Supreme
Perfection is invoked from the point of view which, in the con-
cluding hymn of The Seasons, sees 'life rising still on life, in
higher tone' to absorption with deity.
Perfection is invoked from the point of view which, in the con-
cluding hymn of The Seasons, sees 'life rising still on life, in
higher tone' to absorption with deity.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v10
714 seq.
11 Spring, ll. 516 seq.
13 Ibid. 11, 499, 500.
13 Ibid. ll. 101 seq.
6
1
7-2
## p. 100 (#126) ############################################
100 Thomson and Natural Description in Poetry
noonday sun scatters the light clouds borne across the sky before
the west wind, may retire with a book to the shady bank where
sight is attracted by the purple violet, and the air is scented by
the 'balmy essence' of the lily of the valley, or beneath the shade
of a mountain ash where the sounding culver' builds its nest in
the cliff? . Few of Thomson's pictures are without their accom-
paniment of sound. The silence of the winter morning is broken
by the foot-fall of the shepherd on the hard crust of frozen snow? .
The song of birds in spring, which forms the subject of one of the
most attractive passages in The Seasons", intensifies, as it ceases,
the stillness of autumn, when the only sound is that of the distant
gun or of the woodman's axe in the 'sadden'd grove'' Such sounds
are used chiefly to give emphasis to quiet and solitude. His
happiest effects in this direction are summed up in a stanza of The
Castle of Indolence beginning
Join'd to the prattle of the purling rills,
Were heard the lowing herds along the vale5.
In all the scenes to which this stanza makes reference, the part
of man is incidental. The poet roams with 'eye excursive' for the
sake of the varied pleasure to be derived from his wanderings.
He has his own stock of readily awakened sentiment, susceptible
to the gloom and terror of storm, or to the coming of the Power
of Philosophic Melancholy' in autumn®; but there is no subjective
sense of revolt in his own breast to make his spirit at one with the
warring elements, no natural melancholy which colours Nature
with its own hue and translates her death into personal terms.
Similarly, man is introduced only so far as he forms a telling
feature in the landscape, just as the human element in Salvator
Rosa's pictures is subordinated to a position which gives scale to
nodding rocks and adds terror to frowning forests. The village
haymaking and sheepwashing in Summer are mild attempts at
genre pictures; the rural smell’of the harvest, the 'dusky wave'
of mown hay on the meadow, the ‘russet hay-cock' of the one, the
'pebbled shore’and 'flashing wave' of the washing-pool in the other,
meant more to Thomson than the perfunctory rustics who form part
of the scene? His one elaborate picture of the pursuits of his fellow-
men is the description of the feast after a day's hunting8; and this,
conceived in a spirit of heavy playfulness, was transferred by his
executor Lyttelton, as unworthy of The Seasons, to a place by itself
1 Spring, 11. 443 seq.
2 Winter, 11. 755—9.
3 Spring, ll. 582 seq.
• Autumn, 11. 886 seq. 8 The Castle of Indolence, canto 1, st. 4.
6 Autumn, 11. 920 seq. ? Summer, 11. 352 seq. 8 Autumn, 11. 488 seq.
## p. 101 (#127) ############################################
Objective Attitude towards Nature
IOI
in his collected works, where it appears as The Return from the Fox-
Chace, a Burlesque Poem, in the Manner of Mr Philips. More
characteristic is his introduction of the horseman, vainly awaited by
his wife and children, and perishing in the swamp, to heighten the
terrors of the marsh, lit by treacherous wildfire, on an autumn
night'. A parallel tragedy adds effect to the description of the
snowdrift? . The famous picture in Summer of the caravan
swallowed in the sandstorm ends with lines which, in pointing a
contrast to the scene described, are invested with an unusual
element of human interest an element which, in the scene itself,
is entirely subject to the irresistible power of nature.
In this objective attitude to nature, which, while recognising
her power, dissociates her from an active participation in the
terests and emotions of man, Thomson stands midway between
two periods. Milton, a lover of nature less for her own sake than
for the echoes of poetry and music which she aroused in him,
felt in her being the breath of an animating and sustaining
creative power. Twenty-one years after Thomson's death, Gray,
travelling in north-west Yorkshire, as he looked on Ingleborough
wrapped in clouds and stood ‘not without shuddering' in the
gloomy ravine of Gordale scar, felt the presence of a sentient life
in nature responding to his own thought and quickening his
emotions. The chief characteristic of this point of view is the
local colour which it lends to description, its attempt to register
every shade of subjective emotion by a definition of the spirit of
place which gives it its special hue. Thomson's descriptions of
individual scenes are guiltless of local colour. Most of them
were introduced into later editions of The Seasons, and, in
these, the thought of the patron or friend whose ‘hospitable genius'
presides over the landscape inspires the passage, while the details
of the landscape itself are characterised in the most general terms.
The prospect from Richmond hill is described with affection and
with a keen sense of its natural beauty4. From the hill above
Hagley park, the Welsh mountains are noted in the western
distances, and, at Stowe, the poet's eye is quick to mark the
autumnal colour of the woods. But it is precisely in such places,
with their memories of friendship and social pleasure, that
Thomson is most in harmony with the poetic taste of his day.
The landscape is merely the setting to a compliment or a tribute
1 Autumn, 11. 1061 seq.
3 Gray, Journal in the Lakes.
6 Spring, 11. 899 seq.
2 Winter, Il. 276 seq.
• Summer, 11. 1402 seq.
Autumn, 11. 953 seq.
B
## p. 102 (#128) ############################################
102 Thomson and Natural Description in Poetry
a
of personal regard. An enumeration of the general features of the
landscape, a ready perception of points of colour, the occasional
introduction of a place-name, are indicative of the poet's personal
enjoyment, but do not by themselves evoke the special qualities of
the prospect. And, if these passages have a certain prominence in
The Seasons, it must be owned that, as pictures of nature, they
are inferior to passages, such as that which describes the eagle
rearing its young 'on utmost Kilda's shore',' where Thomson's
imagination, although untouched by personal experience, is un-
fettered by the claims of man upon its object.
It is true that the poetry of nature, even where deeply imbued
with the spirit of place, frequently shows a tendency to vagueness
of description. Wordsworth's Lines composed a few miles above
Tintern Abbey, or the sonnet Composed after a journey across
the Hambleton hills, are records not of the peculiar beauties of
particular spots, but of the emotions which they kindle in an
individual mind. With Thomson, the external aspect of nature
was never made sublime by intensity of spiritual feeling. We, who
have never known Lyttelton or held converse with Pitt, or had
the privilege of directing the downcast eyes of Amanda to the
dwelling of Pope or the shades where ‘the worthy Queensb'ry yet
laments his Gay,' may admire the pictures of Hagley or Stowe or
the Thames near Richmond as skilful arrangements of colour, but
cannot regard them as expressions of the permanent element in
nature. They are interesting landmarks in the history of poetic
taste; but their emotional quality, such as it is, is slight, and
typical of a state of mind which had not yet recognised in nature
the presence of a being independent of period and place. Never-
theless, in common with his generation, Thomson had his con-
ventional philosophy of nature. Just as Milton's habit of generalised
description had tinged the verse of his successors with a pale re-
flection, so his devout conception of a controlling Deity manifesting
Himself in nature had left its impression upon his imitators.
Thomson, with a reminiscence of Vergil, pays repeated tribute to
the Divine force which
pervades,
Adjusts, sustains, and agitates the whole 2,
and writes of it with a reverence which indicates the effect upon
his thought of the Miltonic idea of the Creator, limited by a general
agreement with the deism of his own day. The 'Source of Being'
1 Spring, ll. 750 seq.
2 Ibid. ll. 849, 850.
## p. 103 (#129) ############################################
2
Effective Digressions 103
has touched 'the great whole into perfection". ' Supreme Perfection
attracts 'life rising still on life, in higher tone? ' into Its own Being.
As we gaze on nature, we feel the present Deity 3,' and know it to
be full of a ‘mighty Breath“,' an 'inhaling spirit. ' The seasons
in their course embody this pervading energy, and 'are but the
varied God. ' The paragraphs of The Seasons which contain such
sentiments, or the hymn which is their most eloquent expression
at the end of the poem, leave us in doubt as to Thomson's actual ad-
herence to any connected system of religion or philosophy. Deism
alternates with a vague pantheism according to the feeling of the
moment; and, in one place, at any rate, there are signs of a leaning
towards Pythagorean doctrines”. Thomson himself might have
found it hard to define the religious emotion which nature excited
in him. His sincere gratitude to the Creator is at times prompted
by a sense of duty, when its terms unconsciously resemble those in
which he recognised the disposing hand of Lord Cobham at Stowe
or saw the 'pure Dorsetian downs' at Eastbury decorated by the
union of human graces in Bubb Dodington. The greater patron and
the wider area of power called for the more elaborate compliment.
Such temperate rhapsodies are, in fact, among the digressions of
The Seasons. Thomson felt the necessity of giving some relief to
description, and, in the successive revisions to which The Seasons
was subjected, the poem gained in arrangement and in variety
of surface. The most striking digressions are, undoubtedly, those
surveys of foreign scenery which provide necessary contrast to the
limited area of Thomson's own experience. The longest and best
of these, in Summers, was remodelled and transformed in the later
editions, when Thomson removed from it the eloquent and highly
coloured picture of the African city buried in the sandº-an
alteration which probably involved some self-sacrifice. We have
already noticed Lyttelton's treatment of the hunting episode in
Autumn, a digression which arises naturally out of the subject.
The most popular passages of The Seasons, which were long the
admiration of English readers and did much to gain the poem its
vogue on the continent, were those episodes which take the form
of sentimental anecdotes appropriate to the season under discussion.
Of these, three in number, two are in Summer. A description of
a thunderstorm suggests the story of Celadon and Amelia, the
1 Spring, 1, 560.
? The Castle of Indolence, canto 11, st. 48.
3 Spring, 1. 897.
• Ibid. l. 846.
• Summer, 1. 108.
* A Hymn, 1. 2.
7 Spring, U. 335 seq. 8 Summer, 11. 629 seq.
• Printed in the appendices to Tovey's edition of Thomson.
## p. 104 (#130) ############################################
104 Thomson and Natural Description in Poetry
lovers separated by a fatal thunderbolt? This is quickly succeeded
by a passage on summer bathing, illustrated by the tale of Damon
and Musidora, which, in its present form, is entirely altered, and
altered for the worse, from the form which it assumed in the
earliest draft of the poem? The episode of Palemon and Lavinia
.
in Autumn is a tale of harvest, modelled upon the history of Boaz
and Ruth At their best, these stories are merely elegant
decorations of Thomson's verse. Their popularity in their own day
was due to an artificial taste which sought in such poetry the
distractions of an unreal world, and tolerated the questionable
morality and spurious sentiment of the story of Damon and
Musidora, for the sake of its superficial prettiness.
Moral reflections, such as those upon love and jealousy suggested
by the song of the birds in spring“, are among the incidental
passages of The Seasons. No subject, however, was more congenial
to Thomson than the glory of his country, and the patriotic
enthusiasm excited by the prospect seen from Richmond hill in
Summer was more than a conventional sentiment exacted by duty
to the political sympathies of his friends and patrons. His con-
victions, on this head, found their earliest expression in the
monologue Britannia, and were developed at tedious length in
Liberty. In this poem, his art failed him, and the careful arrange-
ment of topics which gave much variety to The Seasons was
abandoned for the prolix discussion of a single theme. Stirred to
his subject by the sight of the ruins of Rome, he indulged in a
historical survey, related by Liberty herself, of her progress from
Greece to Italy, her temporary eclipse in ‘Gothic darkness, and
her revival at the renascence to find in Britain a field for her
untrammelled sway. In her autobiography, Liberty displays a
remarkable lack of modesty, and the width of her claims is the
only original feature of Thomson's political philosophy. The poet
himself plays the part of an admiring listener to her oration,
making, from time to time, respectful interruptions which serve to
let loose new floods of verbiage. He evidently grew weary of his
task. The prophecy contained in the fifth book, awaited by a
steadily decreasing number of subscribers, begins with an uninspired
adaptation to Britain of Vergil's famous tribute to Italy in the
second Georgic, and 'goes dispiritedly, glad to finish' to an abrupt
and hurried end. After Thomson's death, Lyttelton, following, as
he said, the author's own design, condensed the five books of
1 Summer, ll. 1170 seq.
6
9 Ibid. ll. 1270 seq.
Autumn, 11. 182 seq.
4 Spring, 11. 959 seq.
8
## p. 105 (#131) ############################################
The Castle of Indolence
105
Liberty into three. His rearrangement, when compared with the
earlier text, is a symptom of the loose construction and redundancy
of the original, which made such drastic treatment possible.
Thomson's friend Murdoch appears to have set his face against the
application of a similar process to The Seasons ; but it must be
owned that, even after all the revision which it underwent from
the author himself, The Seasons is not without a considerable
amount of repetition, which testifies to the limitations of Thomson's
material
Although Liberty was a failure, Thomson evidently intended
to try his fortune once more with a patriotic poem. The ominous
promise, recorded in The Castle of Indolence, was not fulfilled,
for a reason which must be found in The Castle of Indolence itself.
The elaboration of this short poem occupied many years, and, even
in its final condition, bears signs of incompleteness. Each of the
two cantos ends abruptly with a homely realistic simile which forms
an inappropriate conclusion to a romantic allegory. The poem
might, indeed, have been extended to an indefinite length : its
merit lies, not in the story which it contains, but in the polish of
its style and the success with which Thomson, following a fixed
model, contrived to display in it his own best qualities.
This poem (says the advertisement prefixed to it) being writ in the manner
of Spenser, the obsolete words, and a simplicity of diction in some of the lines,
which borders on the ludicrous, were necessary to make the imitation more
perfect. And the stile of that admirable poet, as well as the measure in
which he wrote, are, as it were, appropriated by Custom to all allegorical
Poems writ in our language; just as in French the stile of Marot, who lived
under Francis i, has been used in tales, and familiar epistles, by the politest
writers of the age of Louis xiv.
Already, in 1742, Shenstone had attempted, in The School-Mistress,
to imitate Spenser's
language, his simplicity, his manner of description, and a peculiar tenderness
of sentiment remarkable throughout his works.
Thomson's poem, however, had been conceived at an earlier date
than Shenstone's. It shows, not merely an admiration of the
external qualities of Spenser's verse, but some intimacy with his
methods of description and personification. At the same time, the
use of the Spenserian stanza, of obsolete words and of a studied
simplicity of diction, could not repress the characteristic tastes of
the poet of The Seasons. In the habit of poetical inversion Milton
stood between Spenser and Thomson; and Thomson had assimilated
this habit so thoroughly that The Castle of Indolence could hardly
· The Castle of Indolence, canto I, st. 32.
## p. 106 (#132) ############################################
106 Thomson and Natural Description in Poetry
6
fail to be leavened with it. With Spenser, the employment of
obsolete words, if, primarily, an affectation, became an essential
feature of his poetry. With Thomson, it was purely a quaint
imitation of Spenser : his old-fashioned words were dragged in as
a necessity, and the poem would lose none of its attractiveness
without them.
The point at which Thomson most closely approaches Spenser
is in the deliberate movement and varied melody of his stanza.
Otherwise, it may fairly be claimed that his resemblance to his
model is of the most general kind. The landscape with which the
poem opens is his highest achievement in that type of description,
combining soft colour with suggestions of perfume and sound, with
which The Seasons has made us familiar. There is little emphasis
on small details : effects of colour, of light and shadow, are
conveyed in such general and inclusive phrases as
gay castles in the clouds that pass,
For ever flushing round a summer-skyl.
If, in such passages, the luxurious beauty of Spenser's descriptions
is reflected, it is rather in their form than in their contents. Here,
once more, the influence of Milton in poetry, of 'savage Rosa' and
learned Poussin' in painting, are too strong to make insistence
on detail possible. In his personifications, Thomson comes nearer
to Spenser. The incidental persons, the comely full-spread porter? '
and his 'little roguish pages,' the diseases of body and mind in the
dungeon of the castle', 'the fiery-footed boy, benempt Dispatch','
who is page to the Knight of Arts and Industry, are portraits which
have Spenser's power of giving individual being to abstract qualities.
On the other hand, the chief portraits of The Castle of Indolence,
the sketches of the friends of the poet as inhabitants or visitors of
the castle, suggested though they may have been by Spenser's
habit of interweaving traits of his contemporaries with his per-
sonified abstractions, were drawn with a personal feeling which
owed little to imitation. Written by one who has himself fallen under
the dominion of the enchanter, the poem has a note of confession
and complaint which gives its contents a special interest, apart
from questions of derived form and style.
The slightness of The Castle of Indolence and its allegory do
not bear comparison with the sustained complication of the fable
which Spenser made the vehicle of his high philosophy. Thomson's
imagination was unrefined by exalted philosophical thought, and
>
6
>
.
1 The Castle of Indolence, canto 1, st. 6. 2 Ibid. st. 24. 3 Ibid. st. 25.
4 Ibid, st. 73 seg.
5 Ibid. canto II, st. 32. & Ibid. canto 1, st. 57 seq.
## p. 107 (#133) ############################################
6
The Castle of Indolence
107
his poem is certainly not improved by excursions into conventional
moralising. The eleven stanzas of perverted morality, which are
sung with an energy foreign to his character by Indolence as he
sits at the gate of his castle', do not add anything to the allegory,
but simply mark a breathing-space between the opening descrip-
tion and the admirable remainder of the first canto. With the
appearance, in the second canto, of the 'generous imp of fame? '
whose vigorous accomplishments are to be fatal to the wizard's
abode, Thomson was easily betrayed into paths which his muse had
trodden bare. After a life passed in varied climes, the Knight of
Arts and Industry has at length found his proper home in Britain,
encircled by the protection of Britannia's thunder on the main,
and aided in his efforts by Liberty, 'th' Eternal Patronº,' who
handsomely atones for her overpowering egoism in an earlier poem
by allowing him to encroach upon her extensive functions. The
mechanic arts, the learning, the constitution of Britain, meet with
due compliment. Threatened by the minions of Indolence, they
are protected by the knight, who sets out to overthrow the castle.
The song of the bard Philomelus, tuned to the British harp, stands
in contrast to the song of Indolence, and proceeds through its
fifteen stanzas with equal smoothness and fluency? .
Supreme
Perfection is invoked from the point of view which, in the con-
cluding hymn of The Seasons, sees 'life rising still on life, in
higher tone' to absorption with deity. The examples of Greece
and Rome and of the great poets are cited to encourage the energy
which is the antithesis to slothful repose. A contrast is drawn
between health and disease, and a final exhortation to the use
of godlike reason has the desired effect of stirring the knight's
followers to the attack. While these sentiments are polished with
.
the care which distinguishes the whole poem, they are drawn from
a stock-in-trade which Thomson and his contemporaries had well-
nigh exhausted, and their commonplace nobility is at the very
opposite pole to the grave philosophy of Spenser or to Milton's
lofty morality.
Thomson's dramatic work consists of five tragedies and the
masque of Alfred, written in conjunction with Mallet. He had no
special talent for the stage, and, at a period when rhetoric was the
chief ambition of the dramatist, Thomson's rhetoric has no dis-
tinguishing excellence. His dramas are devoid of characterisation;
his characters are vehicles of lofty sentiment, the prevailing tone
1 The Castle of Indolence, canto 1, st. 9 seq.
3 Ibid. st. 23.
4 Ibid. st. 47 seg.
? Ibid. canto 11, st. 4.
## p. 108 (#134) ############################################
108 Thomson and Natural Description in Poetry
of which is the belligerent patriotism of the party to which
Thomson was sincerely devoted. Sophonisba, however, the earliest
of the tragedies, is without noticeable political bias. It is simply
a classical drama of the conventional type. Its subject, to be sure,
is patriotic, and its choice of a queen who died for her country
may have been intended to spur the queen, to whom it was
dedicated, to free herself from an influence to which Thomson's
associates were bitterly opposed. There can be no question as to
the meaning of the later plays. Between Sophonisba and the
production of Agamemnon, there was an interval of nine years.
It is easy to read into the characters of Clytemnestra and Egisthus
the queen and the minister whom the prince's coterie was bent on
deposing. The Orestes of Agamemnon was flattered more openly
in Alfred, which was played before the prince and princess at
Cliveden in 1740; while the application of Edward and Eleonora
was so obvious that it was rejected for the stage. Agamemnon
and Edward were published with dedications to the princess of
Wales; the last of the political plays, Tancred and Sigismunda,
was inscribed to the prince himself. Coriolanus, posthumously
produced, is a return to pure tragedy without party bias. It may
fairly be said that not one of these plays has the least dramatic
interest. Their blank verse, however, is, as might be expected,
easy and fluent. Thomson, possibly in imitation of the constant
habit of the later Jacobean and Caroline dramatists, permitted
himself a free use of weak endings to his lines, a practice which
may promote ease in delivery, but becomes monotonous to the
reader. His rhetoric is respectable; but the nobility of sentiment
which it clothes is not above the ordinary level of the conventional
sentiment of the classical drama of his day, and provokes no striking
bursts of eloquence. His subjects do not afford scope for his gift
of natural description, and there is only an occasional touch to
remind us that his true genius lay in his appreciation of natural
atmosphere and colour. His philosophy, on the other hand, is
frequently introduced, but without any material addition to the
contents of the passages in which its vague principles had been
embodied in The Seasons. On the whole, the main interest of
the plays is the debt which they owe directly to Greek tragedy,
and not merely to the antique drama through the medium of the
French stage. This virtue may, to some extent, be claimed for
Agamemnon ; it cannot be denied to Edward and Eleonora,
where the self-sacrifice of Eleanor of Castile is imitated at first
hand from the devotion of Alcestis, and the famous description of
## p. 109 (#135) ############################################
Influence of Thomson. .
Somerville
109
the Cretan queen's farewell to life is almost translated in the
narrative given by Daraxa to the earl of Gloster. Otherwise, the
dramas fail to offer any special feature that raises them above the
ordinary competence of their time; they are deficient in action,
and their division into five acts is a theatrical convention which
only emphasises the poverty of their construction. The masque of
Alfred, the greater part of which, in its first form, seems to have
been supplied by Mallet, was afterwards rewritten by Thomson, and
the music, 'excepting two or three things which being particularly
Favourites at Cliefdon, are retained by Desire,' was ‘new-composed'
by Arne'. Among the lyrics to which Arne provided new music
for the edition of 1753 was Rule, Britannia, the sentiments of
which embody Thomson's enthusiasm for his country and liberty in
its most compact form.
a
The influence of Thomson was strongly felt by the younger
generation of poets : by Collins, who dedicated a beautiful Ode to
his memory, and by Gray, in whose work reminiscences of the
elder poet are frequent. The vogue of The Seasons was followed
by a period in which blank verse, such as Thomson had employed,
was used with some fluency and skill for the treatment of rural
subjects. Milton was the original model on which this type of
verse was founded, and the example of John Philips, 'Pomona's
bard,' was felt in the choice both of metre and of subject.
Somerville, in his preface to The Chace, defends his blank verse
against ‘the gentlemen, who are fond of a gingle at the close of
every verse. '
For my own part (he adds), I shall not be ashamed to follow the example
of Milton, Philips, Thomson, and all our best tragic writers.
William Somerville, born in 1675, was a year older than Philips
and twenty-five years older than Thomson; but it was not until 1735
that he published The Chace, by virtue of which his name survives.
He was educated at Winchester and New college, Oxford, and was
elected fellow of New college. On succeeding to the family estate
of Edstone, near Henley-in-Arden, he settled down to a life in
which the ordinary occupations of a country gentleman were
varied by the study and composition of poetry. Much of his
verse is poor doggerel in the form of fables and tales, dull and
coarse after the usual manner of such productions. But Somer-
ville was a scholar and something of a critic. His Occasional
1 Title-page of the 1753 edition of Alfred.
## p. 110 (#136) ############################################
110 Thomson and Natural Description in Poetry
Poems (1727) contain appreciative verses addressed to Addison
and Pope; he enjoyed the friendship of Allan Ramsay, and
criticised the 'rude notes' of the youthful Jago. In a set of
couplets, he welcomed the first edition of The Seasons in a tone of
patronage which, if justified by his age, was hardly warranted by
his own poetry. Prophesying a great future for the young poet,
he regretted that his muse should want the reforming toilet's
daily care,' and urged him to abandon novelties of diction which,
dangerous in southern poets, became all the more so 'when minted
on the other side of Tweed. '
Read Philips much, consider Milton more;
But from their dross extract the parer orel.
Somerville himself had nothing to teach Thomson ; and his
Chace, when it appeared, shows the influence of the verse of The
Seasons, or, at any rate, a strong inclination to come into line with
it. The poet's “hoarse-sounding horn' invited the prince of Wales,
the friend of Lyttelton and the patron of Thomson,
to the Chace, the sport of kings;
Image of war, without its guilt2.
After a short sketch of the history of hunting from the rude but
thorough methods of Nimrod to the days of William the conqueror,
,
and a compliment to Britain, the 'fair land of liberty,' as the
true home of horse and hound, the country gentlemen of Britain
are summoned to hear the poet's instructions upon his favourite
sport. He discusses at length, and with much practical knowledge
and good sense, the position and proper design of the kennels,
with the advice, not inapplicable to a day when Palladian symmetry
was being pursued to excess by the architects of country houses
and their out-buildings, 'Let no Corinthian pillars prop the domes'
The habits of hounds, the best breeds—a subject which gives
Somerville the true hunter's opportunity to express his contempt
for coursing and the mysteries of scent conclude the first book.
Hare-hunting is the main subject of the second and fox-hunting of
the third ; but Somerville was not a mere sportsman, and his lite-
rary digressions and allusions to the great Mogul's battue of wild
beasts 'taken from Monsieur Bernier, and the history of Gengiscan
the Great<,' and to the story of the tribute of wolves' heads imposed
1 Epistle to Mr Thomson, on the first edition of his Seasons.
2 The Chace, bk 1, ll. 13-15. 3 Ibid. 1. 143.
4 Ibid. ll. 227-30.
5 Argument to The Chace, bk 11. The Voyage of François Bernier (1625—88), who
had been for & time physician to Aurungzebe the great, was published in 1699.
## p. 111 (#137) ############################################
Somerville's Chace and other Poems
III
6
by Edgar, show that he followed his own advice and spent days on
which sport was impossible in improving converse with his books.
From one of these digressions upon oriental methods of hunting,
his devious muse' is recalled, with an appropriate reference to
Denham's Cooper's Hill and a flattering eulogy of the royal
family, to Windsor and the king's buckhounds; and the third
book ends with an example of royal clemency to the stag and a
compliment to the throne. The concluding book contains instruc-
tions upon breeding and the art of training puppies, from which
a transition is made to the diseases of hounds and the fatal effect
of bites. Otter-hunting concludes the series of descriptions, and
is followed by a final congratulation, in the spirit of Vergil's
O fortunatos nimium, on the felicities of the hunter in his un-
ambitious country life.
The Chace was followed a few years later by the short poem
entitled Rural Sports, also dedicated to the prince of Wales.
Hobbinol, a burlesque narrative in blank verse, dedicated to
Hogarth, was inspired by Philips's Splendid Shilling, and is a
lively account of the quarrelsome May games of some rustics in
the vale of Evesham. In his preface, as in that to The Chace,
Somerville indulged in a short critical explanation of his chosen
form of verse, and defined his burlesque as 'a satire against the
luxury, the pride, the wantonness, and quarrelsome temper, of the
middling sort of people,' which he condemned as responsible for
the decline in trade and the depressed condition of the rural
districts. These poems do not add anything to the qualities dis-
played in The Chace, and the mock heroics of Hobbinol are unduly
prolonged into three cantos. Somerville, however, was always
lively in description; he knew his subject, whether he wrote of
sport, or of the amusements of the Gloucestershire rustic 'from
Kiftsgate to remotest Henbury',' and he had a genuine feeling
for classical poetry. Philips appears to have been his favourite
English author, appealing to his rural tastes and to his particular
vein of somewhat coarse humour. Natural description is purely
incidental to his verse; but the scene and atmosphere of the
various forms of sport which he described are suggested in
adequate general terms? Where he approaches detail, as in his
description of unfavourable weather for hunting, the resemblance
1 Hobbinol, canto 1, 1. 246.
2 It may be mentioned that The Chace was a favourite of Mr Jorrocks in the
sporting novel Handley Cross, where several quotations from it occur which have
become familiar to readers who know nothing about Somerville's poem.
## p. 112 (#138) ############################################
112 Thomson and Natural Description in Poetry
of his methods to those of Thomson is noticeable. Like Thomson,
he was fond, as has been noticed, of oriental and of patriotic
digressions. His tendency to moralising is slight when compared
with Thomson's, and from quasi-religious rhapsody he was as
entirely free as he was from Thomson's sympathy with the victims
of the chase. His poems are in no sense dull reading; but his
blank verse, suave and regular, is somewhat monotonous, and is
seldom broken by any variation of accent, such as that frequent
employment of a trochee in the first foot of a line which gives
variety of movement to the verse of The Seasons.
In the Edge-Hill of Richard Jago, a strong taste for moralising
was combined with appreciation of 'Britannia’s rural charms, and
tranquil scenes? ' Warwickshire, a fertile nurse of poets, was his
native county and provided him with his subject. His father,
a member of a Cornish family, was rector of Beaudesert near
Henley-in-Arden, where Jago was born in 1715. Somerville, whose
estate Edstone lay some three miles distant, was a friend of his
boyhood? At Solihull, where he went to school, he made the
friendship of Shenstone, a year his senior, which he continued to
share at Oxford and long afterwards. He entered University
college as a servitor, and, about 1739, took holy orders and became
curate of Snitterfield near Stratford-on-Avon. In 1746, he was
presented to the vicarage of Harbury, with which he held the
perpetual curacy of the neighbouring church of Chesterton. To
these, he added, in 1754, the vicarage of Snitterfield; and, in
1771, resigning Harbury vicarage, he was presented to the rectory
of Kimcote near Lutterworth. He retained his three livings until
his death in 1781. He was buried at Snitterfield.
His poems consist of a few miscellaneous pieces, an oratorio
called Adama canto from Paradise Lost intended to combine
the passages of that poem most suitable for music—and Edge-
Hill. The design of the last poem is very simple. In four books,
he describes the prospect of Warwickshire as seen at various
times in the day from the famous ridge which separates the vale
of the Cherwell from the plain through which the Avon flows to
meet the Severn. At morning, he looks westward over the vale of
Red Horse to Stratford and Alcester. At noon, afternoon and
evening, from different standpoints on the hill, his eye, to some
Edge-Hill, bk 1, 1. 1.
2 Ibid. II. 365—70.
3 See ibid. bk ni, 11. 355 seq. , and the stanzas To William Shenstone, esq. on
receiving a gilt pocket-book, 1751, and The Goldfinches, an elegy. To William
Shenstone, esq.
## p. 113 (#139) ############################################
Jago's Edge-Hill
113
6
extent aided by imagination, roams over other portions of the
county and dwells upon its principal towns and gentlemen's seats.
These comprehensive panoramas are broken up by a large amount
of digressive morality; and a large portion of the third book is
a scientific discourse on the theory of sight, addressed to Lord
Clarendon, and pointed by an extremely long, if appropriate, anec-
dote of a blind youth restored to sight by the help of a gentle
friend named Lydia. When the fourth book has run a third of
its course, and the survey of Warwickshire has been completed by
compliments to the owners of Arbury and Packington, Jago turns
the sober evening hour to account by reviewing the scene with
moral eye,' and descants upon the instability of human affairs.
This is well illustrated by the death of the seventh earl of
Northampton, the master of Compton Wynyates—an allusion
which shows that this part of the poem, at any rate, was written
in 1763; and the local calamity introduces the chief memory of
the place, the battle of Edge-bill and the lessons and warnings to
be derived from it. Jago's moralising has a distinctly religious
end. His master was Milton, whose phraseology he copies closely
and
even borrows, although, in such lines as
Nature herself bids us be serious),
his ear can hardly be said to have caught the charm of Milton's
verse. His topography is conscientious : he mentions every
country seat of any importance in the county, and adds footnotes
with the owners' names. In such passages, he may have felt the
influence of Thomson ; but his catalogues have little picturesque-
ness or colour; while his verse, although it is not without the
accent of local association, is typical, as a whole, of the decadence
of the Miltonic method of natural description in the eighteenth
century. Every group of trees is a grove, every country house a
dome, and every hill a precipice. The classicism of the renascence
has degenerated into a fixed and stilted phraseology.
As he looks from Edge-hill to the distant Cotswolds, Jago
refers to the Monody written by George Lyttelton in 1747 to the
memory of his wife, Lucy Fortescue, whose home was at Ebring-
ton near Chipping Campden. Lyttelton, the son of Sir Thomas
Lyttelton of Hagley, Worcestershire, was the friend of Pope,
Thomson and Shenstone, and his house at Hagley was a favourite
resort of men of letters. His life was largely political. Born in
1709, and educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, he made
1 Edge-Hill, bk iv, 1. 254,
E. L. X
CH, V.
8
## p. 114 (#140) ############################################
114 Thomson and Natural Description in Poetry
the usual grand tour, and entered parliament as member for Oke-
hampton in 1735. He was a prominent supporter of the ‘patriotic'
party against Walpole, and, after Walpole's fall, became a lord of
the treasury. In 1751, he succeeded to his father's baronetcy,
and, in 1756, after his retirement from a short tenure of the
chancellorship of the exchequer, was created baron Lyttelton of
Frankley. He died in 1773. His later years saw the publication
of Dialogues of the Dead and of his History of the Life of
Henry II. But at no season of his life was literature entirely
neglected. He wrote poetry at Eton and Oxford ; on his foreign
tour, he addressed epistles in couplets to his friends at home; and,
soon after his return, he appears to have composed the four
eclogues called The Progress of Love. His poems include some
songs and stanzas, of which the best are those addressed to his
wife. His affection for her is a pleasing trait in a character
which excited genuine devotion in his friends ; and his Monody,
composed in irregular stanzas, with a motto taken from Vergil's
description of the lament of Orpheus for Eurydice', is written
with some depth of feeling, although its reminiscences of Lycidas
invite a comparison which it cannot sustain. The influence of
French literature presides over his imaginative prose works : the
very titles of the satiric Persian Letters, written in his youth, and
the more mature but less sprightly Dialogues of the Dead, are
copied from Montesquieu and Fénelon, their contents suffering
from the usual inferiority of imitations. The graver tone of his
later work, as distinguished from his licence of thought and ex-
pression in the letters of the Persian Selim from England to
Mirza and Ibrahim Mollac at Ispahan, is due to his change of
opinion from deism to Christianity. He flattered himself that his
Observations on the Conversion and Apostleship of St Paul,
which took the form of a letter to Gilbert West, translator of
Pindar, brought about the conversion of Thomson on his death-
bed. However this may have been, the mutual attachment
.
between himself and Thomson calls for some mention of him in
this place. He is said to have supplied the stanza which charac-
terises the poet in The Castle of Indolence? ; he wrote the
prologue, recited by Quin, to the posthumous Coriolanus, and,
as we have seen, he put a liberal interpretation upon his duties
as Thomson's executor. In this connection, it is interesting to
1 Ipse, cava solans, etc. (Georgic iv, 464-6).
2 The Castle of Indolence, canto 1, st. 68. The first line, 'A bard here dwelt, more
fat than bard beseems,' is Thomson's own.
## p. 115 (#141) ############################################
Lyttelton
I15
remember the criticism of Thomson which Lyttelton introduced
in the most valuable of the Dialogues of the Dead. In answer to
a question by Boileau, Pope says:
Your description points out Thomson. He painted nature exactly, and
with great strength of pencil. His imagination was rich, extensive, and
sublime: his diction bold and glowing, but sometimes obscure and affected.
Nor did he always know when to stop, or what to reject. . . . Not only in his
plays, but all his other works, there is the purest morality, animated by piety,
and rendered more touching by the fine and delicate sentiments of a most
tender and benevolent heart1.
Lyttelton's early poems show him to have followed in the
footsteps of Pope, and the letters written to his father from France
and Italy are mainly concerned with foreign politics ; the only
prolonged passage of description in them is a formal account in
French of his journey across Mont-Cenis. In 1756, he wrote two
letters to the historian Archibald Bower, describing a journey
in north Wales. The master of Hagley, by this time, had de-
veloped a strong taste for scenery. His descriptions are excellent
and accurate, and he visited the castles of Wales with the
enthusiasm of a historian, although he fell into the error of
imagining that the ruins of Rhuddlan were those of a castle built
by Henry II. The beauty of the valleys charmed him; the
situation of Powis castle, the vales of Festiniog and Clwyd, the
wooded shores of the Menai straits and the view of the Dee valley
from Wynnstay, excited him to enthusiasm. Bala seemed to him
an oasis in the desert of Merionethshire, 'a solitude fit for Despair
to inhabit. ' Snowdon filled him with 'religious awe' rather than
admiration, and its rocks excited the idea of Burnet, of their
being the fragment of a demolished world. It is characteristic of
'
the taste of his day that the magnificent prospect of the Carnarvon-
shire mountains from Baron hill above Beaumaris, on which
Suckling had looked more than a century before, seemed to
Lyttelton inferior to the view of Plymouth sound and Dartmoor
from mount Edgcumbe. The love of nature in her wilder moods
was not yet part of English literature. 'Nature,' said Lyttelton
of the Berwyn mountains, 'is in all her majesty there; but it is the
majesty of a tyrant, frowning over the ruins and desolation of a
country. '
1 Dialogues of the Dead, XIV.
8-2
## p. 116 (#142) ############################################
CHAPTER VI
GRAY
THOMAS GRAY, a poet whose influence upon subsequent
literature was largely in excess of the volume of his published
works, was born in Cornhill, 26 December 1716. His father,
Philip Gray, was an exchange broker, but seems to have combined
with this other and more hazardous pursuits. He was a selfish,
despotic, ill-tempered man, passionate even to the verge of lunacy.
He owned the house in which the poet was born, and, about the
year 1706, let it, and the shop connected with it, to two sisters,
Mary and Dorothy Antrobus, milliners. At the same date,
approximately, he married Dorothy and came to live with her and
Mary. Thomas Gray was the fifth and only surviving child of this
marriage; the rest, to the number of seven, died in infancy; and
his own life was saved by the prompt courage of his mother, who
opened one of his veins with her own hand.
Dorothy Gray had two brothers, Robert and William Antrobus.
Robert was a fellow of Peterhouse, and had a considerable reputa-
a
tion at Cambridge. He was Gray's first teacher, not only in
classical knowledge, but, also, in the study of natural history,
especially botany, and imbued his nephew with a life-long passion
for scientific observation of the minutest kind in almost every
department of vegetable and animal life. Robert Antrobus was
sometime assistant master at Eton, but had probably resigned
before Gray entered the school in 1727. The poet's tutor there
was William, Robert's younger brother.
During the earlier part of his stay at Eton, Gray, probably,
was housed with his uncle Robert, then residing in retirement
either in the town or in the college precincts. As an oppidan, the
delicate boy had not to endure the hardships of the colleger, and
the horrors of Long Chamber. His chief friend there, in the
first instance, was Horace, son of Sir Robert Walpole, the prime
## p. 117 (#143) ############################################
School and College
117
minister, of whose wife his cousin Dorothy was a humble
intimate. Another of his Eton contemporaries was Richard West,
son of the lord chancellor of Ireland, and grandson of bishop
Burnet. At Eton, West was accounted the most brilliant of the
little coterie formed by the three and Ashton, afterwards fellow
of King's and of Eton, and called the quadruple alliance. A scholar,
with a thin vein of poetry, West was absent-minded, with a tendency
to melancholy, to some extent resembling Gray's own, and he died
prematurely in 1742.
The year 1734 brought a dislocation of the alliance.
11 Spring, ll. 516 seq.
13 Ibid. 11, 499, 500.
13 Ibid. ll. 101 seq.
6
1
7-2
## p. 100 (#126) ############################################
100 Thomson and Natural Description in Poetry
noonday sun scatters the light clouds borne across the sky before
the west wind, may retire with a book to the shady bank where
sight is attracted by the purple violet, and the air is scented by
the 'balmy essence' of the lily of the valley, or beneath the shade
of a mountain ash where the sounding culver' builds its nest in
the cliff? . Few of Thomson's pictures are without their accom-
paniment of sound. The silence of the winter morning is broken
by the foot-fall of the shepherd on the hard crust of frozen snow? .
The song of birds in spring, which forms the subject of one of the
most attractive passages in The Seasons", intensifies, as it ceases,
the stillness of autumn, when the only sound is that of the distant
gun or of the woodman's axe in the 'sadden'd grove'' Such sounds
are used chiefly to give emphasis to quiet and solitude. His
happiest effects in this direction are summed up in a stanza of The
Castle of Indolence beginning
Join'd to the prattle of the purling rills,
Were heard the lowing herds along the vale5.
In all the scenes to which this stanza makes reference, the part
of man is incidental. The poet roams with 'eye excursive' for the
sake of the varied pleasure to be derived from his wanderings.
He has his own stock of readily awakened sentiment, susceptible
to the gloom and terror of storm, or to the coming of the Power
of Philosophic Melancholy' in autumn®; but there is no subjective
sense of revolt in his own breast to make his spirit at one with the
warring elements, no natural melancholy which colours Nature
with its own hue and translates her death into personal terms.
Similarly, man is introduced only so far as he forms a telling
feature in the landscape, just as the human element in Salvator
Rosa's pictures is subordinated to a position which gives scale to
nodding rocks and adds terror to frowning forests. The village
haymaking and sheepwashing in Summer are mild attempts at
genre pictures; the rural smell’of the harvest, the 'dusky wave'
of mown hay on the meadow, the ‘russet hay-cock' of the one, the
'pebbled shore’and 'flashing wave' of the washing-pool in the other,
meant more to Thomson than the perfunctory rustics who form part
of the scene? His one elaborate picture of the pursuits of his fellow-
men is the description of the feast after a day's hunting8; and this,
conceived in a spirit of heavy playfulness, was transferred by his
executor Lyttelton, as unworthy of The Seasons, to a place by itself
1 Spring, 11. 443 seq.
2 Winter, 11. 755—9.
3 Spring, ll. 582 seq.
• Autumn, 11. 886 seq. 8 The Castle of Indolence, canto 1, st. 4.
6 Autumn, 11. 920 seq. ? Summer, 11. 352 seq. 8 Autumn, 11. 488 seq.
## p. 101 (#127) ############################################
Objective Attitude towards Nature
IOI
in his collected works, where it appears as The Return from the Fox-
Chace, a Burlesque Poem, in the Manner of Mr Philips. More
characteristic is his introduction of the horseman, vainly awaited by
his wife and children, and perishing in the swamp, to heighten the
terrors of the marsh, lit by treacherous wildfire, on an autumn
night'. A parallel tragedy adds effect to the description of the
snowdrift? . The famous picture in Summer of the caravan
swallowed in the sandstorm ends with lines which, in pointing a
contrast to the scene described, are invested with an unusual
element of human interest an element which, in the scene itself,
is entirely subject to the irresistible power of nature.
In this objective attitude to nature, which, while recognising
her power, dissociates her from an active participation in the
terests and emotions of man, Thomson stands midway between
two periods. Milton, a lover of nature less for her own sake than
for the echoes of poetry and music which she aroused in him,
felt in her being the breath of an animating and sustaining
creative power. Twenty-one years after Thomson's death, Gray,
travelling in north-west Yorkshire, as he looked on Ingleborough
wrapped in clouds and stood ‘not without shuddering' in the
gloomy ravine of Gordale scar, felt the presence of a sentient life
in nature responding to his own thought and quickening his
emotions. The chief characteristic of this point of view is the
local colour which it lends to description, its attempt to register
every shade of subjective emotion by a definition of the spirit of
place which gives it its special hue. Thomson's descriptions of
individual scenes are guiltless of local colour. Most of them
were introduced into later editions of The Seasons, and, in
these, the thought of the patron or friend whose ‘hospitable genius'
presides over the landscape inspires the passage, while the details
of the landscape itself are characterised in the most general terms.
The prospect from Richmond hill is described with affection and
with a keen sense of its natural beauty4. From the hill above
Hagley park, the Welsh mountains are noted in the western
distances, and, at Stowe, the poet's eye is quick to mark the
autumnal colour of the woods. But it is precisely in such places,
with their memories of friendship and social pleasure, that
Thomson is most in harmony with the poetic taste of his day.
The landscape is merely the setting to a compliment or a tribute
1 Autumn, 11. 1061 seq.
3 Gray, Journal in the Lakes.
6 Spring, 11. 899 seq.
2 Winter, Il. 276 seq.
• Summer, 11. 1402 seq.
Autumn, 11. 953 seq.
B
## p. 102 (#128) ############################################
102 Thomson and Natural Description in Poetry
a
of personal regard. An enumeration of the general features of the
landscape, a ready perception of points of colour, the occasional
introduction of a place-name, are indicative of the poet's personal
enjoyment, but do not by themselves evoke the special qualities of
the prospect. And, if these passages have a certain prominence in
The Seasons, it must be owned that, as pictures of nature, they
are inferior to passages, such as that which describes the eagle
rearing its young 'on utmost Kilda's shore',' where Thomson's
imagination, although untouched by personal experience, is un-
fettered by the claims of man upon its object.
It is true that the poetry of nature, even where deeply imbued
with the spirit of place, frequently shows a tendency to vagueness
of description. Wordsworth's Lines composed a few miles above
Tintern Abbey, or the sonnet Composed after a journey across
the Hambleton hills, are records not of the peculiar beauties of
particular spots, but of the emotions which they kindle in an
individual mind. With Thomson, the external aspect of nature
was never made sublime by intensity of spiritual feeling. We, who
have never known Lyttelton or held converse with Pitt, or had
the privilege of directing the downcast eyes of Amanda to the
dwelling of Pope or the shades where ‘the worthy Queensb'ry yet
laments his Gay,' may admire the pictures of Hagley or Stowe or
the Thames near Richmond as skilful arrangements of colour, but
cannot regard them as expressions of the permanent element in
nature. They are interesting landmarks in the history of poetic
taste; but their emotional quality, such as it is, is slight, and
typical of a state of mind which had not yet recognised in nature
the presence of a being independent of period and place. Never-
theless, in common with his generation, Thomson had his con-
ventional philosophy of nature. Just as Milton's habit of generalised
description had tinged the verse of his successors with a pale re-
flection, so his devout conception of a controlling Deity manifesting
Himself in nature had left its impression upon his imitators.
Thomson, with a reminiscence of Vergil, pays repeated tribute to
the Divine force which
pervades,
Adjusts, sustains, and agitates the whole 2,
and writes of it with a reverence which indicates the effect upon
his thought of the Miltonic idea of the Creator, limited by a general
agreement with the deism of his own day. The 'Source of Being'
1 Spring, ll. 750 seq.
2 Ibid. ll. 849, 850.
## p. 103 (#129) ############################################
2
Effective Digressions 103
has touched 'the great whole into perfection". ' Supreme Perfection
attracts 'life rising still on life, in higher tone? ' into Its own Being.
As we gaze on nature, we feel the present Deity 3,' and know it to
be full of a ‘mighty Breath“,' an 'inhaling spirit. ' The seasons
in their course embody this pervading energy, and 'are but the
varied God. ' The paragraphs of The Seasons which contain such
sentiments, or the hymn which is their most eloquent expression
at the end of the poem, leave us in doubt as to Thomson's actual ad-
herence to any connected system of religion or philosophy. Deism
alternates with a vague pantheism according to the feeling of the
moment; and, in one place, at any rate, there are signs of a leaning
towards Pythagorean doctrines”. Thomson himself might have
found it hard to define the religious emotion which nature excited
in him. His sincere gratitude to the Creator is at times prompted
by a sense of duty, when its terms unconsciously resemble those in
which he recognised the disposing hand of Lord Cobham at Stowe
or saw the 'pure Dorsetian downs' at Eastbury decorated by the
union of human graces in Bubb Dodington. The greater patron and
the wider area of power called for the more elaborate compliment.
Such temperate rhapsodies are, in fact, among the digressions of
The Seasons. Thomson felt the necessity of giving some relief to
description, and, in the successive revisions to which The Seasons
was subjected, the poem gained in arrangement and in variety
of surface. The most striking digressions are, undoubtedly, those
surveys of foreign scenery which provide necessary contrast to the
limited area of Thomson's own experience. The longest and best
of these, in Summers, was remodelled and transformed in the later
editions, when Thomson removed from it the eloquent and highly
coloured picture of the African city buried in the sandº-an
alteration which probably involved some self-sacrifice. We have
already noticed Lyttelton's treatment of the hunting episode in
Autumn, a digression which arises naturally out of the subject.
The most popular passages of The Seasons, which were long the
admiration of English readers and did much to gain the poem its
vogue on the continent, were those episodes which take the form
of sentimental anecdotes appropriate to the season under discussion.
Of these, three in number, two are in Summer. A description of
a thunderstorm suggests the story of Celadon and Amelia, the
1 Spring, 1, 560.
? The Castle of Indolence, canto 11, st. 48.
3 Spring, 1. 897.
• Ibid. l. 846.
• Summer, 1. 108.
* A Hymn, 1. 2.
7 Spring, U. 335 seq. 8 Summer, 11. 629 seq.
• Printed in the appendices to Tovey's edition of Thomson.
## p. 104 (#130) ############################################
104 Thomson and Natural Description in Poetry
lovers separated by a fatal thunderbolt? This is quickly succeeded
by a passage on summer bathing, illustrated by the tale of Damon
and Musidora, which, in its present form, is entirely altered, and
altered for the worse, from the form which it assumed in the
earliest draft of the poem? The episode of Palemon and Lavinia
.
in Autumn is a tale of harvest, modelled upon the history of Boaz
and Ruth At their best, these stories are merely elegant
decorations of Thomson's verse. Their popularity in their own day
was due to an artificial taste which sought in such poetry the
distractions of an unreal world, and tolerated the questionable
morality and spurious sentiment of the story of Damon and
Musidora, for the sake of its superficial prettiness.
Moral reflections, such as those upon love and jealousy suggested
by the song of the birds in spring“, are among the incidental
passages of The Seasons. No subject, however, was more congenial
to Thomson than the glory of his country, and the patriotic
enthusiasm excited by the prospect seen from Richmond hill in
Summer was more than a conventional sentiment exacted by duty
to the political sympathies of his friends and patrons. His con-
victions, on this head, found their earliest expression in the
monologue Britannia, and were developed at tedious length in
Liberty. In this poem, his art failed him, and the careful arrange-
ment of topics which gave much variety to The Seasons was
abandoned for the prolix discussion of a single theme. Stirred to
his subject by the sight of the ruins of Rome, he indulged in a
historical survey, related by Liberty herself, of her progress from
Greece to Italy, her temporary eclipse in ‘Gothic darkness, and
her revival at the renascence to find in Britain a field for her
untrammelled sway. In her autobiography, Liberty displays a
remarkable lack of modesty, and the width of her claims is the
only original feature of Thomson's political philosophy. The poet
himself plays the part of an admiring listener to her oration,
making, from time to time, respectful interruptions which serve to
let loose new floods of verbiage. He evidently grew weary of his
task. The prophecy contained in the fifth book, awaited by a
steadily decreasing number of subscribers, begins with an uninspired
adaptation to Britain of Vergil's famous tribute to Italy in the
second Georgic, and 'goes dispiritedly, glad to finish' to an abrupt
and hurried end. After Thomson's death, Lyttelton, following, as
he said, the author's own design, condensed the five books of
1 Summer, ll. 1170 seq.
6
9 Ibid. ll. 1270 seq.
Autumn, 11. 182 seq.
4 Spring, 11. 959 seq.
8
## p. 105 (#131) ############################################
The Castle of Indolence
105
Liberty into three. His rearrangement, when compared with the
earlier text, is a symptom of the loose construction and redundancy
of the original, which made such drastic treatment possible.
Thomson's friend Murdoch appears to have set his face against the
application of a similar process to The Seasons ; but it must be
owned that, even after all the revision which it underwent from
the author himself, The Seasons is not without a considerable
amount of repetition, which testifies to the limitations of Thomson's
material
Although Liberty was a failure, Thomson evidently intended
to try his fortune once more with a patriotic poem. The ominous
promise, recorded in The Castle of Indolence, was not fulfilled,
for a reason which must be found in The Castle of Indolence itself.
The elaboration of this short poem occupied many years, and, even
in its final condition, bears signs of incompleteness. Each of the
two cantos ends abruptly with a homely realistic simile which forms
an inappropriate conclusion to a romantic allegory. The poem
might, indeed, have been extended to an indefinite length : its
merit lies, not in the story which it contains, but in the polish of
its style and the success with which Thomson, following a fixed
model, contrived to display in it his own best qualities.
This poem (says the advertisement prefixed to it) being writ in the manner
of Spenser, the obsolete words, and a simplicity of diction in some of the lines,
which borders on the ludicrous, were necessary to make the imitation more
perfect. And the stile of that admirable poet, as well as the measure in
which he wrote, are, as it were, appropriated by Custom to all allegorical
Poems writ in our language; just as in French the stile of Marot, who lived
under Francis i, has been used in tales, and familiar epistles, by the politest
writers of the age of Louis xiv.
Already, in 1742, Shenstone had attempted, in The School-Mistress,
to imitate Spenser's
language, his simplicity, his manner of description, and a peculiar tenderness
of sentiment remarkable throughout his works.
Thomson's poem, however, had been conceived at an earlier date
than Shenstone's. It shows, not merely an admiration of the
external qualities of Spenser's verse, but some intimacy with his
methods of description and personification. At the same time, the
use of the Spenserian stanza, of obsolete words and of a studied
simplicity of diction, could not repress the characteristic tastes of
the poet of The Seasons. In the habit of poetical inversion Milton
stood between Spenser and Thomson; and Thomson had assimilated
this habit so thoroughly that The Castle of Indolence could hardly
· The Castle of Indolence, canto I, st. 32.
## p. 106 (#132) ############################################
106 Thomson and Natural Description in Poetry
6
fail to be leavened with it. With Spenser, the employment of
obsolete words, if, primarily, an affectation, became an essential
feature of his poetry. With Thomson, it was purely a quaint
imitation of Spenser : his old-fashioned words were dragged in as
a necessity, and the poem would lose none of its attractiveness
without them.
The point at which Thomson most closely approaches Spenser
is in the deliberate movement and varied melody of his stanza.
Otherwise, it may fairly be claimed that his resemblance to his
model is of the most general kind. The landscape with which the
poem opens is his highest achievement in that type of description,
combining soft colour with suggestions of perfume and sound, with
which The Seasons has made us familiar. There is little emphasis
on small details : effects of colour, of light and shadow, are
conveyed in such general and inclusive phrases as
gay castles in the clouds that pass,
For ever flushing round a summer-skyl.
If, in such passages, the luxurious beauty of Spenser's descriptions
is reflected, it is rather in their form than in their contents. Here,
once more, the influence of Milton in poetry, of 'savage Rosa' and
learned Poussin' in painting, are too strong to make insistence
on detail possible. In his personifications, Thomson comes nearer
to Spenser. The incidental persons, the comely full-spread porter? '
and his 'little roguish pages,' the diseases of body and mind in the
dungeon of the castle', 'the fiery-footed boy, benempt Dispatch','
who is page to the Knight of Arts and Industry, are portraits which
have Spenser's power of giving individual being to abstract qualities.
On the other hand, the chief portraits of The Castle of Indolence,
the sketches of the friends of the poet as inhabitants or visitors of
the castle, suggested though they may have been by Spenser's
habit of interweaving traits of his contemporaries with his per-
sonified abstractions, were drawn with a personal feeling which
owed little to imitation. Written by one who has himself fallen under
the dominion of the enchanter, the poem has a note of confession
and complaint which gives its contents a special interest, apart
from questions of derived form and style.
The slightness of The Castle of Indolence and its allegory do
not bear comparison with the sustained complication of the fable
which Spenser made the vehicle of his high philosophy. Thomson's
imagination was unrefined by exalted philosophical thought, and
>
6
>
.
1 The Castle of Indolence, canto 1, st. 6. 2 Ibid. st. 24. 3 Ibid. st. 25.
4 Ibid, st. 73 seg.
5 Ibid. canto II, st. 32. & Ibid. canto 1, st. 57 seq.
## p. 107 (#133) ############################################
6
The Castle of Indolence
107
his poem is certainly not improved by excursions into conventional
moralising. The eleven stanzas of perverted morality, which are
sung with an energy foreign to his character by Indolence as he
sits at the gate of his castle', do not add anything to the allegory,
but simply mark a breathing-space between the opening descrip-
tion and the admirable remainder of the first canto. With the
appearance, in the second canto, of the 'generous imp of fame? '
whose vigorous accomplishments are to be fatal to the wizard's
abode, Thomson was easily betrayed into paths which his muse had
trodden bare. After a life passed in varied climes, the Knight of
Arts and Industry has at length found his proper home in Britain,
encircled by the protection of Britannia's thunder on the main,
and aided in his efforts by Liberty, 'th' Eternal Patronº,' who
handsomely atones for her overpowering egoism in an earlier poem
by allowing him to encroach upon her extensive functions. The
mechanic arts, the learning, the constitution of Britain, meet with
due compliment. Threatened by the minions of Indolence, they
are protected by the knight, who sets out to overthrow the castle.
The song of the bard Philomelus, tuned to the British harp, stands
in contrast to the song of Indolence, and proceeds through its
fifteen stanzas with equal smoothness and fluency? .
Supreme
Perfection is invoked from the point of view which, in the con-
cluding hymn of The Seasons, sees 'life rising still on life, in
higher tone' to absorption with deity. The examples of Greece
and Rome and of the great poets are cited to encourage the energy
which is the antithesis to slothful repose. A contrast is drawn
between health and disease, and a final exhortation to the use
of godlike reason has the desired effect of stirring the knight's
followers to the attack. While these sentiments are polished with
.
the care which distinguishes the whole poem, they are drawn from
a stock-in-trade which Thomson and his contemporaries had well-
nigh exhausted, and their commonplace nobility is at the very
opposite pole to the grave philosophy of Spenser or to Milton's
lofty morality.
Thomson's dramatic work consists of five tragedies and the
masque of Alfred, written in conjunction with Mallet. He had no
special talent for the stage, and, at a period when rhetoric was the
chief ambition of the dramatist, Thomson's rhetoric has no dis-
tinguishing excellence. His dramas are devoid of characterisation;
his characters are vehicles of lofty sentiment, the prevailing tone
1 The Castle of Indolence, canto 1, st. 9 seq.
3 Ibid. st. 23.
4 Ibid. st. 47 seg.
? Ibid. canto 11, st. 4.
## p. 108 (#134) ############################################
108 Thomson and Natural Description in Poetry
of which is the belligerent patriotism of the party to which
Thomson was sincerely devoted. Sophonisba, however, the earliest
of the tragedies, is without noticeable political bias. It is simply
a classical drama of the conventional type. Its subject, to be sure,
is patriotic, and its choice of a queen who died for her country
may have been intended to spur the queen, to whom it was
dedicated, to free herself from an influence to which Thomson's
associates were bitterly opposed. There can be no question as to
the meaning of the later plays. Between Sophonisba and the
production of Agamemnon, there was an interval of nine years.
It is easy to read into the characters of Clytemnestra and Egisthus
the queen and the minister whom the prince's coterie was bent on
deposing. The Orestes of Agamemnon was flattered more openly
in Alfred, which was played before the prince and princess at
Cliveden in 1740; while the application of Edward and Eleonora
was so obvious that it was rejected for the stage. Agamemnon
and Edward were published with dedications to the princess of
Wales; the last of the political plays, Tancred and Sigismunda,
was inscribed to the prince himself. Coriolanus, posthumously
produced, is a return to pure tragedy without party bias. It may
fairly be said that not one of these plays has the least dramatic
interest. Their blank verse, however, is, as might be expected,
easy and fluent. Thomson, possibly in imitation of the constant
habit of the later Jacobean and Caroline dramatists, permitted
himself a free use of weak endings to his lines, a practice which
may promote ease in delivery, but becomes monotonous to the
reader. His rhetoric is respectable; but the nobility of sentiment
which it clothes is not above the ordinary level of the conventional
sentiment of the classical drama of his day, and provokes no striking
bursts of eloquence. His subjects do not afford scope for his gift
of natural description, and there is only an occasional touch to
remind us that his true genius lay in his appreciation of natural
atmosphere and colour. His philosophy, on the other hand, is
frequently introduced, but without any material addition to the
contents of the passages in which its vague principles had been
embodied in The Seasons. On the whole, the main interest of
the plays is the debt which they owe directly to Greek tragedy,
and not merely to the antique drama through the medium of the
French stage. This virtue may, to some extent, be claimed for
Agamemnon ; it cannot be denied to Edward and Eleonora,
where the self-sacrifice of Eleanor of Castile is imitated at first
hand from the devotion of Alcestis, and the famous description of
## p. 109 (#135) ############################################
Influence of Thomson. .
Somerville
109
the Cretan queen's farewell to life is almost translated in the
narrative given by Daraxa to the earl of Gloster. Otherwise, the
dramas fail to offer any special feature that raises them above the
ordinary competence of their time; they are deficient in action,
and their division into five acts is a theatrical convention which
only emphasises the poverty of their construction. The masque of
Alfred, the greater part of which, in its first form, seems to have
been supplied by Mallet, was afterwards rewritten by Thomson, and
the music, 'excepting two or three things which being particularly
Favourites at Cliefdon, are retained by Desire,' was ‘new-composed'
by Arne'. Among the lyrics to which Arne provided new music
for the edition of 1753 was Rule, Britannia, the sentiments of
which embody Thomson's enthusiasm for his country and liberty in
its most compact form.
a
The influence of Thomson was strongly felt by the younger
generation of poets : by Collins, who dedicated a beautiful Ode to
his memory, and by Gray, in whose work reminiscences of the
elder poet are frequent. The vogue of The Seasons was followed
by a period in which blank verse, such as Thomson had employed,
was used with some fluency and skill for the treatment of rural
subjects. Milton was the original model on which this type of
verse was founded, and the example of John Philips, 'Pomona's
bard,' was felt in the choice both of metre and of subject.
Somerville, in his preface to The Chace, defends his blank verse
against ‘the gentlemen, who are fond of a gingle at the close of
every verse. '
For my own part (he adds), I shall not be ashamed to follow the example
of Milton, Philips, Thomson, and all our best tragic writers.
William Somerville, born in 1675, was a year older than Philips
and twenty-five years older than Thomson; but it was not until 1735
that he published The Chace, by virtue of which his name survives.
He was educated at Winchester and New college, Oxford, and was
elected fellow of New college. On succeeding to the family estate
of Edstone, near Henley-in-Arden, he settled down to a life in
which the ordinary occupations of a country gentleman were
varied by the study and composition of poetry. Much of his
verse is poor doggerel in the form of fables and tales, dull and
coarse after the usual manner of such productions. But Somer-
ville was a scholar and something of a critic. His Occasional
1 Title-page of the 1753 edition of Alfred.
## p. 110 (#136) ############################################
110 Thomson and Natural Description in Poetry
Poems (1727) contain appreciative verses addressed to Addison
and Pope; he enjoyed the friendship of Allan Ramsay, and
criticised the 'rude notes' of the youthful Jago. In a set of
couplets, he welcomed the first edition of The Seasons in a tone of
patronage which, if justified by his age, was hardly warranted by
his own poetry. Prophesying a great future for the young poet,
he regretted that his muse should want the reforming toilet's
daily care,' and urged him to abandon novelties of diction which,
dangerous in southern poets, became all the more so 'when minted
on the other side of Tweed. '
Read Philips much, consider Milton more;
But from their dross extract the parer orel.
Somerville himself had nothing to teach Thomson ; and his
Chace, when it appeared, shows the influence of the verse of The
Seasons, or, at any rate, a strong inclination to come into line with
it. The poet's “hoarse-sounding horn' invited the prince of Wales,
the friend of Lyttelton and the patron of Thomson,
to the Chace, the sport of kings;
Image of war, without its guilt2.
After a short sketch of the history of hunting from the rude but
thorough methods of Nimrod to the days of William the conqueror,
,
and a compliment to Britain, the 'fair land of liberty,' as the
true home of horse and hound, the country gentlemen of Britain
are summoned to hear the poet's instructions upon his favourite
sport. He discusses at length, and with much practical knowledge
and good sense, the position and proper design of the kennels,
with the advice, not inapplicable to a day when Palladian symmetry
was being pursued to excess by the architects of country houses
and their out-buildings, 'Let no Corinthian pillars prop the domes'
The habits of hounds, the best breeds—a subject which gives
Somerville the true hunter's opportunity to express his contempt
for coursing and the mysteries of scent conclude the first book.
Hare-hunting is the main subject of the second and fox-hunting of
the third ; but Somerville was not a mere sportsman, and his lite-
rary digressions and allusions to the great Mogul's battue of wild
beasts 'taken from Monsieur Bernier, and the history of Gengiscan
the Great<,' and to the story of the tribute of wolves' heads imposed
1 Epistle to Mr Thomson, on the first edition of his Seasons.
2 The Chace, bk 1, ll. 13-15. 3 Ibid. 1. 143.
4 Ibid. ll. 227-30.
5 Argument to The Chace, bk 11. The Voyage of François Bernier (1625—88), who
had been for & time physician to Aurungzebe the great, was published in 1699.
## p. 111 (#137) ############################################
Somerville's Chace and other Poems
III
6
by Edgar, show that he followed his own advice and spent days on
which sport was impossible in improving converse with his books.
From one of these digressions upon oriental methods of hunting,
his devious muse' is recalled, with an appropriate reference to
Denham's Cooper's Hill and a flattering eulogy of the royal
family, to Windsor and the king's buckhounds; and the third
book ends with an example of royal clemency to the stag and a
compliment to the throne. The concluding book contains instruc-
tions upon breeding and the art of training puppies, from which
a transition is made to the diseases of hounds and the fatal effect
of bites. Otter-hunting concludes the series of descriptions, and
is followed by a final congratulation, in the spirit of Vergil's
O fortunatos nimium, on the felicities of the hunter in his un-
ambitious country life.
The Chace was followed a few years later by the short poem
entitled Rural Sports, also dedicated to the prince of Wales.
Hobbinol, a burlesque narrative in blank verse, dedicated to
Hogarth, was inspired by Philips's Splendid Shilling, and is a
lively account of the quarrelsome May games of some rustics in
the vale of Evesham. In his preface, as in that to The Chace,
Somerville indulged in a short critical explanation of his chosen
form of verse, and defined his burlesque as 'a satire against the
luxury, the pride, the wantonness, and quarrelsome temper, of the
middling sort of people,' which he condemned as responsible for
the decline in trade and the depressed condition of the rural
districts. These poems do not add anything to the qualities dis-
played in The Chace, and the mock heroics of Hobbinol are unduly
prolonged into three cantos. Somerville, however, was always
lively in description; he knew his subject, whether he wrote of
sport, or of the amusements of the Gloucestershire rustic 'from
Kiftsgate to remotest Henbury',' and he had a genuine feeling
for classical poetry. Philips appears to have been his favourite
English author, appealing to his rural tastes and to his particular
vein of somewhat coarse humour. Natural description is purely
incidental to his verse; but the scene and atmosphere of the
various forms of sport which he described are suggested in
adequate general terms? Where he approaches detail, as in his
description of unfavourable weather for hunting, the resemblance
1 Hobbinol, canto 1, 1. 246.
2 It may be mentioned that The Chace was a favourite of Mr Jorrocks in the
sporting novel Handley Cross, where several quotations from it occur which have
become familiar to readers who know nothing about Somerville's poem.
## p. 112 (#138) ############################################
112 Thomson and Natural Description in Poetry
of his methods to those of Thomson is noticeable. Like Thomson,
he was fond, as has been noticed, of oriental and of patriotic
digressions. His tendency to moralising is slight when compared
with Thomson's, and from quasi-religious rhapsody he was as
entirely free as he was from Thomson's sympathy with the victims
of the chase. His poems are in no sense dull reading; but his
blank verse, suave and regular, is somewhat monotonous, and is
seldom broken by any variation of accent, such as that frequent
employment of a trochee in the first foot of a line which gives
variety of movement to the verse of The Seasons.
In the Edge-Hill of Richard Jago, a strong taste for moralising
was combined with appreciation of 'Britannia’s rural charms, and
tranquil scenes? ' Warwickshire, a fertile nurse of poets, was his
native county and provided him with his subject. His father,
a member of a Cornish family, was rector of Beaudesert near
Henley-in-Arden, where Jago was born in 1715. Somerville, whose
estate Edstone lay some three miles distant, was a friend of his
boyhood? At Solihull, where he went to school, he made the
friendship of Shenstone, a year his senior, which he continued to
share at Oxford and long afterwards. He entered University
college as a servitor, and, about 1739, took holy orders and became
curate of Snitterfield near Stratford-on-Avon. In 1746, he was
presented to the vicarage of Harbury, with which he held the
perpetual curacy of the neighbouring church of Chesterton. To
these, he added, in 1754, the vicarage of Snitterfield; and, in
1771, resigning Harbury vicarage, he was presented to the rectory
of Kimcote near Lutterworth. He retained his three livings until
his death in 1781. He was buried at Snitterfield.
His poems consist of a few miscellaneous pieces, an oratorio
called Adama canto from Paradise Lost intended to combine
the passages of that poem most suitable for music—and Edge-
Hill. The design of the last poem is very simple. In four books,
he describes the prospect of Warwickshire as seen at various
times in the day from the famous ridge which separates the vale
of the Cherwell from the plain through which the Avon flows to
meet the Severn. At morning, he looks westward over the vale of
Red Horse to Stratford and Alcester. At noon, afternoon and
evening, from different standpoints on the hill, his eye, to some
Edge-Hill, bk 1, 1. 1.
2 Ibid. II. 365—70.
3 See ibid. bk ni, 11. 355 seq. , and the stanzas To William Shenstone, esq. on
receiving a gilt pocket-book, 1751, and The Goldfinches, an elegy. To William
Shenstone, esq.
## p. 113 (#139) ############################################
Jago's Edge-Hill
113
6
extent aided by imagination, roams over other portions of the
county and dwells upon its principal towns and gentlemen's seats.
These comprehensive panoramas are broken up by a large amount
of digressive morality; and a large portion of the third book is
a scientific discourse on the theory of sight, addressed to Lord
Clarendon, and pointed by an extremely long, if appropriate, anec-
dote of a blind youth restored to sight by the help of a gentle
friend named Lydia. When the fourth book has run a third of
its course, and the survey of Warwickshire has been completed by
compliments to the owners of Arbury and Packington, Jago turns
the sober evening hour to account by reviewing the scene with
moral eye,' and descants upon the instability of human affairs.
This is well illustrated by the death of the seventh earl of
Northampton, the master of Compton Wynyates—an allusion
which shows that this part of the poem, at any rate, was written
in 1763; and the local calamity introduces the chief memory of
the place, the battle of Edge-bill and the lessons and warnings to
be derived from it. Jago's moralising has a distinctly religious
end. His master was Milton, whose phraseology he copies closely
and
even borrows, although, in such lines as
Nature herself bids us be serious),
his ear can hardly be said to have caught the charm of Milton's
verse. His topography is conscientious : he mentions every
country seat of any importance in the county, and adds footnotes
with the owners' names. In such passages, he may have felt the
influence of Thomson ; but his catalogues have little picturesque-
ness or colour; while his verse, although it is not without the
accent of local association, is typical, as a whole, of the decadence
of the Miltonic method of natural description in the eighteenth
century. Every group of trees is a grove, every country house a
dome, and every hill a precipice. The classicism of the renascence
has degenerated into a fixed and stilted phraseology.
As he looks from Edge-hill to the distant Cotswolds, Jago
refers to the Monody written by George Lyttelton in 1747 to the
memory of his wife, Lucy Fortescue, whose home was at Ebring-
ton near Chipping Campden. Lyttelton, the son of Sir Thomas
Lyttelton of Hagley, Worcestershire, was the friend of Pope,
Thomson and Shenstone, and his house at Hagley was a favourite
resort of men of letters. His life was largely political. Born in
1709, and educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, he made
1 Edge-Hill, bk iv, 1. 254,
E. L. X
CH, V.
8
## p. 114 (#140) ############################################
114 Thomson and Natural Description in Poetry
the usual grand tour, and entered parliament as member for Oke-
hampton in 1735. He was a prominent supporter of the ‘patriotic'
party against Walpole, and, after Walpole's fall, became a lord of
the treasury. In 1751, he succeeded to his father's baronetcy,
and, in 1756, after his retirement from a short tenure of the
chancellorship of the exchequer, was created baron Lyttelton of
Frankley. He died in 1773. His later years saw the publication
of Dialogues of the Dead and of his History of the Life of
Henry II. But at no season of his life was literature entirely
neglected. He wrote poetry at Eton and Oxford ; on his foreign
tour, he addressed epistles in couplets to his friends at home; and,
soon after his return, he appears to have composed the four
eclogues called The Progress of Love. His poems include some
songs and stanzas, of which the best are those addressed to his
wife. His affection for her is a pleasing trait in a character
which excited genuine devotion in his friends ; and his Monody,
composed in irregular stanzas, with a motto taken from Vergil's
description of the lament of Orpheus for Eurydice', is written
with some depth of feeling, although its reminiscences of Lycidas
invite a comparison which it cannot sustain. The influence of
French literature presides over his imaginative prose works : the
very titles of the satiric Persian Letters, written in his youth, and
the more mature but less sprightly Dialogues of the Dead, are
copied from Montesquieu and Fénelon, their contents suffering
from the usual inferiority of imitations. The graver tone of his
later work, as distinguished from his licence of thought and ex-
pression in the letters of the Persian Selim from England to
Mirza and Ibrahim Mollac at Ispahan, is due to his change of
opinion from deism to Christianity. He flattered himself that his
Observations on the Conversion and Apostleship of St Paul,
which took the form of a letter to Gilbert West, translator of
Pindar, brought about the conversion of Thomson on his death-
bed. However this may have been, the mutual attachment
.
between himself and Thomson calls for some mention of him in
this place. He is said to have supplied the stanza which charac-
terises the poet in The Castle of Indolence? ; he wrote the
prologue, recited by Quin, to the posthumous Coriolanus, and,
as we have seen, he put a liberal interpretation upon his duties
as Thomson's executor. In this connection, it is interesting to
1 Ipse, cava solans, etc. (Georgic iv, 464-6).
2 The Castle of Indolence, canto 1, st. 68. The first line, 'A bard here dwelt, more
fat than bard beseems,' is Thomson's own.
## p. 115 (#141) ############################################
Lyttelton
I15
remember the criticism of Thomson which Lyttelton introduced
in the most valuable of the Dialogues of the Dead. In answer to
a question by Boileau, Pope says:
Your description points out Thomson. He painted nature exactly, and
with great strength of pencil. His imagination was rich, extensive, and
sublime: his diction bold and glowing, but sometimes obscure and affected.
Nor did he always know when to stop, or what to reject. . . . Not only in his
plays, but all his other works, there is the purest morality, animated by piety,
and rendered more touching by the fine and delicate sentiments of a most
tender and benevolent heart1.
Lyttelton's early poems show him to have followed in the
footsteps of Pope, and the letters written to his father from France
and Italy are mainly concerned with foreign politics ; the only
prolonged passage of description in them is a formal account in
French of his journey across Mont-Cenis. In 1756, he wrote two
letters to the historian Archibald Bower, describing a journey
in north Wales. The master of Hagley, by this time, had de-
veloped a strong taste for scenery. His descriptions are excellent
and accurate, and he visited the castles of Wales with the
enthusiasm of a historian, although he fell into the error of
imagining that the ruins of Rhuddlan were those of a castle built
by Henry II. The beauty of the valleys charmed him; the
situation of Powis castle, the vales of Festiniog and Clwyd, the
wooded shores of the Menai straits and the view of the Dee valley
from Wynnstay, excited him to enthusiasm. Bala seemed to him
an oasis in the desert of Merionethshire, 'a solitude fit for Despair
to inhabit. ' Snowdon filled him with 'religious awe' rather than
admiration, and its rocks excited the idea of Burnet, of their
being the fragment of a demolished world. It is characteristic of
'
the taste of his day that the magnificent prospect of the Carnarvon-
shire mountains from Baron hill above Beaumaris, on which
Suckling had looked more than a century before, seemed to
Lyttelton inferior to the view of Plymouth sound and Dartmoor
from mount Edgcumbe. The love of nature in her wilder moods
was not yet part of English literature. 'Nature,' said Lyttelton
of the Berwyn mountains, 'is in all her majesty there; but it is the
majesty of a tyrant, frowning over the ruins and desolation of a
country. '
1 Dialogues of the Dead, XIV.
8-2
## p. 116 (#142) ############################################
CHAPTER VI
GRAY
THOMAS GRAY, a poet whose influence upon subsequent
literature was largely in excess of the volume of his published
works, was born in Cornhill, 26 December 1716. His father,
Philip Gray, was an exchange broker, but seems to have combined
with this other and more hazardous pursuits. He was a selfish,
despotic, ill-tempered man, passionate even to the verge of lunacy.
He owned the house in which the poet was born, and, about the
year 1706, let it, and the shop connected with it, to two sisters,
Mary and Dorothy Antrobus, milliners. At the same date,
approximately, he married Dorothy and came to live with her and
Mary. Thomas Gray was the fifth and only surviving child of this
marriage; the rest, to the number of seven, died in infancy; and
his own life was saved by the prompt courage of his mother, who
opened one of his veins with her own hand.
Dorothy Gray had two brothers, Robert and William Antrobus.
Robert was a fellow of Peterhouse, and had a considerable reputa-
a
tion at Cambridge. He was Gray's first teacher, not only in
classical knowledge, but, also, in the study of natural history,
especially botany, and imbued his nephew with a life-long passion
for scientific observation of the minutest kind in almost every
department of vegetable and animal life. Robert Antrobus was
sometime assistant master at Eton, but had probably resigned
before Gray entered the school in 1727. The poet's tutor there
was William, Robert's younger brother.
During the earlier part of his stay at Eton, Gray, probably,
was housed with his uncle Robert, then residing in retirement
either in the town or in the college precincts. As an oppidan, the
delicate boy had not to endure the hardships of the colleger, and
the horrors of Long Chamber. His chief friend there, in the
first instance, was Horace, son of Sir Robert Walpole, the prime
## p. 117 (#143) ############################################
School and College
117
minister, of whose wife his cousin Dorothy was a humble
intimate. Another of his Eton contemporaries was Richard West,
son of the lord chancellor of Ireland, and grandson of bishop
Burnet. At Eton, West was accounted the most brilliant of the
little coterie formed by the three and Ashton, afterwards fellow
of King's and of Eton, and called the quadruple alliance. A scholar,
with a thin vein of poetry, West was absent-minded, with a tendency
to melancholy, to some extent resembling Gray's own, and he died
prematurely in 1742.
The year 1734 brought a dislocation of the alliance.
