:

he found a character that he liked, and whose attendance was to be obtained, he ordered him to his house and from the fields he brought into his painting-room stumps of trees, weeds, and animals of various kinds; and designed them, not from memory, but immediately from the objects. He even framed a kind of model of landscapes on his table, composed of broken stones, dried herbs, and pieces of looking-glass, which he magnified and improved into rocks, trees, and water. How far this latter practice may be useful in giving hints, the professors of landscape can best determine."

It was, doubtless, through his lifelong companionship with Johnson, Burke, and Goldsmith that Reynolds learned to write in the English language only a little less brilliantly than they.

CHAPTER X

THE POETS OF THE DECADENCE

THERE is no section of our national poetry so sterile, so unstimulating, as that which we have now reached, the poetry of the third quarter of the eighteenth century. Compared even with the period which immediately preceded it, although that was not greatly inspired, it is singularly dull, mechanical, and dusty. There is nothing here so majestic as the odes of Gray or so tender as those of Collins-nothing to challenge comparison with the frank nature-study of Thomson. Names there are in plenty, names of poets not yet utterly discrowned, but on whose brows the laurel is growing very thin and brittle. The greatest of the group is a noble prose-writer, who wrote graceful verses. The rest are either survivals, or else men with the light of the next age already dimly reflected in their faces. The most characteristic of them is scarcely a poet at all, but a versifier, who without charm or imagination, summed up all that the mere tradition of poetic art in the eighteenth century could teach an extremely clever artisan. In the verses of Erasmus Darwin the classic style found itself unsurpassed, and, in that direction, fortunately unsurpassable. As the century approached its close, a newer and a nobler choir of true poetic voices began to be heard, not always to be distinguished at the outset from the hard see-saw of the older generation, yet for ears attuned bringing real music in the Village of Crabbe, and the Poetical Sketches of Blake, both in 1783, the Table-Talk of Cowper

(1785), and Burns's Kilmarnock volume of 1786. But the pleasant task of touching this revival is left to my successor.

How very rapidly what was living and organic in Collins and Gray became fossilised may be seen by examining the frigid work in verse of the physician, Mark Akenside (1721-1770). This writer was the son of a butcher in Newcastle-on-Tyne, where, at the age of sixteen, and still at school, he published The Virtuoso, a poem in Spenserian stanza, which preceded in publicity both Thomson's and Shenstone's efforts in that form, the honour of reviving which should therefore rest with Akenside. In 1744, on his way from Edinburgh to complete his medical studies in Holland, he published his Pleasures of Imagination in London; his Odes appeared in 1745; and in 1746 his Hymn to the Naiads. He was at the latter date only in his twenty-fifth year, but he wrote no more poetry of importance, and is to be classed with those in whom the lyric vein is early stanched. Akenside became a distinguished member of the Royal Society, a writer of valuable physiological treatises, and a leading hospital physician. The first edition of the Pleasures of the Imagination was anonymous, and in three books of cold and stately blank verse. In the prose

'design," Akenside mentioned Addison, from whom he had borrowed much, but not Shaftesbury, to whom he owed his entire philosophical groundwork. Akenside thought that "the separation of the works of imagination from philosophy" was a very undesirable thing, and he determined to unite the theories of the Characteristics with his own strenuous verse. The result was not wholly unlucky, but the world has preferred to take its Shaftesbury undiluted with blank verse; Akenside afterwards re-wrote his poem, without improving it. His odes are icy-cold, and full of elegance rather than beauty; his Hymn to the Naiads is usually held, and with good cause, to be his best poem, the most graceful, the most sculpturesque specimen of his blank verse. It closes thus:

"He, perchance, the gifts

Of young Lyæus, and the dread exploits,
May sing in aptest numbers: he the fate

Of sober Pentheus, he the Paphian rites,
And naked Mars with Cytherea chained,
And strong Alcides in the spinster's robes,
May celebrate, applauded. But with you,
O Naiads, far from that unhallowed rout,
Must dwell the man whoe'er to praised themes
Invokes the immortal Muse. The immortal Muse
To your calm habitations, to the cave
Corycian, or the Delphic mount, will guide
His footsteps; and with your unsullied streams
His lips will bathe: whether the eternal lore
Of Themis, or the majesty of Jove,

To mortals he reveal; or teach his lyre

The unenvied guerdon of the patriot's toils,

In those unfading islands of the blessed,

Where sacred bards abide. Hail, honoured Nymphs!

Akenside was not without influence on poetic style, and he possessed a direct disciple in the early writings of T. L. Peacock. At his very best Akenside is sometimes like a sort of frozen Keats. Two exact contemporaries of Akenside claim mention here only on the strength of one fine lyric apiece-James Grainger (1721-1766), a didactic West Indian sugar-planting physician, having published in 1755 an Ode to Solitude, before he began to sing of canes and swains in tedious couplets; and Francis Fawkes (1721-1777), being the author of "The Brown Jug," printed among his Original Poems of 1761:

"Dear Tom, this brown jug that now foams with mild ale
(In which I will drink to sweet Nan of the Vale)

Was once Toby Fillpot, a thirsty old soul

As e'er drank a bottle, or fathom'd a bowl;
In boosing about 'twas his praise to excel,
And among jolly topers he bore off the bell.

"It chanc'd as in dog-days he sat at his ease

In his flower-woven arbour as gay as you please,

With a friend and a pipe puffing sorrows away,
And with honest old stingo was soaking his clay,
His breath-doors of life on a sudden were shut,
And he died full as big as a Dorchester butt.
"His body, when long in the ground it had lain,
And time into clay had resolv'd it again,

A potter found out in its covert so snug,

And with part of fat Toby he form'd this brown jug,
Now sacred to friendship, and mirth, and mild ale;
So here's to my lovely sweet Nan of the Vale."

Fawkes was distinguished as a translator of the classics, and he had the complaisance to render into English the Latin poems of his friend Christopher Smart (1722-1770). Throughout his own century, Smart received no other honours, and his forlorn reputation has only very recently been lifted out of the limbo where it was lying with that of the Langhornes and the Merricks. In no existing history of literature does Smart receive anything like his due need of attention, as being, in a dreary age of versifiers, a very original, if somewhat crazy and unbalanced poet. He went to Pembroke College, Cambridge, in 1738, and remained there until 1754, when he lost his fellowship through the fact of his marriage having been discovered. Of his eccentric and disreputable ways in college we find traces in the letters of Gray, who was resident with him for a long time at Pembroke, and who describes him as graduating for Bedlam or a jail. After having tested the merits of either kind of asylum, however, in 1752 Smart pulled himself together, and published a collection of his Poems, a handsome quarto, containing, besides some sixteen odes in following of Gray, a didactic Hop-Garden, in two books of Thomsonian blank verse, a masque, and some miscellaneous ballads. These pieces are all mediocre, although illuminated here and there with flashes of gorgeous phraseology. In 1753 Smart published The Hilliad, a conceited satire on Dr. John Hill, who had somewhat severely reviewed Smart's odes. This poem is chiefly notable as having probably suggested the form and the title of the much more famous Rolliad (1785) of Lawrence and