comprehensive-minded enough to weigh the law from a legislator's point of view. His Commentaries were very severely handled by Bentham and by Austin and his school. But in the meantime they had established a place for themselves as a classic of English law. Their influence has been great, not merely in our island, but over two continents. For Blackstone was profoundly studied by Madison, Hamilton, Jefferson, and the other fathers of the American constitution, and, from the vantage-ground thus gained, Blackstone has made his mark upon the institutions of Europe. All unconscious of this farreaching destiny, he died at Wallingford on February 14th. 1780, æt. 56. Educationally "Blackstone" is still a great name, while his book is often referred to in the courts to this day as a standard of all but primary authority.

The best editions of Gibbon's History are those by Milman and Bury.* The Memoirs first issued by Lord Sheffield in 2 vols., 1827, have been re-edited by Milman, Murray, Birkbeck Hill, and O. F. Emerson; while the Letters were edited by R. E. Prothero in 1896. See also J. Cotter Morison's Gibbon, P. Anton's Masters in History, Grant's English Historians (1906), and Seccombe's Age of Johnson (1898).

For Hume, J. Hill Burton's Life and Correspondence of David Hume and Dr. Birkbeck Hill's Letters of Hume to Strachan must be supplemented by Huxley's sketch* of Hume's philosophical position in the "English Men of Letters," and by James Orr's David Hume and his Influence (1903); see also Revue des Deux Mondes, November 1st, 1856; A Schatz, L'Euvre économique de D. Hume (1902); M. Tesseire, Les Essais économiques de D. Hume (1902). Both Hume and Robertson are well depicted in H. G. Graham's Scottish Men of Letters of the Eighteenth Century.

CHAPTER VI

THE CAVE OF THE POETS

"To a reader of Thomson's own generation The Seasons must have come as the revelation of a fresh world of beauty. Such passages as those which describe the first spring showers, the thunderstorm in summer, the trout fishing, the sheep washing, and the terrors of the winter night, were not only strange to the public of that day, but were new in English poetry.”— BEERS, English Romanticism.

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These divine truisms make me weep."-TENNYSON on GRAY'S Elegy.

Poetic nonconformists-" Jemmy Thomson-William Shenstone-Thomas Gray-William Collins-The Wartons.

A GREAT defect of the Grand Siècle in France and of the Augustan Age in England was their lack of historical and antiquarian sentiment, and their insensibility to the idea of historic continuity. The age of Pope and Swift knew hardly anything about the great Elizabethan literature, and still less of the great writers before that epoch. The Augustans thought pretty well of themselves, and no doubt imagined that they knew practically everything worth knowing. We know that they were far from encyclopædic: the Encyclopædia Britannica was indeed still undreamt of. A smattering of everything was still unattainable to the connoisseurs of the early Georges, and they fastened upon Dryden, Pope, Boileau, and the classics as the models best worthy of their close and unremitting attention. The narrowing effect of this tendency cannot be gainsaid. At the same time both tendency and effect have been grossly exaggerated by the critics of the nineteenth century, whose foible has never been a profound knowledge

of the eighteenth. The spell cast by Pope over the poetry of the mid-eighteenth century is freely admitted; but it is very easy to overestimate and to generalise far too readily upon this basis. Slavish imitation is the badge of none but very second-rate poets. The cult of Pope was the established relegion of taste, no doubt, but there were always non-conformists both active and numerous, whose ideal chapels dotted the land and multiplied almost as rapidly as the material chapels of the Methodists. Curiously enough the revolts against formalism in religion and poetry broke out almost simultaneously. And the poetic revolt was much more versatile and many-sided than the religious. It is extraordinary, in fact, how, beginning with Thomson in 1726, the ideals of the Augustan Age were with scant ceremony to be put aside and reversed. Blank verse is seen beginning to supersede the heroic couplet, against which, by reason of its very perfection in Pope's hands, the poets of the rising generation felt that they must protect themselves at all hazards. Similarly, experiments, first playful, but very quickly more serious, were being made with the stanza of The Faerie Queene, and later on with the sonnet form, the very name of which provoked in critics of the Johnsonian school the sort of disdain a Beethoven might feel for a toy symphony. With Shenstone and Philips and Percy in another direction the cultivation of the old ballad literature began. Gray stands for an awakened curiosity in Scandinavian and Icelandic poetry and antiquities. He also represents very well in England what Rousseau blazed abroad-the development of a new, passionate, and increasingly intimate love of wild external nature, partly as a reaction and a protest against the courtly and suburban elegances of Twickenham and Versailles.

To pretend, then, that the poetic heart of the eighteenth century was Popean to the core is nothing short of an

extravagance. The tradition of Mr. Pope was cherished among versifiers throughout the century, no doubt, just as the poetic ideals of Scott and Macaulay are cherished even to-day, and for similar reasons. The diction, too, which Dryden and Pope had transmitted and modified from Milton remained to most of the poets of the day an embarrassing source of wealth. But one need not regard the poetasters of the time and the recipes that they employed as the exclusive depositories of poetic tradition. There were a number of true poets in the second and third quarters of the eighteenth century to whom all credit is due as pioneers and precentors of the romantic movement under the depressing conditions to which innovators in poetry are commonly subject. They may strike us as rather a feeble band after the great romantics of Elizabethan days. Four of them were mentally deranged (Collins, Smart, Cowper, Blake), while Gray was a perfect hermit, and Shenstone and Thomson the most indolent of recluses. The most virile of the group, perhaps, was a boy who died at the age of seventeen. All of them were bachelors, with the single exception of Blake, and a more despondent group of artists, as a whole, it would not, perhaps, be easy to discover. Catacombs and cypresses were the forms of imagery that came to them most naturally. Elegies and Funeral Odes were the forms of expression in which they felt at home. Yet they strove as a whole to follow the gleam in poetry, to reinstate imagination upon its throne, and to substitute the singing voice for the rhetorical recitative of the heroic couplet. And their influence, weak and tortuous though its workings were, eventually permeated our literature between 1730 and 1798, when the Lyrical Ballads heralded the new movement. We trace the first stirrings of these new impulses in the lives and careers of Thomson, Shenstone, Gray and Collins.

In July, 1692, Thomas Thomson, son of a gardener in

the employment of Mr. Edmonston, of Ednam, was appointed minister to that parish in the north-eastern corner of pastoral Roxburgh. Fifteen months after his settlement in Ednam, this pious and devoted, if somewhat gloomy and superstitious, minister married Beatrix Trotter, the daughter of a neighbouring yeoman. Their fourth son, James, born at Ednam Manse, and baptised in the kirk there on September 15th, 1700, was destined to be the descriptive poet par excellence of the eighteenth century, and one of the most notable forerunners of the romantic movement in this country. At twelve he went to school in a former chapel of the old Abbey at Jedburgh, and in 1715 proceeded to Edinburgh University. The boy had attracted some attention by his parts among the local gentry of Roxburghshire, and the somewhat freezing atmosphere of the class-rooms at Edinburgh chilled his young blood. His father would have overruled his objections to the ministry, but the good pastor had died in 1716. James, at twenty-five, decided upon trying his fortune in London, and there was no one to prevent him; through connections of his mother he got a footing as a tutor with the Hamiltons, Earls of Haddington, at East Barnet. While under their roof he began to combine some fragments of descriptive blank verse from a germ formed by a poem he had contributed to The Edinburgh Miscellany of 1720, grafted upon a MS. poem on Winter by his father's friend, Robert Riccaltoun. A bookseller was found to advance £3 upon it, and Winter was published in March, 1726. A second edition appeared in June, and The Seasons, as a complete whole, which he had not contemplated when he sat down to a blank verse "study" of a Scottish winter, grew out of its success. He proceeded with Summer as the antithesis of Winter. Spring followed in 1728, and the scheme was brought to a glorious conclusion with Autumn and the final Hymn in 1730. Between this date and 1746 he re