Richard Jago (1715-81), son of a Warwickshire rector, was a servitor at University College, Oxford (where Shenstone, then a commoner, was his intimate friend), and became vicar of Snitterfield near Stratford-on-Avon. He wrote an elegy on The Blackbirds (1753); Edgehill, or the Rural Prospect Delineated and Moralised (1767); Labour and Genius, or the Mill-Stream and the Cascade, a Fable (1768); Adam, an oratorio (mainly from Paradise Lost), and other poetical pieces, all collected and published in one volume in 1784.

Absence.

With leaden foot Time creeps along,

While Delia is away;

With her, nor plaintive was the song,
Nor tedious was the day.

Ah! envious power, reverse my doom,
Now double thy career;
Strain every nerve, stretch every plume,
And rest them when she's here.

Thomas Blacklock (1721-91), the blind poet, attracted sympathy and interest, but, though he was an amiable and excellent man, his verse is almost wholly tame, languid, and commonplace. The son of a Cumberland bricklayer who had settled at Annan in Dumfriesshire, he completely lost his sight by smallpox when only six months old; but his worthy father, assisted by neighbours, amused his solitary boyhood by reading to him; and before he was twenty he was familiar with Spenser, Milton, Pope, Addison, Thomson, and Allan Ramsay, from whom he largely derived his images and impressions of nature and natural objects. His father was accidentally killed when the studious youth was about nineteen; but Dr Stevenson, an Edinburgh physician, having seen some of his attempts at verse, brought their blind author to the Scottish capital, where he was enrolled as a student of divinity. In 1746 he published a volume of his poems, which was reprinted with additions in 1754 and 1756. He was licensed in 1759, and in 1762 was by the Earl of Selkirk nominated minister of Kirkcudbright. But the parishioners were opposed both to Church patronage in the abstract and to this exercise of it in favour of a blind man, and the poet relinquished the appointment for an annuity. He now resided in Edinburgh, and took in boarders, but suffered from depression of spirits, supposing that his powers were failing him; his generous ardour in 1786 on behalf of Burns showed no diminution of taste or sensibility. He published some sermons and theological treatises, and an article on Blindness for the Encyclopædia Britannica.

Terrors of a Guilty Conscience.
Cursed with unnumbered groundless fears,
How pale yon shivering wretch appears!
For him the daylight shines in vain,
For him the fields no joys contain;
Nature's whole charms to him are lost,
No more the woods their music boast;

No more the meads their vernal bloom,
No more the gales their rich perfume:
Impending mists deform the sky,
And beauty withers in his eye.
In hopes his terror to elude,
By day he mingles with the crowd,
Yet finds his soul to fears a prey,
In busy crowds and open day.

If night his lonely walks surprise,
What horrid visions round him rise!
The blasted oak which meets his way,
Shewn by the meteor's sudden ray,
The midnight murderer's lone retreat
Felt heaven's avengeful bolt of late;
The clashing chain, the groan profound,
Loud from yon ruined tower resound;
And now the spot he seems to tread,
Where some self-slaughtered corse was laid;
He feels fixed earth beneath him bend,
Deep murmurs from her caves ascend;
Till all his soul, by fancy swayed,
Sees livid phantoms crowd the shade.

Ode to Aurora on Melissa's Birthday.
Of time and nature eldest born,
Emerge, thou rosy-fingered morn;
Emerge, in purest dress arrayed,

And chase from heaven night's envious shade,
That I once more may pleased survey,
And hail Melissa's natal day.

Of time and nature eldest born,
Emerge, thou rosy-fingered morn;
In order at the eastern gate
The hours to draw thy chariot wait;
Whilst Zephyr on his balmy wings,
Mild nature's fragrant tribute brings,
With odours sweet to strew thy way,
And grace the bland revolving day.

But, as thou lead'st the radiant sphere,
That gilds its birth and marks the year,
And as his stronger glories rise,
Diffused around the expanded skies,
Till clothed with beams serenely bright,
All heaven's vast concave flames with light;

So when, through life's protracted day,
Melissa still pursues her way,
Her virtues with thy splendour vie,
Increasing to the mental eye;
Though less conspicuous, not less dear,
Long may thy Bion's prospect cheer;
So shall his heart no more repine,

Blessed with her rays, though robbed of thine.

Of this ode Henry Mackenzie said it was a compliment and tribute of affection to the tender assiduity of an excellent wife, which I have not anywhere seen more happily conceived or more elegantly expressed.'

Sir William Blackstone (1723-80), a Londoner born, made choice of the law for his profession, entered himself a student of the Middle Temple, and took formal leave of poetry in verses published in Dodsley's Miscellany. But though he had forsaken his muse, he still-like Charles Lamb, when he had given up the use of the 'great

plant' tobacco-'loved to live in the suburbs of her graces.' Blackstone, who was called to the Bar in 1746, became Vinerian Professor of Law at Oxford, where he delivered the lectures afterwards published as the famous Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-69). After refusing the SolicitorGeneralship, he was knighted, and died a judge in the Court of Common Pleas. The Commentaries that arose out of his lectures as first professor of English law at Oxford (the Civil or Roman law had always been taught) were the first attempt to popularise and systematise the law of England. Though he had not an original or independent mind, and was not profoundly versed in either Civil or Common law, he produced an unequalled compendium of what was known on his chosen subject, admirably written in a style always clear and generally dignified, though somewhat formal. Junius attacked him for leaning too much to the side of prerogative, and abiding rather by precedents than by sense and justice; Priestley protested against his statement and defence of the law as against Dissenters; and Bentham later assailed his view on the nature of law in general. But the work took, maintained an unique place in English law, and erelong was cited not as a mere statement of the law, but as an original authority. As the standard exposition it was edited and re-edited (down to 1840 in England, to 1884 in the United States); and even modern statements are in part adaptations of Blackstone, who thus sums up the relative merits of an elective and hereditary monarchy:

now

It must be owned, an elective monarchy seems to be the most obvious and best suited of any to the rational principles of government and the freedom of human nature; and accordingly, we find from history that, in the infancy and first rudiments of almost every state, the leader, chief-magistrate, or prince hath usually been elective. And if the individuals who compose that state could always continue true to first principles, uninfluenced by passion or prejudice, unassailed by corrup tion, and unawed by violence, elective succession were as much to be desired in a kingdom as in other inferior communities. The best, the wisest, and the bravest man would then be sure of receiving that crown which his endowments have merited; and the sense of an unbiassed majority would be dutifully acquiesced in by the few who were of different opinions. But history and observation will inform us that elections of every kind, in the present state of human nature, are too frequently brought about by influence, partiality, and artifice; and even where the case is otherwise, these practices will be often suspected, and as constantly charged upon the successful, by a splenetic disappointed minority. This is an evil to which all societies are liable; as well those of a private and domestic kind, as the great community of the public, which regulates and

includes the rest.

But in the former there is this advan

tage, that such suspicions, if false, proceed no further than jealousies and murmurs, which time will effectually suppress; and, if true, the injustice may be remedied by legal means, by an appeal to those tribunals to which every member of society has (by becoming such) virtu

ally engaged to submit. Whereas, in the great and independent society which every nation composes, there is no superior to resort to but the law of nature; no method to redress the infringements of that law but the actual exertion of private force. As, therefore, between two nations complaining of mutual injuries, the quarrel can only be decided by the law of arms, so in one and the same nation, when the fundamental principles of their common union are supposed to be invaded, and more especially when the appointment of their chiefmagistrate is alleged to be unduly made, the only tribunal to which the complainants can appeal is that of the God of battles; the only process by which the appeal can be carried on is that of a civil and intestine war. A hereditary succession to the crown is therefore now established in this and most other countries, in order to prevent that periodical bloodshed and misery which the history of ancient imperial Rome and the more modern experience of Poland and Germany may show us are the consequences of elective kingdoms.

The Lawyer's Farewell to his Muse.
As by some tyrant's stern command
A wretch forsakes his native land,
In foreign climes condemned to roam
An endless exile from his home;
Pensive he treads the destined way,
And dreads to go; nor dares to stay;
Till on some neighbouring mountain's brow
He stops, and turns his eyes below;
There, melting at the well-known view,
Drops a last tear, and bids adieu :
So I, thus doomed from thee to part,
Gay queen of fancy and of art,
Reluctant move, with doubtful mind,
Oft stop, and often look behind.
Companion of my tender age,
Serenely gay, and sweetly sage,
How blithesome we were wont to rove,
By verdant hill or shady grove,
Where fervent bees, with humming voice,
Around the honied oak rejoice,
And aged elms with awful bend,
In long cathedral walks extend !
Lulled by the lapse of gliding floods,
Cheered by the warbling of the woods,
How blest my days, my thoughts how free,
In sweet society with thee!

Then all was joyous, all was young,
And years unheeded rolled along :
But now the pleasing dream is o'er,
These scenes must charm me now no more;
Lost to the fields, and torn from you-
Farewell!-a long, a last adieu.

Me wrangling courts, and stubborn law,
To smoke, and crowds, and cities draw:
There selfish faction rules the day,
And pride and avarice throng the way;
Diseases taint the murky air,
And midnight conflagrations glare;
Loose Revelry, and Riot bold,
In frighted streets their orgies hold;
Or, where in silence all is drowned,
Fell Murder walks his lonely round;
No room for peace, no room for you;
Adieu, celestial nymph, adieu!

Shakspeare, no more, thy sylvan son,

Nor all the art of Addison,

Pope's heaven-strung lyre, nor Waller's ease,
Nor Milton's mighty self must please:
Instead of these, a formal band

In furs and coifs around me stand;
With sounds uncouth and accents dry,

That grate the soul of harmony,
Each pedant sage unlocks his store
Of mystic, dark, discordant lore,

And points with tottering hand the ways
That lead me to the thorny maze.
There, in a winding close retreat,
Is Justice doomed to fix her seat;
There, fenced by bulwarks of the law,

She keeps the wondering world in awe;
And there, from vulgar sight retired,
Like Eastern queens, is more admired.
Oh, let me pierce the secret shade
Where dwells the venerable maid!
There humbly mark, with reverent awe,
The guardian of Britannia's law;
Unfold with joy her sacred page,
The united boast of many an age;
Where mixed, yet uniform, appears
The wisdom of a thousand years.
In that pure spring the bottom view,
Clear, deep, and regularly true;
And other doctrines thence imbibe
Than lurk within the sordid scribe;
Observe how parts with parts unite
In one harmonious rule of right;
See countless wheels distinctly tend
By various laws to one great end;
While mighty Alfred's piercing soul
Pervades and regulates the whole.
Then welcome business, welcome strife,
Welcome the cares, the thorns of life,
The visage wan, the pore-blind sight,
The toil by day, the lamp at night,
The tedious forms, the solemn prate,
The pert dispute, the dull debate,
The drowsy bench, the babbling hall,
For thee, fair Justice, welcome all !
Thus though my noon of life be past,
Yet let my setting sun, at last,
Find out the still, the rural cell,
Where sage retirement loves to dwell!
There let me taste the home-felt bliss
Of innocence and inward peace;
Untainted by the guilty bribe,
Uncursed amid the harpy tribe;
No orphan's cry to wound my ear;
My honour and my conscience clear.
Thus may I calmly meet my end,

Thus to the grave in peace descend.

Albania was one of two Scottish descriptive poems (The Clyde the other) belonging to this period, which were reprinted in 1803 in John Leyden's collection. Albania, an anonymous work of two hundred and ninety-six lines in blank verse, in praise of Scotland, was published in London in 1737, its author apparently being a Scottish minister who had lately died young. Aaron Hill prefixed some highly encomiastic lines

to the editor, but the little volume seems to have remained unnoticed and unknown till 1783, when Dr Beattie, in one of his Essays on Poetry and Music, quoted a picturesque passage, praised also by Sir Walter Scott, which describes 'invisible hunting,' a superstition formerly prevalent in the Highlands, and not unknown elsewhere.

The Invisible Hunting.

E'er since of old the haughty thanes of Ross
(So to the simple swain tradition tells)
Were wont, with clans and ready vassals thronged,
To wake the bounding stag or guilty wolf,
There oft is heard at midnight or at noon,
Beginning faint, but rising still more loud
And nearer, voice of hunters, and of hounds,
And horns hoarse-winded, blowing far and keen;
Forthwith the hubbub multiplies, the gale
Labours with wilder shrieks, and rifer din
Of hot pursuit, the broken cry of deer
Mangled by throttling dogs, the shouts of men,
And hoofs thick beating on the hollow hill.
Sudden the grazing heifer in the vale

Starts at the noise, and both the herdsman's ears
Tingle with inward dread. Aghast he eyes
The mountain's height, and all the ridges round,
Yet not one trace of living wight discerns;
Nor knows, o'erawed, and trembling as he stands,
To what or whom he owes his idle fear,
To ghost, to witch, to fairy, or to fiend,
But wonders, and no end of wondering finds.

The

John Wilson (1720-89), parish schoolmaster at Lesmahagow and Greenock, was the author of The Clyde, another descriptive poem included by Leyden in the same volume with Albania. In 1767 the magistrates and minister of Greenock, before they admitted Wilson to the superintendence of the grammar-school, stipulated that he abandon the profane and unprofitable art of poemmaking'! He complied, burned his unfinished manuscripts, and faithfully kept his word. world probably lost little through the barbarism of the Greenock functionaries. For though Wilson had a good command of the heroic couplet, a keen love for scenery, and in the Clyde produced what Leyden called 'the first loco-descriptive poem of any merit,' he had none of the originality of the true 'maker'—as will be seen from the challenge to Forth, quoted below. The Clyde, which extends to nearly two thousand lines, was published in 1764, along with a 'dramatic sketch,' Earl Douglas, which in its original form Wilson had issued in 1760.

Boast not, great Forth, thy broad majestic tide,
Beyond the graceful modesty of Clyde ;
Though famed Mæander, in the poet's dream,
Ne'er led through fairer field his wandering stream.
Bright wind thy mazy links on Stirling's plain,
Which oft departing, still returns again;
And wheeling round and round in sportive mood,
The nether stream turns back to meet the upper flood.
Now sunk in shades, now bright in open day,
Bright Clyde in simple beauty winds his way.

William Wilkie (1721-72), author of The Epigoniad, was a native of Echlin in Dalmeny parish, Linlithgowshire, and sometime minister of Ratho. In 1759 he was elected Professor of Natural Philosophy in the University of St Andrews. He was described as a very absentminded, eccentric person, who wore as many clothes as tradition assigns to the gravedigger in Hamlet on the stage, and who used to lie in bed with two dozen pair of blankets above him. According to David Hume, Wilkie's Homeric studies were also conducted on an eccentric method. The Scottish farmers near Edinburgh were very much troubled, Hume reported, with wood-pigeons, and Wilkie's father planted him often as a scarecrow (an office for which he is well qualified) in the midst of his fields of wheat. He carried out his Homer with him, together with a table, and pen and ink, and a great rusty gun. He composed and wrote two or three lines, till a flock of pigeons settled in the field, then rose up, ran towards them, and fired at them; returned again to his former station, and added a rhyme or two more, till he met with a fresh interruption.' The Epigoniad, a Poem in nine Books, published in 1757, deals with the fortunes of the Epigoni, the sons of the seven heroes who led the expedition against Thebes ; it was founded on part of the fourth book of the Iliad, and in style modelled on Pope's Homer. Though marvellously popular in Scotland, it had few readers in England. A somewhat depreciatory notice of it in the Critical Review drew forth a long reply from David Hume, in which he speaks of its six thousand lines as 'abounding in sublime beauties,' and conceived so thoroughly in the spirit of Homer as 'would almost lead us to imagine that the Scottish bard had found a lost manuscript of that father of poetry, and had read a faithful translation of it into English.' Here obviously (as in Hume's laudation of Home's Douglas) the warm-hearted friend predominated over the philosophical critic; as also when he pronounced the following description of the person and mission of Jealousy to be 'painted in the most splendid colours that poetry affords.' It is, however, vigorous and ingenious, and as good a specimen as could be offered of the powers of the 'Scottish Homer,' who also published a collection of fables in verse after the manner of Gay-one of them in his native vernacular.

Jealousy.

First to her feet the winged shoes she binds,
Which tread the air and mount the rapid winds:
Aloft they bear her through the ethereal plain,
Above the solid earth and liquid main :
Her arrows next she takes of pointed steel,
For sight too small, but terrible to feel :
Roused by their smart the savage lion roars,
And mad to combat rush the tusky boars,

Of wounds secure; for where their venom bites,
What feels their power all other torture slights.

A figured zone, mysteriously designed, Around her waist her yellow robe confined; There dark Suspicion lurked, of sable hue; There hasty Rage his deadly dagger drew; Pale Envy inly pined; and by her side Outrageous Phrenzy with his chains untied; Affronted Pride with thirst of vengeance burned, And Love's excess to deepest hatred turned. All these the artist's curious hand expressed, The work divine his matchless skill confessed. The virgin last around her shoulders flung The bow; and by her side the quiver hung; Then, springing up, her airy course she bends, For Thebes, and lightly o'er the tents descends. The son of Tydeus, 'midst his bands, she found In arms complete, reposing on the ground: And, as he slept, the hero thus addressed, Her form to fancy's waking eye expressed. Richard Gifford (1725-1807), vicar of Duffield in Derbyshire, rector of North Ockendon in Essex, and chaplain to the Marquis of Tweeddale, issued anonymously in 1753, through Dodsley, a poem called Contemplation, which attracted the attention of Johnson. The last of the stanzas quoted below, slightly altered, was quoted by Johnson in his Dictionary to illustrate the word 'wheel,' and was repeated by him to Boswell at Nairn. Southey was grateful to 'the great Cham of literature' for preserving the stanza, than which he says 'a sweeter was never composed.' Gifford, who was the son of a Shropshire clergyman and studied at Balliol, wrote on Kennicott and the True Life and on Priestley's views on matter and spirit, translated from Domesday, and contributed to the Gentleman's Magazine. In his Contemplation, he obviously copied or caught his tone and manner from Gray's Elegy. The poem consists of seventyone stanzas, and opens thus :

Dropt is the sable mantle of the night;
The early lark salutes the rising day,
And, while she hails the glad return of light,
Provokes each bard to join the raptured lay.

The music spreads through nature: while the flocks
Scatter their silver fleeces o'er the mead,
The jolly shepherd, 'mid the vocal rocks,
Pipes many a strain upon his oaten reed:

And sweetest Phoebe, she, whose rosy cheeks
Outglow the blushes of the ruddy morn,
All as her cows with eager step she seeks,
Vies with the tuneful thrush on yonder thorn.
Unknown to these each fair Aonian maid,
Their bosoms glow with Nature's truer fire;
Little, ye Sister-Nine, they need your aid
Whose artless breasts these living scenes inspire.
Even from the straw-roofed cot the note of joy
Flows full and frequent as the village fair,
Whose little wants the busy hours employ,
Chanting some rural ditty soothes her care.

Verse sweetens toil, however rude the sound,
She feels no biting pang the while she sings;
Nor, as she turns the giddy wheel around,
Revolves the sad vicissitude of things.

Tobias George Smollett

was by birth a gentleman and by training a doctor; he was something of a poet, and produced a superficial history; but as a novelist he is memorable. He was born at Dalquhurn House, near Renton in Dumbartonshire, and baptised on the 19th of March 1721. His father, a younger son of Sir James Smollett of Bonhill, judge and Scottish M.P., having died early, the poet was educated by his grandfather. After the usual course of study at the grammar school of Dumbarton and the University of Glasgow, Tobias was apprenticed to a medical practitioner in Glasgow. His apprenticeship expired, the young and sanguine adventurer proceeded to London, his chief dependence being a tragedy, The Regicide, on the assassination of James I. of Scotland. Foiled in his efforts to get it brought out at the theatres, he became surgeon's mate on board eighty - gun ship, and was present at the disastrous expedition against Carthagena described in

an

In 1753 his romance of Ferdinand Count Fathom was published, and in 1755 his translation of Den Quixote-based mainly on the earlier translation of Jervas, for Smollett's knowledge of Spanish was far from perfect. In 1756 he became editor of the Critical Review, which drew him into much acrid controversy. An attack on Admiral Knowles, one of the commanders at Carthagena, led to a trial for libel; and he was sentenced to pay a fine of £100, and suffered three months' imprisonment.

Roderick Random. He left the navy, and fell in love in Jamaica; and by 1744 was practising medicine in London. In 1746 and 1747 he published two short satires, Advice and Reproof; and in 1748 he gave to the world his novel of Roderick Random. Peregrine Pickle appeared three years afterwards, and made even a greater hit. Smollett failed as a physician in London and at Bath, and, taking a house at Chelsea, he devoted himself to literature as a profession, becoming by turns, as Thackeray said, 'reviewer and historian, critic, medical writer, poet and pamphleteer.' Spite of his laboriousness and literary facility, his life was one continual struggle for existence, embittered by personal quarrels brought on by his irritable temper. He quarrelled with relations, patrons, and literary rivals, and had fierce feuds with Lyttelton, Fielding, Churchill, Garrick, Akenside, Wilkes, and others.

a continuation to Hume.

In prison he consoled himself by writing his least

successful novel,

Launcelot Greaves

(1762). Another

proof of his facility and industry was his History of England, written, it was affirmed, in fourteen months (1756-57). The rate of production wholly precluded all thought of research, or even of conscientious study; and the work, essentially booksellers' hackwork, was severely and indignantly denounced by some critics. It is unequal in execution, and abounds in errors and inconsistencies. Its fate ultimately was to be truncated, and made to serve (from the Revolu

tion of 1688) as The Reprisal, a farce

of the sea, was fairly successful on the stage in 1757. He translated Gil Blas (1761), but it is doubtful whether he executed any part of the translation of The Works of M. Voltaire, published in 1761-70 under his name and that of Thomas Francklin. He compiled a Compendium of Voyages, and superintended and partly wrote a Universal History. Like Goldsmith, he showed extraordinary versatility; and, except Goldsmith, few writers with such an undeniably original vein of genius ever performed so large an amount of dismal drudgery and hackwork. For political discussion he was ill qualified by temper, and, taking the unpopular side, he was completely vanquished by the truculent satire and abuse of Wilkes.

His health was now shattered by sedentary labour, family trials, and worry. In 1747 he had