alone, face to face with starvation, and to end his intolerable miseries he drank arsenic on the night of the 24th of August 1770, being seventeen years and ten months of age, and the most extraordinary genius of his years whom the world has ever seen. FROM CHATTERTON'S "ÆLLA." First Minstrel. The budding floweret blushes at the light: The meads are sprinkled with the yellow hue; In daisied mantles is the mountain dight; The slim young cowslip bendeth with the dew; The trees enleafèd into heaven straught, When gentle winds do blow, to whistling din are brought. The evening comes and brings the dew along ; Second Minstrel. So Adam thought, what time, in Paradise, Third Minstrel. When Autumn stript and sunburnt doth appear, Bringing up Winter to fulfil the year, Bearing upon his back the ripened sheaf; When all the hills with woody seed are white ; When levin-fires and gleams do meet from far the sight ; When the fair apples, red as even-sky, Do bend the tree unto the fruitful ground; Do dance in air and call the eyes around; Then, be it evening foul or evening fair, Methinks my joy of heart is shadowed with some care. There was no conscious rebellion against fashion in the sentimental William Shenstone (1714-1763), yet his artifice and graces were links in the transition of style. He is remembered for the fantastic little estate of Leasowes, in Salop, where he devoted the whole of his leisure in dreams of how best " to diversify his surface, to entangle his walks, and to wind his waters." The smoothness and the sentimentality of the eighteenth century reach their acme in Shenstone, to whom William Shenstone From an original Portrait Shenstone's most ambitious poem, The Schoolmistress, appeared in 1742; the Pastoral Ballad (from which two stanzas have just been quoted) in 1743. He died at the Leasowes, of a fever, on the 11th of February 1763. A figure of a totally different kind was Christopher Smart (1722-1770), in whose case the painful discipline of the age was loosened by nothing less than mental disease. He was born at Shipbourne on April 11, 1722, and at the age of seventeen became a scholar of Pembroke College. He was later a fellow, and held several college offices, but became increasingly unbearable, until, in 1751, he "set out for Bedlam." This was the earliest of many attacks of insanity, in the course of one of which (about 1762) Johnson visited him and prayed with him. It was in the asylum that Smart wrote his Song to David, which was published in 1763; this extraordinary production is his one claim to immortality. It is incoherent, vague and distracted, but it is full of astonishing audacities and beauties; of which these are Two disinterested lovers of our old neglected poetry, who did much to revive the knowledge of it, were Percy and Warton. Dr. Thomas Percy (1729-1811) was born at Bridgenorth on the 13th of April 1729. He was educated at Christ Church, Oxford, and from boyhood was destined for the Church. He became Dean of Carlisle, and for the last thirty years of his life was Bishop of Dromore. He dabbled early in Chinese and Icelandic, but soon settled down to the study of Early English. His famous Reiiques of Ancient English Poetry appeared in three volumes in 1765, and was a considerable factor in the development of taste. Thomas Warton (1728-1790) was also a clergyman, but of a more academic type. He belonged to a family of poets and antiquaries, and was the son of an Oxford professor of poetry of the same name (1687-1745). His brother was Joseph Warton (1722-1800), headmaster of Winchester, and editor of Pope. Thomas wrote much in verse, and was poet-laureate from 1785 to the time of his death, but he is best remembered in connection with the History of English Poetry, on which he was occupied for many years. This was not completed; the last instalment appeared in 1781, with the promise of a final volume which was never issued. Both the Wartons and Percy were intimate with Dr. Johnson, and formed part of his circle James MacPherson (17361796), with whose name that of OSSIAN is inevitably connected, was a Highlander, who was born at Kingussie on the 27th of October 1736. He was educated at his parish school and at Aberdeen, perhaps at Edinburgh also; he came north again to be a schoolmaster at Ruthven. There can be no reasonable doubt that he did collect genuine snatches of ancient Gaelic song, and that he was encouraged by several cultivated friends to travel through the Highlands in 1759 in search of more. In 1760 he printed anonymously his Fragments of Ancient Gaelic Poetry, and in 1762 an epic, in six books, called Fingal, which he professed to have translated from Ossian. To this day it is undecided what were the exact materials which MacPherson used. Neither in the cases mentioned, nor in that of his Temora (1763), could he be induced to display his Gaelic originals. This led to his being accused of sheer forgery, and Dr. Johnson openly charged him with imposture. He replied that he copied the poetry of Ossian "from old MSS.," but these he obstinately declined to pro duce. Johnson declared the whole thing to be "another proof of Scotch conspiracy in national falsehood." But modern criticism has not dismissed the matter with such high-handedness. It is now certain that Gaelic poetry attributed to or connected with Ossian or Oisin had been known in the Highlands of Scotland since the sixteenth century, and it is further certain that some of MacPherson's "translations" coincide with genuine Gaelic tradition. The original text, as it was called, of Ossian's poems, never forthcoming in MacPherson's life, was at last published in 1818, but it only made the darkness denser, for in large measure it was found to consist of MacPherson translated back into modern Gaelic, with admixture of fragments which were probably genuine and of considerable antiquity. It has been noted that in authentic Celtic romance the two cycles, the Fennian and the Ossianic, are never mingled, but that this is incessantly done by MacPherson. On the whole, it is probable that MacPherson was in possession, not indeed of MSS., but of copious fragments orally preserved, that he did not choose to admit their incoherency, and that he set himself to build around them a fictitious "epical" narrative, counting upon the credulity of his readers. Having once started this partial deception, he could never venture to withdraw his broad statements, and he descended to the grave under the stigma of forgery and falsehood. If he had been content to tell the plain truth, the great value of his paraphrases and expansions would have been more freely acknowledged, and Dr. Johnson need not have provided him. self with "a stout oaken plant," nor have spoken of "the menaces of a ruffian." James MacPherson After the Portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds |