and "Autumn," in "Sophonisba," and in his “Poem to the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton." In all these may be traced an extensive acquaintance with general history and the narratives of recent travellers, with mental philosophy, natural history, astronomy, &c. He must either have been a most discursive reader while a resident in the University, or had subsequently acquired the happy art of accumulating all available knowledge, and of holding the choice materials in store till emergent occasions might demand their tasteful appropriation.

I.-Page xxi.

Strong Characteristics of Originality in Thomson's Poetry,' Is confirmation of Murdoch's high character of our author's poetry, I append the recorded opinions of two eminent critics, Dr. Samuel Johnson and Dr. Joseph Warton.

I. DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON.

As a writer he is entitled to one praise of the highest kind; his mode of thinking, and of expressing his thoughts, is original. His blank verse is no more the blank verse of Milton, or of any other poet, than the rhymes of Prior are the rhymes of Cowley. His numbers, his pauses, his diction, are of his own growth, without transcription, without imita tion. He thinks in a peculiar train, and he thinks always as a man of genius; he looks round on Nature and on Life with the eye which Nature bestows only on a poet; the eye that distinguishes, in every thing presented to its view, whatever there is on which Imagination can delight to be detained; and with a mind that at once comprehends the vast, and attends to the minute. The reader of the 'Seasons' wonders that he never saw before what Thomson shows him, and that he never yet has felt what Thomson impresses.

His is one of the works in which blank verse seems properly used. Thomson's wide expansion of general views, and his enumeration of circumstantial varieties, would have been obstructed and embarrassed by the frequent intersection of the sense, which are the necessary effects of rhyme.

His seriptions of extended scenes and general effects bing before us the whole magnificence of Nature, whether jersa tie, aw dreadful. The gaiety of Spring, the splendour

of Summer, the tranquillity of Autumn, and the horror of Winter, take in their turns possession of the mind. The poet leads us through the appearances of things as they are successively varied by the vicissitudes of the year, and imparts to us so much of his own enthusiasm, that our thoughts expand with his imagery, and kindle with his sentiments. Nor is the naturalist without his part in the entertainment; for he is assisted to recollect and to com bine, to range his discoveries, and to amplify the sphere of his contemplation.

The great defect of the "Seasons" is want of method; but for this I know not that there was any remedy. Of many appearances subsisting all at once, no rule can be given why one should be mentioned before another; yet the memory wants the help of order, and the curiosity is not excited by suspense or expectation.

His diction is in the highest degree florid and luxuriant, such as may be said to be to his images and thoughts "both their lustre and their shade;" such as invest them with splendour, through which perhaps they are not always easily discerned. It is too exuberant, and sometimes may be charged with filling the ear more than the mind.-JOHNSON'S "Lives of the Poets," pp. 237-239.

II. DR. JOSEPH WARTON.

Ir would be unpardonable to conclude these remarks on descriptive poesy, without taking notice of the "Seasons" of Thomson, who had peculiar and powerful talents for this species of composition. Let the reader, therefore, pardon a digression, if such it be, on his merits and character.

Thomson was blessed with a strong and copious fancy he hath enriched poetry with a variety of new and original images, which he painted from nature itself, and from his own actual observations: his descriptions have, therefore, a distinctness and truth, which are utterly wanting to those of poets who have only copied from each other, and have never looked abroad on the objects themselves. Thomson was accustomed to wander away into the country for days, and for weeks, attentive to "each rural sight, each rural sound;" while many a poet, who has dwelt for years in the Strand, has attempted to describe fields and rivers, and generally succeeded accordingly. Hence that nauseous repetition of the same circumstances; hence that disgusting

impropriety of introducing what may be called "a set of hereditary images," without proper regard to the age, or climate, or occasion, in which they were formerly used. Though the diction of the "Seasons" is sometimes harsh and inharmonious, and sometimes turgid and obscure, and though, in many instances, the numbers are not sufficiently diversified by different pauses, yet is this poem, on the whole, from the numberless strokes of nature in which it abounds, one of the most captivating and amusing in our language; and which, as its beauties are not of a transitory kind, as depending on particular customs and manners, will ever be perused with delight. The scenes of Thomson are frequently as wild and romantic as those of Salvator Rosa, varied with precipices and torrents, and "castled cliffs," and deep valleys, with piny mountains, and the gloomiest caverns. Innumerable are the little circumstances in his descriptions totally unobserved by all his predecessors. What poet hath ever taken notice of the leaf, that, towards the end of autumn,

Incessant rustles from the mournful grove,
Oft startling such as, studious, walk below,
And slowly circles through the waving air?

Or who, in speaking of a summer evening, hath ever mentioned

The quail that clamours for his running mate?

Or the following natural image at the same time of the year?

Wide o'er the thistly lawn, as swells the breeze,
A whitening shower of vegetable down

Amusive floats.........

In what other poet do we find the silence and expectation that precedes an April shower insisted on, as in verse 165 of "Spring?" Or where,

The stealing shower is scarce to patter heard, By such as wander through the forest walks, Beneath the' umbrageous multitude of leaves? How full, particular, and picturesque, is this assemblage of circumstances that attend a very keen frost in a night of winter!

Loud rings the frozen earth, and hard reflects

A double noise; while at his evening watch

The village dog deters the nightly thief;
The heifer lows; the distant water-fall

Swells in the breeze; and with the hasty tread
Of traveller, the hollow-sounding plain

Shakes from afar.

Ivii

In no one subject are common writers more confused and
unmeaning, than in their descriptions of rivers, which are
generally said only to wind and to murmur, while their
qualities and courses are seldom accurately marked. Ex-
amine the exactness of the ensuing description, and consider
what a perfect idea it communicates to the mind:

Around the adjoining brook, that purls along
The vocal grove, now fretting o'er a rock,
Now scarcely moving through a reedy pool,
Now starting to a sudden stream, and now
Gently diffused into a limpid plain;

A various group the herds and flocks compose,
Rural confusion.

A group worthy the pencil of Giacomo da Bassano, and so
minutely delineated, that he might have worked from this
sketch:

..On the grassy bank

Some ruminating lie; while others stand
Half in the flood, and often bending sip
The circling surface

He adds, that the ox, in the middle of them,

.......From his sides

The troublous insects lashes, to his sides
Returning still.

A natural circumstance, that, to the best of my remem-
brance, hath escaped even the natural Theocritus. Nor do
I recollect that any poet hath been struck with the mur-
murs of the numberless insects that swarm abroad at the
noon of a summer's day: as attendants of the evening, in-
deed, they have been mentioned:

Resounds the living surface of the ground:

Nor undelightful is the ceaseless hum

To him who muses through the woods at noon;
Or drowsy shepherd, as he lies reclined

With half-shut eyes.

But the novelty and nature we admire in the descriptions of Thomson, are by no means his only excellencies; he is equally to be praised for impressing on our minds the effects which the scene delineated would have on the present spectator or hearer. Thus having spoken of the roaring I the savages in a wilderness of Africa, he introduces a

captive, who, though just escaped from prison and slavery under the tyrant of Morocco, is so terrified and astonished at the dreadful uproar, that

The wretch half wishes for his bonds again.

Thus also having described a caravan lost and overwhelmed in one of those whirlwinds that so frequently agitate and lift up the whole sands of the desert, he finishes his picture by adding, that,

..In Cairo's crowded streets,

The' impatient merchant, wondering waits in vain,
And Mecca saddens at the long delay.

And thus, lastly, in describing the pestilence that destroyed the British troops at the siege of Carthagena, he has used a circumstance inimitably lively, picturesque, and striking to the imagination; for he says, that the admiral not only heard the groans of the sick that echoed from ship to ship, but that he also pensively stood, and listened at midnight to the dashing of the waters, occasioned by throwing the dead bodies into the sea;

Heard, nightly, plunged into the sullen waves,
The frequent corse.........

A minute and particular enumeration of circumstances judiciously selected, is what chiefly discriminates poetry from history, and renders the former, for that reason, a more close and faithful representation of nature than the latter. And if our poets would accustom themselves to contemplate fully every object, before they attempted to describe it, they would not fail of giving their readers more new and more complete images than they generally do.

These observations on Thomson, which, however, would not have been so large, if there had been already any con siderable criticism on his character, might be still augmented by an examination and developement of the beauties in the loves of the birds, in "Spring," verse 580; a view of the torrid zone in "Summer," verse 630; the rise of fountains and rivers in "Autumn," verse 781; a man perishing in the snows, in "Winter," verse 277; the wolves descending from the Alps, and a view of winter within the polar circle, verse 389; which are all of them highly-finished originals, excepting a few of those blemishes intimated above. "Winter" is, in my apprehension, the most valuable of these four poems; the