is very great. In it we see English verse timidly reasserting its characteristic qualities and resuming forbidden powers. The change was gradual, without revolution, without violent initiative. Passion did not suddenly return in its bolder forms, but an insidious melancholy shook the pensive bosom. For nearly eighty years the visual world, in its broader forms, had scarcely existed for mankind ; it was not to be expected that shy and diffident poets, such as were those of this new period, men in most cases of subdued vitality, should flash out into brilliant colourists and high-priests of pantheism. They did their work gingerly and slowly; they introduced an obvious nature into their writings; they painted, with a deprecating pencil, familiar scenes and objects. With Thomson they removed the fog that had obscured the forms of landscape, with Gray they asserted the stately beauty of mountains, with Young they proclaimed anew the magic of moonlight, with Walpole they groped after the principles of Gothic architecture. That their scenes were painted in grey and greenish neutral tint, that their ruined arches were supported on modern brickwork, that falsity and fustian, a hollow eloquence and a frigid sententiousness spoiled many of their enterprises, is not to the point. We must occupy ourselves, not with what they failed to do, but with their faltering successes. They were the pioneers of romanticism, and that is what renders them attractive to the historian.

Nor was it in England only, but over all Europe, that the poets of the age of Johnson were the pioneers of romantic feeling and expression. In the two great movements which we have indicated—in a melancholy sensibility pointing to passion, in a picturesqueness of landscape leading to direct nature-study—the English were the foremost of a new intellectual race. As a child of the eighteenth century, Stendhal, reminded the French, " Le pittoresque—comme les bonnes diligences et les bateaux a vapeur—nous vient d'Angleterre." It came to France partly through Voltaire, who recorded its manifestations with wonder, but mainly through Rousseau, who took it to his heart. Not instantly was it accepted. The first translator of the Seasons into French dared not omit an apology for Thomson's " almost hideous imagery," and it took years for the religious melancholy of Young to sink into German bosoms. But when there appeared the Nouvelle Heloise, a great and catastrophic work of passion avowedly built up on the teaching of the English poets of the funereal school, a book owing everything to English sensibility, then the influence of British verse began, and from 1760 to 1770 the vogue and imitation of it on the Continent was in full swing. To the European peoples of that time Young was at least as great an intellectual and moral portent as Ibsen has been to ours.

It was in a comparative return to a sombre species of romanticism, and in a revolt against the tyranny of the conventional couplet, that these poets mainly affected English literature. James Thomson is at the present hour but tamely admired. His extraordinary freshness, his new outlook into the whole world of imaginative life, deserve a very different recognition from what is commonly awarded to him. The Hymn which closes the Seasons

was first published in 1730, when Pope was still rising towards the zenith of his fame. It recalled to English verse a melody, a rapture which had been entirely unknown since Milton's death, more than sixty years before. We may be told that the close observation of natural phenomena which made

James Thomson

After an Engraving by James Basire

the four books of the Seasons so illustrious had never, although scouted or disregarded, been entirely lost. The names of Lady Winchelsea, of Gay, even of John Philips, may be quoted to prove to us that the poets still had eyes, and knew a hawk from a hernshaw. But these pedestrian studies of nature had no passion in them ; they were but passages of an inventory or of

a still-life painting. With Thomson, and mainly with his majestic Hymn, another quality came back to poetry, the ecstasy of worship awakened by the aspect of natural beauty. We can but wonder what lines such as

" Ye forests bend, ye harvests wave, to Him ; Breathe your still song into the reaper's heart, As home he goes beneath the joyous moon,"

could have meant to readers such as Warburton and Hurd. We may answer—To them, as to Johnson, they could have meant nothing at all; and here began the great split between the two classes of eighteenth-century students of poetry—those who clung to the old forms, and exaggerated their aridity, down to the days of Hayley and Darwin ; and those who falteringly and blindly felt their way towards better things through Gray, and Percy's Reliques, and Warton's revelation of the Elizabethans.

James Thomson (1700-1748) was the eldest son of the Reverend Thomas Thomson and his wife, Beatrice Trotter, well-born people of the Scottish Border. Mr. Thomson had since 1692 been minister of Ednam in Roxburghshire, and the poet was born in the manse there on the 11th of September 1700. Next year the family removed to a parish close to Jedburgh. Here, in early childhood, Thomson attracted the notice of Robert Riccaltoun, a local poet of some merit, and soon began to write verses. In 1715 he was sent up to Edinburgh University, being intended for the Church, and he remained there for ten years. Of his youth we know little, save that he was extremely susceptible to local superstitions, and so much afraid of ghosts that, even when at college, he would rush roaring out of the room if he was left alone in the dark. His father died in 1718, as was believed " under the oppression of diabolical malignity," having

The Perishing Traveller

Illustration by Stothard to Thomson's " Winter"

rashly undertaken to lay that

celebrated spook, the Woolie

Ghost. At Edinburgh Thomson was gradually drawn away from divinity towards

literature, and in his twenty-fifth year he determined to adventure to London;

he sailed from Leith, and arrived almost destitute, having been robbed even

of a handkerchief in which he had tied up his letters of introduction. He found