richardson, the English novel was introduced to the French world under the best auspices. Young's Night Thoughts struck a chord throughout educated Europe, and in a German translation (1760-71) made its mark on multitudes who knew no English. Thomson, too, soon found a foreign following. Other notes of the period are dealt with in Mr Dobson's essay on the eighteenth century at the beginning of this volume.

James

James Thomson was born at Ednam, near Kelso in Roxburgh, on the 11th of September 1700. His father, then minister of the parish of Ednam, soon removed to Southdean, a retired parish among the lower slopes of the Cheviots; and there the young poet spent his boyish years. The gift of poesy came early, and some lines written at the age of fourteen show how soon his characteristic manner was formed. In his eighteenth year Thomson was sent to Edinburgh College to study for the Church; but after the death of his father he went to London (1725) to push his fortune. His college friend, Mallet, got him a post as tutor to the son of Lord Binning, and being shown some of his descriptions

of Winter, advised him to connect them into one regular poem. Winter was published in March 1726, the poet receiving only three guineas for the copyright. A second and a third edition appeared the same year. Summer appeared in 1727. In 1728 he issued proposals for publishing, by subscription, the Four Seasons; the number of subscribers, at a guinea a copy, was 387; Pope (to whom Thomson had been introduced by Mallet) took three copies. Autumn completed the work, which appeared in 1730. He wrote a poem on the death of Newton, and Britannia (1729), a tirade against Spain and in praise of the Prince of Wales. The tragedy of Sophonisba was produced in 1729;

but the unlucky line, 'Oh! Sophonisba, Sophonisba Oh!' parodied (not from the gallery of the theatre, but) in a printed squib, 'Oh! Jemmy Thomson, Jemmy Thomson Oh!' extinguished its little spark of life, after it had been produced with fair success ten times. It was at best an imitation of Otway's manner. In 1731 the poet accompanied the son of a future Lord Chancellor to the Continent, and with him visited France, Switzerland, and Italy. At Rome, Thomson indulged the wish expressed in one of his letters,

'to see the fields where Virgil had gathered his immortal honey, and tread the same ground where men have thought and acted so greatly.' On his return next year he busied himself with his poem on Liberty, which Dr Johnson and so many after

him have found unreadable, and obtained the sinecure situation of Secretary of Briefs in the Court of Chancery, which he held till the death of his patron, the Lord Chancellor. A new Chancellor bestowed the post on another, Thomson having, from characteristic inomitted

dolence,

to ask a continuance of the office. He again tried the

rural domain,' he writes to a friend: 'the two fields next to me, from the first of which I have walled-no, no-paled in, about as much as my garden consisted of before, so that the walk runs round the hedge, where you may figure me walking any time of the day, and sometimes at night.' His house appears to have been finely furnished: the sale catalogue, specifying the contents of every room, fills eight pages of print; and his cellar was well stocked with wines and Scotch ale. In this

drama, and produced Agamemnon (1738), which was coldly received. Edward and Eleonora followed (1739), and the poet's circumstances were brightened by a pension of £100 a year from the Prince of Wales, to whom in 1732 he had dedicated the poem on Liberty. He was also made Surveyor-General of the Leeward Islands, an office which (though its duties were performed by deputy) brought him £300 per annum. In 1740 the masque of Alfred, by Thomson and Mallet, was produced before the Prince of Wales; the song 'Rule, Britannia,' afterwards tacitly claimed by Mallet as his, was almost certainly part of Thomson's share in the masque. He was now in comparative opulence, and his house at Kew Lane near Richmond was the scene of social enjoyment and lettered ease. Retirement and nature became, he said, more and more his passion every day. 'I have enlarged my

snug suburban retreat Thomson produced the dramas of Tancred and Sigismunda (1745) and Coriolanus (1748); he also applied himself to finish the Castle of Indolence, on which he had been for years engaged. The poem was published in May 1748. In August he took a boat

at Hammersmith when heated by walking from London, caught cold, was thrown into a fever, and died on the 27th August 1748.

Though born a poet, Thomson advanced but slowly towards perfection; and the impressions of his Continental tour left their traces on his subsequent work. The first

edition of the Seasons differs materially from the second; and almost every alteration was an improvement. In the 1744 edition six hundred lines were added to 'Summer,' eighty-seven to 'Autumn,' one hundred and six to 'Spring,' and two hundred and eighty-two to 'Winter,' according to Mr Logie Robertson's reckoning. Between the first and the last forms that received the author's own corrections the length of the whole poem grew from 3902 to 5403 lines. It has been matter of controversy how far the additions and emendations were due to Thomson himself. The Rev. John Mitford, editing Gray in 1814, alleged that the alterations in an interleaved copy of the 1744 edition were partly by Thomson himself and partly by another, whom, by help of the British Museum authorities, Mitford identified with no less a personage than Pope. Tovey, editing in 1897, and supported by the then

British Museum experts, positively denies that the writing of the second corrector is Pope, and Mr Churton Collins has argued strongly against the inherent improbability of Mitford's assumption. There is no ground to believe that Pope wrote blank verse at all; and it is certainly odd that none of the anecdotists or earlier biographers of Pope or Thomson should have recorded a fact so interesting as the collaboration of the two poets. It may well be that the handwriting of the second series of corrections was merely that of Thomson's amanuensis, and that the second corrector as well as the first was Thomson himself-for it is not fair to assume that the best of the alterations were beyond Thomson's own powers.

One of the most remarkable alterations attributed by Mitford to Pope, which duly appeared in the later editions of the Seasons, was the famous passage about Lavinia. In the original edition of Autumn, Thomson's lines on Lavinia were:

Thoughtless of beauty, she was Beauty's self,
Recluse among the woods; if city dames

Will deign their faith: and thus she went, compelled
By strong necessity, with as serene

And pleased a look as Patience e'er put on,
To glean Palemon's fields.

This passage was deleted, and the following substituted for it:

Thoughtless of beauty, she was Beauty's self,
Recluse amid the close-embowering woods.
As in the hollow breast of Apennine,
Beneath the shelter of encircling hills,

A myrtle rises, far from human

eye,

And breathes its balmy fragrance o'er the wild ;
So flourished blooming, and unseen by all,
The sweet Lavinia; till at length, compelled
By strong Necessity's supreme command,
With smiling patience in her looks, she went
To glean Palemon's fields.

In writing the Seasons, Thomson is credited with having opened a new era in English literature, and with having produced the first conspicuous example of the poetry consisting mainly of the description of nature. Hazlitt called him 'the best of our descriptive poets.' It would be absurd to say that poets had ever been obtuse to the beauties and interests of nature; Dyer rejoiced in describing hills and valleys and glimpses of the distant sea; but in the bulk of Thomson's predecessors-in Shakespeare, for example, and Milton --nature, and the emotions evoked by nature, form rather an accidental background; in Thomson it becomes the essence of the poem. Wordsworth, his most conspicuous successor in this sphere, was unfair in ascribing Thomson's popularity to 'false ornaments and sentimental commonplaces.' It is Thomson's best that appealed then, that appeals still, to his readers; in spontaneous and genuine love of nature, in describing and in evoking the joy and love of nature in others, he led the way for a long band of followers. He had the insight to

see that the heroic couplet, then so popular, was unsuited for his theme; no doubt his blank verse falls short of his great model, Milton, yet the poet of the Seasons wields his verse with power and musical charm.

That Thomson's art was perfecting itself up to the end may be seen from the nobler style and diction of the Castle of Indolence, in which the imitation of Spenser is largely playful. Thomson's natural gift included an exuberance which required to be disciplined and controlled. He never slackens in an enthusiasm which fatigues his readers, nor tires of pointing out the beauties of nature, which, indolent as he was, he had surveyed under every aspect till he had become familiar with all. There are many traces of minute and accurate observation at first hand. But he looks also, as Johnson said, 'with the eye which nature bestows only on a poet -the eye that distinguishes, in everything presented to its view, whatever there is on which imagination can delight to be detained, and with a mind that at once comprehends the vast, and attends to the minute.' And everywhere we find evidences of a genuinely sympathetic and kindly heart. His touching allusions to the poor and suffering, to hapless bird and beast in winter; the description of the peasant perishing in the snow, the Siberian exile, or the Arab pilgrims-all overflow with the true feeling which in part at least formed the magic of his song.' His own impulses he has expressed with convincing sincerity in one lofty stanza of the Castle of Indolence:

I care not, Fortune, what you me deny : You cannot rob me of free Nature's grace; You cannot shut the windows of the sky, Through which Aurora shows her brightening face; You cannot bar my constant feet to trace The woods and lawns, by living stream, at eve. Let health my nerves and finer fibres brace, And I their toys to the great children leave: Of fancy, reason, virtue, naught can me bereave. 'The love of nature,' in Coleridge's words, 'seems to have led Thomson to a cheerful religion; and a gloomy religion to have led Cowper to a love of nature. The one would carry his fellow-men along with him into nature; the other flies to nature from his fellow-men. In chastity of diction, however, and the harmony of blank verse, Cowper leaves Thomson immeasurably below him; yet I still feel the latter to have been the born poet.' The copiousness and fullness of Thomson's descriptions distinguish them, not always to their advantage, from those of the less buoyant Cowper, although Sainte-Beuve holds that he is better than the poet of the Task at large pictures and general effects; 'il y a des masses chez Thomson! Coleridge also rather unkindly said that 'Thomson was a great poet rather than a good one; his style was as meretricious as his thoughts were natural.' His work is at times as verbose as an elaborately descriptive catalogue, and is frequently disfigured by grandiose words and phrases and by superfluous

Latinisms. And it must be admitted that even the thought is often conventional and commonplace. He is terribly unequal; and though he has long passages of pleasing melody, though the exquisite note in his description of the Hebrides, 'placed far amid the melancholy main,' is but rarely heard, the diction of the Seasons, often admirable for its purpose, is too ambitious for ordinary themes. This, also on the Hebrides, is another wonderfully felicitous fragment:

Or where the northern ocean in vast whirls
Boils round the naked melancholy isles
Of farthest Thule, and the Atlantic surge
Pours in among the stormy Hebrides.

Thomson was not without a vein of quaint and even coarse humour; but when he descends to minute description, or to humorous or satirical scenes-as in the account of the chase and foxhunters' dinner in Autumn-the effect is grotesque and absurd.

As a man Thomson was kindly, easy, gay, indolent, and of a rare modesty. No wonder he was universally popular. Stanza Ixviii. Canto I written by a friend of the author' - Lord Lyttelton) of his last work pictures him as 'more fat than bard beseems;' as 'void of envy guile, and lust of gain;' as all

The world forsaking with a calm disdain,

Here laughed he careless in his easy seat; Here quaffed encircled with the joyous train, • Oft moralising sage: his ditty sweet.

He loathed much to write, nor cared to repeat.

The Seasons powerfully influenced Kleist, and told on the attitude to nature of German poetry. The poem was translated by Brockes, and is still familiar to many in Germany and elsewhere in the selection set to music by Haydn. The Castle of Indolence, in Mr Gosse's opinion, had a marked influence in determining certain phases of the work of Shelley. The first seven of the following passages are from the Seasons; the next is from the beginning of Book i. of the Castle of Indolence, by most critics admitted to be his masterpiece.

Showers in Spring.

The North-east spends his rage, and now shut up
Within his iron cave, the effusive South
Warms the wide air, and o'er the void of heaven
Breathes the big clouds with vernal showers distent.
At first a dusky wreath they seem to rise,
Scarce staining ether; but by fast degrees,
In heaps on heaps the doubling vapour sails
Along the loaded sky, and mingling deep
Sits on the horizon round a settled gloom :
Not such as wintry storms on mortals shed,
Oppressing life; but lovely, gentle, kind,
And full of every hope and every joy,
The wish of nature. Gradual sinks the breeze
Into a perfect calm; that not a breath

Is heard to quiver through the closing woods,

Or rustling turn the many-twinkling leaves
Of aspen tall. The uncurling floods, diffused
In glassy breadth, seem through delusive lapse
Forgetful of their course. 'Tis silence all,

And pleasing expectation. Herds and flocks
Drop the dry sprig, and mute-imploring, eye
The falling verdure. Hushed in short suspense,
The plumy people streak their wings with oil,
To throw the lucid moisture trickling off;
And wait the approaching sign to strike, at once,
Into the general choir. Even mountains, vales,
And forests seem, impatient, to demand
The promised sweetness. Man superior walks
Amid the glad creation, musing praise,
And looking lively gratitude. At last,
The clouds consign their treasures to the fields;
And, softly shaking on the dimpled pool
Prelusive drops, let all their moisture flow,
In large effusion, o'er the freshened world.
The stealing shower is scarce to patter heard,
By such as wander through the forest walks,
Beneath the umbrageous multitude of leaves.

Birds in Spring.

To the deep woods They haste away, all as their fancy leads, Pleasure, or food, or secret safety prompts; That Nature's great command may be obeyed: Nor all the sweet sensations they perceive Indulged in vain. Some to the holly-hedge Nestling repair, and to the thicket some; Some to the rude protection of the thorn Commit their feeble offspring: the cleft tree

Offers its kind concealment to a few,

Their food its insects, and its moss their nests. Others apart far in the grassy dale,

Or roughening waste, their humble texture weave.
But most in woodland solitudes delight,
In unfrequented glooms, or shaggy banks,
Steep, and divided by a babbling brook,
Whose murmurs soothe them all the live-long day,
When by kind duty fixed. Among the roots
Of hazel, pendent o'er the plaintive stream,
They frame the first foundation of their domes:
Dry sprigs of trees, in artful fabric laid,
And bound with clay together. Now 'tis nought
But restless hurry through the busy air,
Beat by unnumbered wings. The swallow sweeps
The slimy pool, to build his hanging house
Intent. And often, from the careless back
Of herds and flocks a thousand tugging bills
Pluck hair and wool; and oft, when unobserved,
Steal from the barn a straw: till soft and warm,
Clean and complete, their habitation grows.
As thus the patient dam assiduous sits,
Not to be tempted from her tender task,
Or by sharp hunger, or by smooth delight,
Though the whole loosened Spring around her blows,
Her sympathising lover takes his stand
High on the opponent bank, and ceaseless sings
The tedious time away; or else supplies
Her place a moment, while she sudden flits
To pick the scanty meal. The appointed time
With pious toil fulfilled, the callow young,
Warmed and expanded into perfect life,
Their brittle bondage break, and come to light,

A helpless family, demanding food

With constant clamour. O what passions then,
What melting sentiments of kindly care,
On the new parents seize! away they fly
Affectionate, and undesiring bear
The most delicious morsel to their young;
Which equally distributed, again

The search begins. Even so a gentle pair,
By fortune sank, but formed of generous mould,
And charmed with cares beyond the vulgar breast,
In some lone cot amid the distant woods,
Sustained alone by providential Heaven,
Oft, as they weeping eye their infant train,
Check their own appetites, and give them all.

A Summer Morning.
With quickened step,

Brown Night retires: young Day pours in apace,
And opens all the lawny prospect wide.
The dripping rock, the mountain's misty top,
Swell on the sight, and brighten with the dawn.
Blue, through the dusk, the smoking currents shine;
And from the bladed field the fearful hare
Limps, awkward: while along the forest-glade
The wild deer trip, and, often turning, gaze
At early passenger. Music awakes
The native voice of undissembled joy;
And thick around the woodland hymns arise.
Roused by the cock, the soon clad shepherd leaves
His mossy cottage, where with Peace he dwells;
And from the crowded fold, in order, drives
His flock, to taste the verdure of the morn.

Summer Evening.

And now,

Low walks the sun, and broadens by degrees,
Just o'er the verge of day. The shifting clouds
Assembled gay, a richly-gorgeous train,
In all their pomp attend his sitting throne.
Air, earth, and ocean smile immense.
As if his weary chariot sought the bowers
Of Amphitrite, and her tending nymphs
(So Grecian fable sung), he dips his orb;
Now half-immersed; and now a golden curve
Gives one bright glance, then total disappears.
Confessed from yonder slow-extinguished clouds,
All ether softening, sober Evening takes
Her wonted station in the middle air;
A thousand shadows at her beck. First this
She sends on earth; then that, of deeper dye,
Steals soft behind; and then a deeper still,
In circle following circle, gathers round,
To close the face of things. A fresher gale
Begins to wave the wood, and stir the stream,
Sweeping with shadowy gust the fields of corn;
While the quail clamours for his running mate.
Wide o'er the thistly lawn, as swells the breeze,
A whitening shower of vegetable down
Amusive floats. The kind impartial care
Of Nature nought disdains: thoughtful to feed
Her lowest sons, and clothe the coming year,
From field to field the feathered seeds she wings.
His folded flock secure, the shepherd home
Hies, merry-hearted; and by turns relieves
The ruddy milk-maid of her brimming pail ;
The beauty whom perhaps his witless heart,
Unknowing what the joy-mixed anguish means,

Sincerely loves, by that best language shown
Of cordial glances and obliging deeds.
Onward they pass, o'er many a panting height,
And valley sunk and unfrequented; where
At fall of eve the fairy people throng,
In various game and revelry to pass
The summer night, as village stories tell.
But far about they wander from the grave
Of him whom his ungentle fortune urged
Against his own sad breast to lift the hand
Of impious violence. The lonely tower
Is also shunned; whose mournful chambers hold,
So night-struck Fancy dreams, the yelling ghost.
Among the crooked lanes, on every hedge,
The Glowworm lights his gem; and through the dark,
A moving radiance twinkles. Evening yields
The world to Night; not in her winter robe
Of massy Stygian woof, but loose arrayed
In mantle dun. A faint erroneous ray,
Glanced from the imperfect surfaces of things,
Flings half an image on the straining eye;
While wavering woods, and villages, and streams,
And rocks, and mountain-tops, that long retained
The ascending gleam, are all one swimming scene,
Uncertain if beheld. Sudden to heaven
Thence weary vision turns; where, leading soft
The silent hours of love, with purest ray
Sweet Venus shines; and, from her genial rise,
When day-light sickens, till it springs afresh,
Unrivalled reigns, the fairest lamp of night.

An Autumn Evening.

But see, the fading many-coloured woods,
Shade deepening over shade, the country round
Imbrown; a crowded umbrage, dusk and dun,
Of every hue, from wan declining green

To sooty dark. These now the lonesome Muse,
Low-whispering, lead into their leaf-strewn walks,
And give the season in its latest view.

Meantime, light-shadowing all, a sober calm
Fleeces unbounded ether; whose least wave
Stands tremulous, uncertain where to turn
The gentle current; while, illumined wide,
The dewy-skirted clouds imbibe the Sun,
And through their lacid veil his softened force
Shed o'er the peaceful world. Then is the time
For those whom Wisdom and whom Nature charm
To steal themselves from the degenerate crowd,
And soar above this little scene of things;
To tread low-thoughted Vice beneath their feet;
To soothe the throbbing passions into peace,
And woo lone Quiet in her silent walks.

Thus solitary, and in pensive guise,

Oft let me wander o'er the russet mead,
And through the saddened grove, where scarce is heard
One dying strain, to cheer the woodman's toil.
Haply some widowed songster pours his plaint,
Far, in faint warblings, through the tawny copse;
While congregated thrushes, linnets, larks,
And each wild throat, whose artless strains so late
Swelled all the music of the swarming shades,
Robbed of their tuneful souls, now shivering sit
On the dead tree, a dull despondent flock,
With not a brightness waving o'er their plumes,
And nought save chattering discord in their note.
O, let not, aimed from some inhuman eye,