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'Poor Willie wad ne'er hae ta'en ye,
Had he kent ye as weel as I ;
For ye're baith proud and saucy,
And no for a poor man's wife;
Gin I canna get a better,

I 'se ne'er tak ane i' my life.'

Out spake the bride's sister,

As she cam in frae the byre: 'O gin I were but married,

It's a' that I desire;

But we poor folk maun live single,
And do the best that we can ;

I dinna care what I should want,
If I could get but a man.'

John Skinner (1721-1807), by his 'Tullochgorum' and other songs, helped to inspire Burns, and in his life as in his verses sought to further kindliness and good-will among men. Born at Birse in Aberdeenshire, the son of a Presbyterian schoolmaster, he was educated at Marischal College, Aberdeen, and, turning Episcopalian, from 1742 officiated as Episcopal minister of Longside near Peterhead. After the troubled period of the rebellion of 1745, when the Episcopal clergy of Scotland laboured under the charge of disaffection, Skinner was in 1753 imprisoned six months for preaching to more than four persons! He was a faithful pastor and a diligent student, setting little store by his verse-writing gifts. All his life he had a hard struggle with poverty; in venerable age he died in the house of his son, the Bishop of Aberdeen, having realised his wish of 'seeing once more his children's grandchildren, and peace upon Israel.' His son edited the theological works (with Life, 3 vols. 1809); the Ecclesiastical History of Scotland (2 vols. 1788) begins with the conversion of Scotland, and is an authority for the history of the 'suffering and Episcopal remnant.' There is also a most interesting life of him by Walker (1883). Skinner wrote a poem on football in imitation of Chrystis Kirk, which latter he did into Latin. He wrote Latin versions of some of the psalms, and several Latin poems, humorous and other. 'The Ewie wi' the Crookit Horn' combines playful humour and tenderness; Burns's 'Death and Dying Words of Poor Mailie' has much in common with it. Burns said (too complimentarily, writing to Skinner himself) ""Tullochgorum" was the best Scotch song ever Scotland saw.' In Skinner's day 'Tullochgorum' was no song, but the name of a Highland reel tune, called after a holding of the Grants on Speyside.

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THE REIGNS OF
OF THE GERMAN-BORN

GEORGES.

HE accession of the Hanoverian dynasty made no very serious break in our history; the outward events it brought in its train

the Jacobite risings at home and the foreign complications-did not so deeply affect the life of the nation as is suggested by the disproportionate space their records occupy in the national annals. But under the first George, who did not know any English, and the second, who to the end of his life spoke it as a foreigner, notable changes and signs of greater change manifested themselves in our literature.

Most important is what is known as the return to nature, the revival of interest in the poetry of natural description: the gradual transition from the poetry of formal culture, of critical disquisition, of philosophical reflection, to the poetry of emotion, of spontaneous joy in life and passion and beauty. At no time had men or poets been wholly obtuse to the glories of nature-of sea and sky, mountain and river, winter storms and summer sunsets. But somehow in poetry and literature the expression of these emotions was obscured by much moralising and reflecting on them, and so making them, as it were, a background for philosophical and more or less artificial-looking elucubrations. The more Nature in the abstract was praised and invoked and personified in poetry and prose, the less room was left for taking concrete things and facts close to the heart. The difference was not so much in what men felt, or in the way they felt, as in the things they were moved to put into words and to utter in song, and what other people cared to have them say. Human nature remained fundamentally the same, but sought and found a new way of expressing itself, or at least of expressing itself more fully.

Occasional utterances that reveal the new temper may be traced sporadically even in the writers at the end of the seventeenth century, but become more frequent and more marked early in the eighteenth. In Dyer, born

towards the end of the seventeenth century, we found the new leaven working; Grongar Hill is largely a poem of nature, but has not wholly thrown off the old fetters. And in virtue of his principal poem, The Fleece, Dyer must still be ranked with the didactics; though, he is obviously happier when exulting over his Welsh mountains than in blessing English sheep-walks and their industries. Young and Blair are far removed from Pope in temper as in versification; but the Night Thoughts and the Grave, both printed in the period under review, belong clearly to the didactic category. In James Thomson, born in the very last months of the seventeenth century, literary historians have agreed to see the first whole-hearted prophet of the new movement; direct and heartfelt descriptions of natural scenery form the warp and woof of his fine spun web (see above at page 11). Yet the Seasons was being read while Pope's pre-eminency was undisputed, and before the Essay on Man was written. In Shenstone, along with much old artificiality, the new spirit is also stirring. Gray and Collins combine with zeal for a classical perfection of form, a freedom and variety of verse and rhythm, a simplicity and spontaneity of thought and feeling, that point forward to the poetry of romanticism. Mallet's William and Margaret prepares the way for the work of Warton and Percy on the relics of the romantic past. The significance of Fielding's novels, and their modernness of spirit in contrast to Richardson, have been dealt with by Mr Dobson at pages 7 and 340 of this volume. The rude realism of Fielding and Smollett is also an aspect of the naturalistic movement, and is reflected in the art of Hogarth. Akenside, Thomson's younger contemporary, even more didactic and pseudo-philosophical than many of his spiritual ancestors; and Dr Samuel Johnson, the dominant personality in his age, the most characteristic representative of eighteenth-century England, in his poetry holds almost wholly of the past. The Great Cham of letters was too ponderous a figure to be easily swayed by new movements or the

320

The Reigns of the German-Born Georges

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 Thomson.

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 indolence, omitted 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

JAMES THOMSON.

From the Portrait by John Paton in the National Portrait Gallery.

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

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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 attri`buted 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.

cessors

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 prede-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

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