COLLINS

Woods, that wave o'er Delphi's steep,
Isles, that crown th' Egean deep,

Fields, that cool Ilissus laves,

Or where Mæander's amber waves
In lingering labyrinths creep,

How do your tuneful echoes languish,
Mute, but to the voice of anguish !
Where each old poetic mountain
Inspiration breathed around;
Every shade and hallowed fountain
Murmured deep a solemn sound :
Till the sad Nile, in Greece's evil hour,

Left their Parnassus for the Latian plains.
Alike they scorn the pomp of tyrant Power,

And coward Vice, that revels in her chains.

When Latium had her lofty spirit lost,

They sought, oh Albion! next thy sea-encircled coast.

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William Collins (1721-1759) was the son of a prosperous hatter in Chichester, where he was born on Christmas Day 1721. According to an early tradition, he attended the Prebendal School in Chichester. In 1733 he was sent to Winchester, as a scholar on the foundation, and remained there seven years. There was a great deal of poetical enthusiasm in the school during this period, and Collins began to write verses at twelve. His Persian Eclogues are said by Warton to have been written when Collins was seventeen, that is to say, in 1738; they appeared anonymously in 1742. But meanwhile, and before the boy left Winchester,

some of his verses had been printed in the Gentleman's Magazine. Collins was head of the school in 1740, and, after matriculating at Queen's College, Oxford, went to Magdalen College as a demy in 1741. At the University he was "distinguished for genius and indolence"; he is understood to have left Oxford, rather abruptly, early in 1744. He went over to Flanders to be a soldier, but was told that he was "too indolent even for the army." He returned to London, and intended to enter upon holy orders, but was dissuaded from doing so by a wealthy tobacconist. It is plain that he was not fitted to devote himself to the labour involved by the adoption of any profession. He sold his property in Sussex, and "subsisted on the proceeds" in the leading coffee-houses

of London until all his little fortune was dissipated. Dr. Johnson, who now made his acquaintance and liked him, said that "Collins had many projects in his head." None of them came to anything, and it is probable that the poet's irresolution was already the consequence of mental disease. His Odes, a slender volume containing the most splendid of his productions, appeared in the winter of 1746-47. It was not bought, and Collins, in a fit of anger, burned the

remaining copies. After the death of Thomson, Collins published, in June 1748, a singularly beautiful monody on that event.. In 1749, after having wasted all his substance, and tasted the bitterness of poverty, Collins inherited from an uncle a sum of money "which," as Johnson says, "he could hardly think exhaustible, and which he did not live to exhaust." He withdrew to Chichester, where he wrote, in 1750, his Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands, which was posthumously printed in 1788. He also wrote an Ode on the Music of the Grecian Theatre, which has unhappily been lost. He now settled down to write a History of the Revival of Learning, but the malady which had long threatened him now definitely attacked him. Terrified by the overshadowing of his intellect, Collins closed his books and tried to forget his anxieties by travelling in France. Nothing, however, stayed the progress of

the disease. His symptoms were originally those, not so much of madness, as of "general laxity and feebleness," but during a visit to Oxford in 1754 the malady took a gloomier character. For the next five years he lingered at Chichester, under the care of his sister, hopelessly insane, but with glimmerings of sanity, since in 1756 he corrected his early eclogues for republication in the following year. Towards the last, however, his condition became terrible, and he filled the cloisters of the cathedral with his shrieks and moanings. He died at Chichester on the 12th of June 1759. Gilbert White, who knew him at college, says that Collins was "of a light and clear complexion, with grey eyes, so very weak at times as hardly to bear a candle in the room." According to Johnson, "his morals were pure and his opinions pious." A few friends were much attached to him; but it is evident from all tradition that the beautiful light of the genius of Collins burned within a very feeble and inefficient physical framework.

While sallow autumn fills thy lap with leaves;
Or winter, yelling through the troublous air
Affrights thy shrinking train,

And rudely rends thy robes;

So long, sure-found beneath the sylvan shed,
Shall fancy, friendship, science, rose-lipped health,
Thy gentlest influence own,

And hymn thy favourite name!

Mark Akenside (1721-1770) was the son of a butcher at Newcastle-onTyne, where he was born on the 9th of November 1721. In his infancy his

father's cleaver fell upon his foot, producing a lifelong lameness, of which he had afterwards the weakness to be ashamed, as a sign of his low birth. He showed an early precocity, and his Virtuoso (written in 1737) was the earliest poem in which the stanza of Spenser was revived. All Akenside's poetic work of merit belongs to his youth; his Pleasures of Imagination were published in 1744; his Odes in 1745. By the age of five-and-twenty he was practically dead as a poet; but he lived long afterwards as a highly successful doctor of medicine. From 1759 onwards he was principal physician to Christ's Hospital, and enjoyed all the honours of the medical profession until his rather sudden death from fever on the 23rd of June 1770. Akenside was a very arrogant man, pompous, and devoid of all sense of humour; She looked as if he could never be undressed." He wore a large white wig and carried a long sword; he terrified the patients at the hospital by the severity of his "pale, strumous countenance." He was accused of ordering the out-patients to be swept from before him with brooms by the hospital servants. He was, however, a learned and "sagacious" lecturer, and he preserved both in poetry and science a dignified austerity.

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AKENSIDE'S "ODE ON A SERMON AGAINST GLORY" (1747)

Come then, tell me, sage divine,

Is it an offence to own

That our bosoms e'er incline

Toward immortal Glory's throne?

For with me nor pomp nor pleasure,
Bourbon's might, Braganza's treasure,
So can Fancy's dream rejoice,
So conciliate Reason's choice,

As one approving word of her impartial voice.

From 1740 to 1760 the Thomsonian and the Graian influences were predominant. About the latter date there was a relapse into something of the old Jesuit precision. In CHURCHILL and his companions, regardless of the more solemn and Latin satire which Johnson had been cultivating, a return was made to the lighter and more primitive forms which Pope had used. For a moment the sombre romantic school seemed swept out of existence, but the popularity of the savage couplets of Churchill was brief. All that was left of the reaction was soon seen in the modified classicism of Goldsmith, with its didactic couplets as smooth and as lucid as Pope's, its humanity and grace, its simplicity and picturesque sweetness. In the Deserted Village (1770) we have the old kind of starched poetry at its very best, and at its latest, since after Goldsmith the movement which had begun with Pope ceased to possess any real vitality.

Charles Churchill (1731-1764) was the son of a curate in Westminster, where he was born in February 1731. He was a riotous boy, and a youth who failed at both universities. At the age of seventeen he made a reckless marriage, in 1753 he became