I.
Edward Young.
"Is it to the credit or discredit of Young, as a poet, that of his \'Night Thoughts\' the French are particularly fond?" So asks Croft, the sardonic author of a notice on Young in Dr. Johnson\'s "Lives of the Poets". The preference is certainly not to the credit of the French! Born in Hampshire in 1683, the son of a clergyman, Young lived till 1765: writing much verse, and more prodigal of praises to "the Great" than any other poet of any age.
Young\'s father, in 1703, appears to have been poor, for the son, to save expense, was hospitably entertained in the lodges of the Warden of New College and the President of Corpus. A Fellowship was found for him at All Souls\', and as he was chosen to make and speak the Latin oration at the founding of the fine Codrington Library, it may be supposed that, at All Souls\', he was held to be more than mediocriter doctus (the qualifications for a Fellow were said to be "well born, well dressed, moderately learned").
Young\'s earlier poems, and his dedications always, seem bids for patronage and preferment. In his "Last Day" (1710),
An archangel eminently bright
From off his silver staff of wondrous height
Unfurls the Christian flag, which waving flies
And shuts and opens more than half the skies.
Angels are asked, on the annihilation of the universe, to say where Britannia is now?
[Pg 423]
All, all is lost, no monument, no sign,
Where once so proudly blazed the great machine.
In the Dedication, which Young later suppressed, nothing was left but Queen Anne, whom the poet distinctly saw floating upwards, and leaving the fixed stars behind her. The clever but eccentric and unfortunate Jacobite Duke of Wharton was a patron of Young, and the defender of Atterbury. The Duke died, under arms for the exiled James III, or Chevalier de St. George, at Lerida; he was then composing a tragedy on Mary, Queen of Scots. Young suppressed, in later years, the dedication to Wharton of his successful tragedy, "The Revenge" (1721).
In 1725-1726 Young published his Satires, "The Universal Passion". They read like a poor imitation of Pope\'s satires, but in point of time they precede the "Dunciad".
Why slumbers Pope, who leads the tuneful train,
Nor hears that Virtue, which he loves, complain?
Pope was not slumbering, he was counting every groan of Virtue, to whom he was so devoted, and was about to lash Vice with the best of them. The Universal Passion which Young flogs, is the Love of Fame. Every one is the fool of Fame except this earl or that, at whom Young dedicates his strings of epigrams which remind us of Pope, with a difference. Sloane and Ashmole are derided for their Museums. Young even dedicated a satire to Sir Robert Walpole; he must smile, "or the Nine inspire in vain". He also adulated the Duke of Newcastle in 1745, when
a pope-bred princeling crawled ashore,
meaning,
The Prince who did in Moidart land
With seven men at his right hand,
And all to conquer kingdoms three.
Oh, he\'s the lad to wanton me!
as a poet of the opposite party exclaimed. The inglorious Duke is
Holles! immortal in far more than fame!
In 1727 Young became a clergyman, at the ripe age of 44.[Pg 424] His "Night Thoughts" in blank verse, are of 1741-1742, in Nine Nights
My song the midnight raven has outwinged,
and the midnight owl was outshrieked.
From short (as usual) and disturbed repose
I wake, how happy they who wake no more!
Yet that were vain, if dreams infest the grave.
We remember
In that sleep of death what dreams may come!
A few lines are in the common stock of quotations such as,
An undevout astronomer is mad.
There are good passages, here and there, but long sermons in a kind of blank verse which "does not overstimulate" are not immortal. "Young has the trick of joining the turgid with the familiar... but with all his faults he was a man of genius and a poet." He was not, as people, misled by the existence of one William Young, foolishly supposed, the original of Fielding\'s Parson Adams in "Joseph Andrews", But Young may be the original of Robert Montgomery, who added to the piety of Young the ebullitions of an unprecedented genius for nonsense.
James Thomson.
Romance secured a firm footing in English literature, after the artificialities of the eighteenth century had sunk into dotage, through the genius of a Borderer, Sir Walter Scott. But another Borderer, long before, had seen glimmerings and had heard strains of the fairy world and the fairy songs. This was James Thomson, son of the parish minister of Ednam in Roxburghshire. The father was presently translated to Southdean, in the Cheviots, and on the old line of Scottish marches: by that way they rode, as Froissart shows, to Otterbourne fight. Thomson\'s father died while trying to lay a ghost in a house near Southdean, when the son was at the University of Edinburgh. The haunted house was demolished. Thomson studied divinity, but abandoned the prospective pulpit for poetry, and went to London to seek his fortune in 1725. He lost his letters of introduction, and he needed a[Pg 425] pair of shoes; his only resource was the manuscript of his "Winter," in "The Seasons". A dedication brought to Thomson twenty guineas: the piece was praised by Aaron Hill and Malloch (or Mallet, Malloch is a Macgregor name); the poem was liked; "Spring" and "Summer" followed, and Thomson dallied over "Autumn" till 1730.
In 1730 he Had been successful with the moral tragedy of "Sophonisba": though in opposition to the Court party, Thomson had obtained several noble patrons, and they did their best for his drama. A long poem on Liberty was not a triumph: but the Prince of Wales gave the author a pension of ￡100 yearly. His tragedy of "Tancred and Sigismunda" was popular (1745), and a patent place brought to the poet ￡300 a year, which he did not long enjoy, dying on 27 August, 1748. Thomson was notoriously indolent, and his last, perhaps his best, work is "The Castle of Indolence" in the Spenserian stanza.
"The Seasons" are in blank verse, a welcome change from the eternal rhyming couplets, and prove that Thomson, unlike his contemporaries, wrote "with his eye on the object". He had been bred in "the wide places of the shepherds," among the lonely Border moors and hills; he had not always been a man of towns. In the sunless winter day
scarce
The bittern knows his time, with bill ingulpht
To shake the sounding marsh; or from the shore
The plovers when to scatter o\'er the heath,
And sing their wild notes to the listening waste.
This was a new voice. Being a Borderer, Thomson was an angler, and describes fly-fishing well, though not better than Gay.
In that old theme of the Middle Ages "the symphony of spring," the songs of birds, he shows knowledge of their ways, and if he makes the hen nightingale the singer, so does Homer, following the myth. In "Summer," Thomson describes, with wonderful tact, sultry climes in which he never breathed, and adds the little idyll of Musidora.
"Autumn" includes a picture of fox-hunting, a sport which James probably did not indulge in, and celebrates the Argyll of[Pg 426] Malplaquet and Duncan Forbes of Culloden, and the water of Tweed,
Whose pastoral banks first heard my Doric reed.
Despite his power of rendering nature, the artificiality of his age is still strong with Thomson, and it cannot be said that "The Seasons" are very attractive to modern readers.
"The Castle of Indolence," by virtue of the poet\'s return to the measure of an author in his day despised, Spenser, yields a welcome change from the eternal rhymed couplets.
A pleasant land of drowsyhead it was.
like the land of the Lotus-eaters in Tennyson. The stanza beginning
And when a shepherd of the Hebrid isles,
Set far amid the melancholy main
is the voice of reviving poetry, and is immortal. Nobody has the slightest sympathy with
The Knight of arts and industry,
And his achievements fair;
That by his castle\'s overthrow
Secur\'d and crowned were.
The castle is a very good castle, it is good to be there, where no cocks disturb the dawn, no dogs murder sleep, "no babes, no wives, no hammers" make a din,
But soft-embodied Fays through airy portals stream.
William Collins.
"The grandeur of wildness and the novelty of extravagance, were always desired by Collins, but not always attained," says Dr. Johnson. After half a century of tame poets, we are happy to meet with one who did not cultivate the trim parterre, and who sometimes did attain to being "exquisitely wild".
Collins was born at Chichester on Christmas Day, 1721, was educated at Winchester, and at Oxford was a "demy," or scholar of Magdalen, like Addison. About 1744 he came to London[Pg 427] with many literary projects in his mind, and very little money in his pockets. Johnson met him, while "immured by a bailiff". Collins cleared his debt with money advanced by a confiding bookseller on the credit of a contemplated translation of Aristotle\'s "Poetics," with a commentary. A legacy of ￡2000 from an uncle, Colonel Martin, was "a sum which Collins could scarcely think exhaustible, and which he did not live to exhaust". His mind weakened: he died in 1759: sane, but incapable of composition. His Odes (1746-1747) are the firm base of his renown: the little volume is extremely scarce; Collins is said to have burned, in disappointment, the greater part of the edition.
Of his "Persian Eclogues" (1742) Collins said that they were his "Irish Eclogues," being inadequately Oriental in local colour. The brief "Ode" (1746) "How Sleep the Brave" (of Fontenoy and Culloden) in ten lines has the magic of an elder day, and of all time. The "Ode to Evening," where the poet sees
hamlets brown and dim discovered spires
And hears their simple bell, and marks o\'er all
Thy dewy fingers draw
The gradual dusky veil,
has escaped from the manner of the eighteenth century, and preludes to Keats.
There are fine free passages in "The Ode to the Passions," and the "Dirge in Cymbeline" is not unworthy of its place. The "Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands," was long lost, and did not receive the poet\'s final touches. He obtained his knowledge of the Second Sight from John Home, author of "Douglas," who was a Hanoverian volunteer in the Forty-five, and inspired in Collins an unfulfilled desire to visit Tay and Teviotdale and Yarrow. The conventions of his age sometimes disfigure Collins\'s poems, but his face was set towards the City of Romance. Tastes still vary as to the relative merit of Collins and Gray: Matthew Arnold being the advocate of Gray; Swinburne of Collins. There is no way of settling such disputes; each writer, at his best, was truly a poet; neither, at his best, is staled or dimmed by time; both were almost portentous exceptions, when really inspired, to the conventional rules of their age in England.
[Pg 428]
Thomas Gray.
Nature occasionally brings into the world pairs of men destined to be distinguished in literature, and, without their own consent, to be pitted against each other as rivals. We have Scott and Byron, Dickens and Thackeray, Tennyson and Browning, and Collins and Gray. Gray was the elder, born in 1716 (Collins was born in 1721). If Collins\'s father was a hatter, Gray\'s mother was a bonnet-maker, if milliners make bonnets. Collins went to Oxford, after being at Winchester; Gray, before going to Peterhouse, Cambridge, was at Eton. Both poets wrote little: the health of Collins broke down; Gray, from h............