speak to a parishioner on some important business, he was very unwilling to leave the ladies, and, on being almost driven into the house by their gentle violence, he thus addressed them:

"Thus Adam once at God's command was driven
From Paradise by angels sent from heaven;
Like him I go, and yet to go am loath;

Like him I go, for angels drove us both.

Hard was his fate, but mine still more unkind,

His Eve went with him, but mine stays behind.”

His wife died in 1741, and this, with other domestic grief, induced him to write the "Night Thoughts," which have been so justly celebrated. In them you will find much to admire, and no doubt you have quoted from them without being aware of it; but his style is so solemn, with a would-be sublimity that too often approaches bombastic unmeaningness, and there is such a lack of connection, and sometimes of common-sense, that you will never be likely to read it continuously. He has given us many proverbs and quotable lines, which are familiar to all. For instance:

"Tired nature's sweet restorer, balmy sleep."
"Procrastination is the thief of time."

"All men think all men mortal but themselves."

"How blessings brighten as they take their flight!"
"That life is long which answers life's great end."

"Death loves a shining mark-a signal blow."

His last days, like those of too many of our great men, were sad and solitary. He is said to have been tyrannized over by a virago of a housekeeper, who drove his only son from his door, and kept him constantly unhappy. He died in 1765, at the age of eighty-four.

His life was a curious contrast of worldliness and piety, luxury and devotion. His affections seemed always divided between God and Mammon. His book would hardly make us happier or better; his morality is often little better than prudence, and his gloomy truisms often sadden without improving. It is not advisable to give full expression to morbid feelings in prose or verse.

When Young, whose very name seems incongruous, was composing his "Thoughts," he would either ramble alone among the tombs, or sit in a darkened room, dimly lighted by candles.

Give me the author who loves to write in the sunshine among the flowers; whose object is to soothe and cheer, as well as instruct. One of our own poets has spoken in a higher and more blessed strain, making us feel that there are "Voices of the Night" which elevate and console:

"O holy Night! from thee I learn to bear

What man has borne before.

Thou layest thy finger on the lips of Care,
And they complain no more."

Yet we should not be too severe, for we cannot fail to find much in the character and writings of Young worthy of our admiration, and will close this sketch with the words of his biographer, Johnson, who says: "In spite of all his defects, he was a genius and a poet."

AFTER Young, comes the fat, lazy Scotchman, JAMES THOMSON, Whom we always think of as author of "The Seasons."

His father was a good minister of Ednam, in Roxburghshire, and there, in 1700, James was born. The good man's family being rather large, nine children in all, he found it as much as he could do to feed and clothe them, without thinking much of education, and another minister, who lived near (perhaps not blessed with so many olive-branches), finding James a clever boy, offered to take him home, and provide him with all the books he

needed. At school, he was not thought a prodigy, excelling in no one study. But in those early days, he used to scribble poetry to amuse his kind friend and his playfellows; yet never was quite satisfied with his rhymes, looking them over every New-Year's-Day, only to throw them all into the fire. His friends wanted him to be a minister, and he was fitting for this profession at Edinburgh, with no other prospect for the future than the laborious life of a country parson, when he one day astonished his grave professor and charmed the class with a remarkably beautiful paraphrase of a psalm. His teacher blamed him for using language so fine as not to be understood by common people, but he cared more for the applause of his young friends than the censure of the grave doctor, and, coming to the conclusion that he was, by nature, more of a poet than preacher, gave up his studies, and soon went to London to seek his fortune. This was rather a bold step for a green, awkward youth, with neither money nor friends, and success did not smile on him at first, as you

shall see.

He had secured several letters of recommendation to persons who could have helped him greatly, and had tied them carefully in the corner of his handkerchief, but London streets and London sights so dazzled and dazed the young Scotchman, that they were quietly taken from his pocket, with every thing else of value there, while he was gaping along, quite forgetting what had sent him to so wonderful a place. He was so poor, that he was not able to buy a pair of shoes, which he really needed. "But, never mind," thought our raw countryman, "I have something in my head worth more than all the shoes in the city." But light did not come at once to the young adventurer. He offered the manuscript of "Winter" to several publishers, but no one cared to take it; at last he found one, who bought it at a ridiculously low price-and then regretted

that he had not refused it. It appeared in print in 1726. All that Thomson now needed was a patron. In those days it was not only politic, but absolutely necessary, for success, that the poets should cram some rich or powerful man with graceful, high-flown compliments, until (with very much the same effect as the flattery of the wily fox in Æsop's Fables" had upon the silly crow, who soon drops the coveted bit of cheese), they open the pursestrings of the delighted magnate, and climb rapidly into favor. Thomson received, in this easy way, twenty guineas for a dedication to Sir Spencer Compton, of the poem, for which his publisher had thought three guineas a good recompense.

The appearance of "Winter" was a new sensation in the literary world. Dame Nature had been comparatively neglected for a long time. All the great poets, from Chaucer to Milton, had loved to commune with her, but, as Hare says, "When Milton lost his eyes, Poetry lost hers," and soon came the artificial school, where mountain and meadow and moonlight, and "all the forest music of an English landscape," were forgotten, and man and the town, the drawing-room and candle-light, usurped their place.

Poets looked at Nature through the spectacles of books. "It was as though a number of eyes had been set in a row, like boys playing at leap-frog, each hinder one having to look through all that stood before it, and, hence seeing Nature, not as it is in itself, but refracted and distorted by a number of more or less turbid media. Ever and anon, too, some one would be seized with the ambition of surpassing his predecessors, and would try by a feat at leap-eye, to get before them; in so doing, however, from ignorance of the ground, he mostly stumbled and fell. Making an impotent effort after originality, he would attempt to vary the combination of words in which