omit to notice that Ramsay gave most manly, and at the same time most pathetic, voice to that love of one's place of birth, and thence of country, which is so strong in the Scot, and which has grown in a great measure out of the scenery of the land and its associations. I refer, of course, to the touching strains of 'Lochaber no more

"Farewell to Lochaber, farewell to my Jean, Where heartsome wi' thee I ha'e mony a day

been;

To Lochaber no more, to Lochaber no more,

We'll maybe return to Lochaber no more.

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CHAPTER XIV.

MODERN PERIOD: JAMES THOMSON.

(1700-1748.)

We now come to one who abandoned wholly conventionalism, at least of feeling, mere bookreference and limited traditional view of nature, and for the first time, not only in Scottish but in British poetry, saw and felt the aspects of nature in all its moods, from the homely everyday sights and sounds, the gentle, the soft, and the simply beautiful, to the strange, the stern, and the wild-the whole progress of the varied year. A Scotsman did this; and he did it, as we shall see, through the strong impressions made on him in youth, and carried to a southern clime from his native streams and hills.

James Thomson (1700-1748) was a son of

the Scottish manse. Roxburghshire, near where the Eden joins the Tweed, on the 11th September 1700. His father was the Rev. Thomas Thomson, minister of the parish. In November of the same year the father was translated to the parish of Southdean, high up in the valley of the Jed, where the road passes upwards to the Reid Swire,the col or neck of the Carter Fell,-and then leads down Redesdale by Whitelee to Otterbourn. On the right side of the road up the Jed water is a very old churchyard, where it is said the Scots, coming from the fight with Percy, buried some of their dead, after carrying them, along with their gallant dead leader, the Douglas, up from the blood-stained bent of Otterbourn.

He was born at Ednam, in

Thomson as a boy was educated in the grammar-school of Jedburgh, then housed in a portion of its old and stately abbey. At the age of fifteen he went as a student to the University of Edinburgh, with a view to study for the Church. There he made the acquaintance of a fellow-student-David Mallochfinally calling himself Mallet, who to a considerable extent influenced the future career of

Thomson, and was himself to be known in the world of letters.

Thomson was fourteen years younger than Allan Ramsay. But he was a student in the University from 1715, and for some years afterwards. Allan Ramsay's occasional broadsheets were hawked about the streets in those years; and probably the young student would be interested enough to make a purchase now and again. We can fancy young Thomson giving a copper for Allan's last! In 1725, having abandoned the idea of entering the Church, Thomson left Edinburgh for London. It is clear, however, that the publication of 'The Gentle Shepherd' could not have been the means of drawing Thomson's attention to outward nature, for before 1725 a series of pieces, afterwards fused together to form Winter,' were already completed. It was at Mallet's suggestion in London that Thomson arranged the fragments, and published the composition under the title of Winter' in 1726. Thus, quite independently of Ramsay, Thomson's love and feeling for nature had quietly grown up and developed when a boy on the slopes of the Cheviots and the braes of the Jed.

In fact, the first form of 'The Seasons' may be found in a juvenile poem of Thomson's, written before he was twenty, entitled 'A Country Life.' And the idea of 'Winter,' the first composed and published of the 'Seasons,' was first suggested to him by a poem of his early friend, and we may say literary helper, the accomplished Riccartoun, who was minister of Hobkirk, near Southdean, and whom he used, while still at school, to visit. This was entitled A Winter's Day.' It was published in 1726 in Savage's Miscellany '; afterwards it appeared in 1740 in the Gentleman's Magazine,'" corrected by an eminent hand,"-supposed to be Mallet, who, with that unscrupulousness which characterised him, led people to infer that it was his own composition.* "In it," Thomson says, 66 are some masterly strokes that awakened me." Here are some of its lines: :

6

"Now, gloomy soul! look out-now comes thy

turn;

With thee, behold all ravaged nature mourn;
Hail the dim empire of thy darling night,

That spreads low-shadowing o'er the vanquished

light.

* See Robert Bell's edition of The Seasons, Preface.

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