On equal terms with ancient wit engage, Our English palace opens wide in state, And without stooping they may pass the gate. DRYDEN. LONDON: MDCCCLIX. LIVES OF THOMSON AND GRAY. THE remains of Dryden were scarcely cold when Pope rose to eminence, and Pope had not attained to middle age when the fame of the Author of the Seasons was established. JAMES THOMSON was born at Ednam, near Kelso, on the 7th of September 1700. His father was minister of the parish in which his son was born, but shortly afterwards removed to that of Southdean, a lonely but romantic district in the heart of the Cheviots. Here Thomson spent his boyish years; and here he first gave evidence of that poetic spirit which long afterwards shone forth so brightly in the Seasons.1 Allan Cunningham was fortunate enough to discover a fragment written by Thomson at the age of fourteen, which shows how early his style was formed. It was first published in 1841, in a memoir prefixed to an illustrated edition of the Seasons. "Now I surveyed my native faculties, And traced my actions to their teeming source; Gazed Nature through, and, with interior light, At school, Thomson, like so many men who have afterwards risen to eminence,-like Goldsmith, for example, in the following generation, and like Scott in the last,-proved himself a dullard. He was constitutionally indolent, and loved better, we do not doubt, to saunter along the pastoral banks of the "sylvan Jed," than pore over the pages of his Cæsar or his Sallust. In his eighteenth year, he removed to Edinburgh to study for the ministry; and at Edinburgh his old reputation still clove to him. "He remained there," says Johnson, "without distinction or expectation." In the meantime his father died. This event made a great change in Thomson's prospects. His mother was poor, and had a large family to support. She removed to Edinburgh; and her son resolved to abandon his profession. London, still the best, was then the only stage on which a poet could appear with any hopes of success. It was the only stage, as Johnson has remarked, at that time too wide for the operation of petty competition and private malignity, the only stage where merit might soon become conspicuous, and where it would find friends as soon as it became reputable to befriend it. To London, accordingly, Thomson, on the promise of some assistance from an acquaintance of his mother's,-a promise, however, which seems never to have been redeemed,-determined to repair. In 1724 he left Edinburgh, with the poem of Winter and some letters of introduction in his pocket. One of those letters was addressed to Mallet, then tutor to the sons of the Duke of Montrose. Mallet was a Scotchman, the son of an innkeeper at Crieff, and probably the most successful, as he was certainly the most unprincipled, literary adventurer of that age. He praised and courted Pope while living, so long as praise and courtship could advance his interests. He heaped abuse upon Pope's memory when dead, when he found that such abuse would gratify his patron. He earned an ignominious pension by publishing, under the signature of "A Plain Man," a pamphlet ich he imputed cowardice to Byng. He accepted a legacy the Duchess of Marlborough, and a pension from her grandon condition that he should write the life of the hero of Blen Struck with the amazing depths of Deity: |