contemporary wit remarked that the poet “had taken a
liberty which was not agreeable to Britannia in any
season.

»* Thomson also wrote for the stage, but without
success, his one memorable triumph being the song of
“Rule Britannia.” Although Thomson published some-
times by subscription, he made but a poor income out
of bis poetry, and he was unfortunate in his sinecures.
Lord Chancellor Talbot, whose son he had accompanied
as tutor to Italy, made him Secretary of Briefs in the
Court of Chancery, and he held this office for rather more
than three years (December, 1733, to February, 1737),
losing it on the death of his patron. The Prince of
Wales gave him for some years a pension of one hun.
dred pounds, but withdrew it in a pet. From 1744 till
his death be held the sinecure office of one of the Com-
missioners for the Leeward Islands.

Thomson must be acknowledged to be one of the
greatest of our minor poets—i. e., of those that are
ranked next to the great names of Chaucer, Spenser,
Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, and Byron. He
holds this place in virtue of his vigor of imagination,
his broad manly sentiment, the individuality of his
verse, and the distinction of his subject. These have
given him a remarkable and enduring popularity. And
measured by his influence on succeeding literature, his
is by far the greatest figure among minor poets. Both
in his use of blank verse, and in the easy discursive
general structure of his poems on the Seasons, he had
many imitators, the most eminent of whom was the
poet Cowper.

And his influence reached into our own
century. It was most marked on Wordsworth ; and
the fact, just put on record by Mrs. Richmond Ritchie
(Miss Thackeray), that Thomson's “Seasons"
first poetry known to Tennyson in his boyhood enables
us to understand whence our Laureate received the
impulse to his minute observation of Nature and country
life.

Edward and

was the

This was said of the tra

tragedy

DYER'S

GRONGAR HILL

69

A word or two on another poet, also nourished by influences outside Pope's circle, but, unlike Thomson, never brought within that circle, John Dyer. He was the son of a Welsh solicitor, but abandoned the law himself for painting and poetry, and in his early manhood apparently wandered about South Wales as an itinerant painter, rhyming as he went. He was born in the same year with Thomson, and his first and best poem, "Grongar Hill," appeared in Lewis's Miscellany in 1726, in the same year with Thomson's “ Winter." It is a sweet little descriptive poem, in the four-accent measure of Milton's “L’Allegro,” as pure and fresh and clear in its vision of natural objects as any thing written by any of the Lakers, and exquisitely musical in its numbers. It is Wordsworthian also in its moralizing:

ore

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Te

' And see the rivers how they run
Through woods and meads, in shade and sun !
Sometimes swift, sometimes slow,
Wave succeeding wave, they go
A various journey to the deep,
Like human life, to endless sleep!
Thus is Nature's vesture wrought
To instruct our wandering thought ;
Thus she dresses green and gay,
To disperse our cares away.
Ever charming, ever new,
When will the landscape tire the view !
The fountain's fall, the river's flow,
The woody valleys, warm and low;
The windy summit, wild and high,
Roughly rushing on the sky !
The pleasant seat, the ruin'd tower,
The naked rock, the shady bower ;
The town and village, dome and farm,
Each give each a double charm,
As pearls upon an Æthiop's arm.

See on the mountain's southern side,
Where the prospect opens wide,
Where the evening gilds the tide.

poem called

In the course of his wanderings as a painter Dyer went to Rome, and on his return in 1740 published a

The Ruins of Rome.” It is in blank verse, most musical in its rhythm, and exquisitely deli. cate and precise in phrase and epithet ; but its declamatory apostrophes and exclamations strike us now as somewhat antiquated ; and its moralizing vein of melancholy sentiment may be said to bave been superseded for this century by Byron's stanzas in “ Childe Harold” on the ruins of Athens.

The following lines on Modern Rome will sufficiently illustrate his treatment of blank verse :

“Behold by Tiber's flood, where modern Rome

Couches beneath the ruins : there of old
With arms and trophies gleamed the field of Mars :
There to their daily sports the noble youth
Rush'd emulous ; to fling the pointed lance;
To vault the steed; or with the kindling wheel
In dusty whirlwinds sweep the trembling goal ;
Or wrestling, cope with adverse swelling breasts,
Strong grappling arms, close heads, and distant feet;
Or clash the lifted gauntlets ; there they formed
Their ardent virtues ; in the bossy piles,
The proud triumphal arches; all their wars,
Their conquests, honours, in the sculptures live.
And see from every gate those ancient roads,
With tombs high verg'd, the solemn paths of Fame !
Deserve they not regard ?”

SOMERVILLE'S

CHASE

71

On his return to England Dyer entered the Church, and reappeared seventeen years later with another poem, also in blank verse, “ The Fleece.” The first lines will give you an idea of the subject :

“The care of sheep, the labours of the loom,

And arts of trade, I sing."

This poem, and Somerville's "Chase," a didactic poem on hunting (1735), may be numbered among the discursive didactic poems called into being by the success of Thomson's “Seasons." Where Dyer treats of soils, and pastures, and breeds of sheep, and prohibitive legislation against the export of wool, and fulling, and weaving, and dyeing, and the foreign trade in wool, he becomes more technical than most readers of poetry are prepared for ; but intermixed with these technicalities are some of the most exquisite passages of description in the language. You can easily get at them by means of the argument. If all the four books had been like these, we could understand Akenside's saying "that he would regulate his opinion of the reigning taste by Dyer's *Fleece'; for if that were ill received, he should not think it any longer reasonable to expect fame from excellence."

THE

AS A SATIRIST AND MORALIST-FAILURE IN EPIC POETRY

DUNCIAD ESSAY ON MAN

WE have to deal to-day with Pope as a satirist and a moralist. His “ Dunciad” (1728), his “Essay on Man (1732-34), “Moral Essays” (1735), and his “Imitations of Horace” (1733–37) were the great literary events of the fifteen years after the publication of Thomson's "Seasons," and showed the author in a new vein. They were a series of surprises as far as Pope was concerned, works that his previous performances had not prepared the public to expect.

Pope's translation of Homer and his editions of Shakespeare occupied him till 1725, when he had reached the age of thirty-seven, and was in the maturity of his powers, with an independence secured by the enormous profits of his Homer. Then began the third period of his literary career. The works that he then produced, and which I have already enumerated, are his greatest works in point of literary power. But why did he not then produce works of more permanent and universal interest ? Why did he not then return to his youthful scheme of writing a great epic ? The critics of this century have refused Pope a place by the side of Milton, because his subjects were of inferior quality, appealing to a lower range of human emotion, and incapable from their very nature, however excel. lent the treatment of them, of being made the subjects of equally great poetic achievements. Now, Pope, as we have seen, was fully possessed of the idea that a