As a natural result of living an abstemious out of doors life in communion with the sights and sounds of Nature, Thomson was then strong and healthy, with a fresh and clear complexion and a frank open countenance that made him liked by all who knew him.

This early activity of Thomson's should be carefully borne in mind because, later in life, after he came to live in Richmond, he became indolent, lived in luxurious ease, and accordingly grew fat. Possibly Richmond may have a lethargic and enfeebling tendency. It is, I know, often described, in words that are found to be a terrible bugbear, as dreadfully relaxing. With Thomson life in this lovely district certainly produced indolent habits, both of life and composition; and these habits often gave rise to much banter and remonstrance on the part of his friends, and are, unfortunately, the characteristics by which he is best remembered.

When taxed with indolence, he did not deny the soft impeachment; but he retaliated upon his friends that they were just as much inclined, in their own way, to ease and idleness, and he good-humouredly caricatured them in a few stanzas out of which arose that masterpiece, "The Castle of Indolence." The poet himself is described in the following stanza, of which he wrote the first line himself, while his friend, Lord Lyttletonone of the dwellers in this abode of indolence-added the other eight lines :

"A bard here dwells more fat than bard beseems,
Who, void of envy, guile, and lust of gain,
On virtue still, and Nature's pleasing themes,

Poured forth his unpremeditated strain:
The world forsaking with a calm disdain,
Here laugh'd he careless in his easy seat;
Here quaffed, encircled with the joyous train,
Oft moralising sage; his ditty sweet

He loathed much to write, nor cared to repeat."

The entire devotion of Thomson to poetry, and his loss—a great one to the Scottish Church, was the result of an unfavourable criticism passed by the Divinity Professor on a probationary exercise which the young student, in accordance with custom, delivered at the end of his theological course, before the professor and his class. This exercise was severely condemned for its florid and poetical style, pronounced unfit for one who meant to be of use in the ministry, which the young preacher was told imperatively needed plainer language. One of the expressions was even censured as indecent or profane.

Then it was that Thomson became enamoured of what Dr. Johnson humorously called "the noblest prospect that a Scotchman ever sees," to wit, "the high road that leads him to England." Accordingly he left Edinburgh, never more to set foot in Scotland, and arrived in London in March, 1725. He probably hoped to obtain a situation under Government, along

with which he might cultivate his favourite poetry. In this he
was disappointed, and then, like many a man afterwards
eminent, having had for a while to support himself by teaching,
he accepted the post of tutor to Lord Binning's son, a small boy
of five years old, who afterwards became Earl of Haddington.
Scarcely had Thomson reached London, when he had the sad
news of the death of his estimable mother, to whom he had been
tenderly attached. To her memory he paid a touching tribute
of affection in a poem which, we cannot but think, must have
been Cowper's model for the better known lines that he wrote on
receipt of his mother's picture. Referring to the privations
endured by the Scottish minister's widow, in her struggle to
support her nine children and keep her son James at the Uni-
versity, the poet pathetically writes:-
:-

"No more the orphan-train around her stands,
While her free heart upbraids her needy hands;
No more the widow's lonely state she feels,
The shock severe that modest want conceals,
The oppressor's scourge, the scorn of wealthy pride
And poverty's unnumbered ills beside."

At Lord Binning's seat of East Barnet, while occupied in what he calls the low and uncongenial task of teaching a small boy to read, Thomson got into debt, and in writing to beg a loan of 12, he added that he was just then engaged in painting Nature in her most lugubrious dress, describing winter as really presented. This was the first hint of the "Seasons," whereof "Winter," the earliest written, was planned and begun at Barnet. During the composition of the poem, Thomson's chief correspondent was David Malloch (or Mallet, as he oddly chose to be called), who was in 1725 and for several years after, tutor to two sons of the Duke of Montrose. Of the estimation in which this office was then held by the Scotch we have some curious evidence in a poem addressed to Mallet by Allan Ramsay, who therein assures him that

"The task assigned thee's great and good,

To cultivate two Grahams!

On Mallet's invitation, Thomson went to live at the Duke's country seat of Twyford, and while there the poem of "Winter was submitted to Mallet's criticism and judgment. The poem was issued in folio in March, 1726, and achieved an immediate and well-deserved success. It soon became the talk of the coffee-houses, fell into the hands of Aaron Hill, a patron of literature who had enjoyed the distinction of falling under the lash of Pope; and Hill, Spence and others made "Winter" famous.

The poem indeed came out at an appropriate time. It was while Pope, with his exquisite rapier-thrusts, was putting to death the swarming hosts of Dunces, that there appeared, almost in the same year, three poems which put an end to the

reign of his own classical verse and heralded the dawn of what may fairly be called the romantic school of English poetry. These three poems were Ramsay's "Gentle Shepherd," Dyer's "Grongar Hill" and Thomson's "Winter," of which the first appeared in 1725 and the other two in 1726. From that time till the publication of Gray's "Elegy," twenty-five years later, the best English poets, with the exception of the great Master himself and his follower Johnson, mostly abandoned the heroic couplet, left the life of towns, coffee-houses and artificial manners, and returning to the freer versification used by Milton and the poets of the seventeenth century, took for their themes external Nature or passions of a serious or romantic type, such as Pope himself had attempted once, and once only, in his "Eloisa." Of this new school Thomson now became the recognised chief, and to him we owe the reintroduction of that poetry of Nature which, through Cowper, Burns, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley and Tennyson, has gone on gathering force from that time down to our own.

Encouraged by the great success of "Winter," our poet went on to write " Summer," and next, "Spring"; and then in 1730 he collected the four "Seasons" into a volume in the order we now have them, adding "Autumn and the fine Hymn" which brought this work to so glorious a close.

During the next four years Thomson moved in and out of London, visiting no doubt Richmond, and becoming enamoured --what lover of Nature can help it ?-with the beauties of its scenery, tried other forms of poetry besides the "Seasons"; took a travelling tutorship, which enabled him to enjoy the delights of visiting France and Italy; lost his promising pupil by a lamentably early death, and wrote a poem in his praise; received from the grateful father, then Lord Chancellor Talbot, the post-a curious one it would seem for a poet-of Secretary of Briefs in the Court of Chancery, and finally, in 1736, came to settle in the town with which his name and fame will be for ever associated. Here he settled in a pleasant garden-house in Kew Foot Lane, where he spent the rest of his life in poetic ease and social retirement.

In Thomson's days, that part of Richmond must have been a very delightful one. It was thirty years before the present Kew Horse-Road existed, and then this Kew Foot-Lane formed an entrance to a pleasant (so-called) Love-Lane, which led across fields, past a fine avenue of trees to where stood the village of West Sheen, with its fine Gothic gateway of the Carthusian Convent, founded in 1414, the year before the battle of Agincourt, by King Henry the Fifth. At that time the Surrey side tow-path crossed there to the Middlesex bank; what we now know as the old Deer Park ran sheer to the water's edge, and the footpath continued through the fields by the riverside to Kew. The convent, a famous one in its day, has been thus commemorated ::

"In Sheen a stately fabric met the sight,
Of old the hoary anchorite's delight:
And near, amid the groves for ever green,
Richly endowed, a stately fane was seen;
In antique grandeur rose the spacious pile
And richest sculptures decked each cloistered aisle ;
On the proud roofs in air sublimely raised,

The eye with pain, yet still with rapture, gazed;
High towered the Gothic arch, and through the dome
Dark clustering columns shed a twilight gloom."

All the old associations with a poetic past; the memories of the days of the monks, of the Sister Convent at Syon House across the river, and of the tunnel under the river said to have connected the two for service purposes; of the place where Perkin Warbeck found refuge, to which Wolsey retired after his downfall; where the corpse of the Scottish King was borne after the disastrous battle of Flodden, and where the unfortunate Amy Robsart was married to the Earl of Leicester: all these associations were still to be called up in Thomson's days, in the near neighbourhood of his house. Moreover, connected with this convent we find the only certain reference to Richmond by Shakespere, who puts into the Founder's mouth in the famous soliloquy delivered by him the night before the battle of Agincourt, these lines in regard to the two Sister Convents:

"Five hundred poor I have, in yearly pay,

Who twice a day their withered hands hold up
Toward Heaven, to pardon blood; and I have built
Two Chantries, where the sad and solemn priests
Still sing for Richard's soul."

There, too, still remained the further memories of the pleasant hamlet where, at a later time, in Sir William Temple's gardens, King William the Third was wont to walk and talk with Swift; where the King was much pleased with the witty young clergyman and offered him the captaincy in one of his regiments of horse, and where, too, he met with the lady whom he has immortalised as "Stella." In the poem cited, these events are thus celebrated :

"The sportive Swift, in many a fragrant bower,

With manly wit beguiled the social hour,

Or, while the charms of beauteous Stella stole

With power resistless on his captive soul,
Poured to the listening flood his tender lays,
And made the vocal woods resound her praise."

All these and like associations with the past-long before the right of way was given up by the inhabitants at the desire of King George the Third-were close to the pleasant house in which Thomson lived. In that house he gathered round him and entertained his poetic friends (he had never an enemy, to all his brethren he was "that right friendly bard"), Pope, Collins, Armstrong, Hammond, Quin, and Lyttleton; there he enjoyed the fame and repute his poetry had gained for him; there he meditated and composed during the whole

of his residence, his masterpiece as regards form, the "Castle of Indolence; and his mortal remains lie buried in the quiet church corner of Richmond. There, I say, lie his mortal remains, but his imperishable remains, his poetry-the truest remains of any poet-lie, I hope, in our memories, in our heart of hearts.

Now if we consider only the best known of our bard's poetic remains, we shall, if we but read aright, be ready to admit that they possess excellencies little short of the highest. We may readily, it is true, recognise in the "Seasons" certain mannerisms, such as some Latin forms of construction and language, the recurrence of a favourite turn of verse, and the resonance of thought in triads or triplets. We cannot but feel, however, that these mannerisms sit very pleasantly on our poet, and hardly in any way detract from the great merit of his verse. His descriptions of scenery show an ardent love of external Nature, a power of minute observation which has hardly ever been equalled and never surpassed, and a combination of literal accuracy with poetic truth which will make his poetry for ever as fresh as it is true. All natural objects, however presented to his notice, were narrowly observed and faithfully remembered. He examined the individual with minuteness; but he especially loved to group objects, and to study the effect of their mingled masses. Of this no poet ever had a keener or more appreciative sense. His genius loves to paint on a large scale, and to dash off objects successively by bold strokes. He sets Nature before our imagination rather than before our eyes. He paints woods rather than trees; and in a few wondrous lines, he sets before us rivers from source to sea.

To the charms of form he was keenly sensitive, but he positively revelled in colour. His bull in the broom, his redbreast on the parlour floor, have the fidelity of photographs, along with the movement and hues of life which photographs want. From such vignettes and pastoral views he ranges with easy sweep to the round of a hemisphere; his forest covers a continent, and his flood becomes

"A shoreless ocean tumbling round the globe."

But Nature's education of his senses was nowise limited to vision: his ear was accurately trained as well. The felicity of his epithets, as suggestive of the melodies and discords of Nature, is as noticeable as the picturesqueness of his draughtsmanship and colouring. Not less than his verbal melodies, the more intricate harmonies of his verse recall the concerted notes of Nature. Although Thomson's verse has sometimes been accused of pomposity, it must be owned that it is the pomposity of Nature. His style is in admirable keeping with his subject. It is part of the interpretation of Nature, and not merely the vehicle of that interpretation.

Smell, taste, and touch are not generally considered so fit