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DANCING ATTENDANCE ON A GREAT MAN.

299 valet, who may induce his Lordship to read the play and recommend it to a manager. One poor fellow, who had danced attendance thus upon a leading London manager for many months, at last grew sick of the constant drain upon his temper and his patience, and demanded his play again. It could not be found. Fruitless search was made, it was gone. And when the broken-spirited literary hack ventured to complain of such treatment, the irritated manager, thrusting his hands into a drawer, drew out a bundle of manuscript plays with, "Choose any three of these for your miserable scribble, and let me hear no more of it or you."

Equally trying to the spirit, and yet more galling in the abject humility it demanded, was the hanging on at a great man's door, or the waiting in a great man's hall to pluck my Lord by the sleeve as he passed to his carriage, and beg a subscription for a forthcoming volume of poetry or prose. Success in such an undertaking depended much upon the number of half-crowns the poor author could afford to invest in buying the good-will of the porter or confidential footman of His Grace or Sir John. Not even the highest literary man was free from this humiliation of cringing before the great. No book appeared without a fulsome dedication or flattering apostrophe addressed to some person of quality, as the phrase then went, whose footman came smirking to the author's dingy room a few days after publication with a present of five, or ten, or twenty guineas-the sum varying according to the amount of flattery laid on the belauded name, or perhaps oftener according to the run of luck which the gratified fashionable had happened to meet at the card-table of the night before.

In such miserable ways alone could the author of the eighteenth century eke out the poor pittance which the booksellers of the time-Tonson, Lintot, or Curll-could or did afford to pay for original works. But we must not suppose, as we might be led to suppose if we judged alone from the works of disappointed authors, that every London bookseller of the day was a kind of trading ogre, who fattened on the blood and brains of the writers he employed. The sale of books in general was small and slow. The circle of book-readers was narrow; but still narrower was the

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READING IN THE SHOP.

circle of book-buyers. Indeed many men never bought books at all; but when any work came out of which they wished to get a sight, they went to the bookseller's shop day after day, and for a small subscription obtained leave to read at the counter. Marking their page where they left off in the afternoon, they came back again and again, until the volume was finished. This practice, which crowded the shops and stalls of the booksellers a hundred years ago with a floating population of readers, laid the foundation of those useful circulating libraries and reading-clubs which so abound in modern days.

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EVERY one has read Thomson's Seasons; comparatively few have read his Castle of Indolence. Yet the latter is the finer piece of literary workmanship. The subject of the former comes home to every heart, we like to find our own thoughts and feelings pictured in the books we read; and so the poem of the Seasons, displaying in glittering blank-verse the changeful beauty of the year, has come to be read by old and young, and loved by all.

The poet's father was minister of Ednam in Roxburghshire; and there in 1700 James was born. Having received his elementary education at the Grammar School of Jedburgh, he became a student in the University of Edinburgh. Nothing of importance marked his progress there, until one day in the Divinity classroom he paraphrased a psalm in language so brilliantly figurative as to excite the wonder of the class and draw forth a rebuke from the professor, who cautioned him against the use of such highflown diction in the pulpit. This was the turning-point in the youth's career; forthwith he abandoned his studies for the Church, wrote poetry more diligently than before, and, upon the slightest encouragement from a friend, went to seek his fortune among the literary men of London.

A raw Scotchman, newly landed in London streets, was then the butt of every Cockney witling, and the sure prey of every city thief. Thomson did not escape; for as he gaped along the street, his letters of introduction, which he had carefully knotted into his handkerchief, were stolen from his pocket. But he did not de

302

1726

A.D.

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spair. When his poem of Winter, of which his friend Mallet thought very highly, was finished, he offered the manuscript to several booksellers without success; until at last a Mr. Millar bought it for three guineas. It appeared in 1726. Poets in those days, if they desired success, were forced, as we have just seen, to dance attendance on the great. Having selected some rich or powerful man, they wrote a dedication, crammed with compliments, which often drew from the flattered magnate a purse of guineas, far outweighing the niggard pay they got from their booksellers. Thomson in this way received twenty guineas from Sir Spencer Compton. Quickly "Winter" grew into public favour. One literary amateur and another read it, and buzzed the praises of the new poet everywhere. The panorama of the completed Seasons soon followed this success. Thomson tried his pen, too, upon tragedy; but Sophonisba perished from the stage in a few nights, killed by the echo of one weak line. "O Sophonisba! Sophonisba, O!"

wrote the poor poet;

"O Jemmy Thomson! Jemmy Thomson, O!"

cried some critical mocking-bird; and the mischief was done, for all London rang with a ready laugh.

In 1731 Thomson set out for the Continent, as tutor to the son of Sir Charles Talbot, afterwards Lord Chancellor. Having travelled through France, Switzerland, and Italy with his pupil, he returned to England and published a poem on Liberty, which he wrongly considered to be his greatest work. About the same time he received from his patron Talbot the easy place of Secretary of Briefs in Chancery. When the Chancellor died, the Secretary lost office; although it is said that he might have retained it by soliciting the favour of the incoming minister. The loss of this appointment drove the poet again to pen-work. He wrote for the stage two tragedies, which proved failures. But the Prince of Wales granted him a yearly pension of £100; and he was, besides, made Surveyor-General of the Leeward Islands,-from which office, after paying a man to do the work, he drew about £300 a year.

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So the fat and lazy poet found at last a snug haven in which to spend his few remaining days. A pretty cottage at Richmond, filled with good furniture and well supplied with wine and ale, was the last home of Thomson. There, lounging in his garden or his easy-chair, he brought to a close his greatest poem, The Castle of Indolence, lavishing on its polished lines the wealth of his ripened genius. This latest effort was published in May 1748. One day in the following August, after a sharp walk out of town, which heated him, he took a boat at Hammersmith for Kew. On the water he got chilled-neglected the slight cold, as many dobecame feverish—and in a few days was dead.

The plan and style of Thomson's Seasons are too well known to need much comment. Many fine episodes of human life relieve the stillness and deepen the interest of the ever-changing pictures of natural scenery which fill this beautiful poem. A certain roughness and crudity, disfiguring many passages of the original work, were removed by the poet, as years developed more fully his artistic skill. So many, indeed, were the changes and corrections, that the third edition of the "Seasons may be looked upon almost as a new work. Thomson's style becomes occasionally inflated and wordy; but, as to the ring of his blank-verse, it has been well said, that, with all its faults, it is his own-not the echo of another poet's song.

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"The Castle of Indolence," an allegory written in the stanza and the style of Spenser, affords a noble specimen of poetic art. No better illustration could be given of that wonderful linking of sound with sense, which critics call onomatopoeia. Stanza after stanza rolling its dreamy music on the ear, soothes us with a soft and sleepy charm. Like Tennyson's Lotus Eaters, the dwellers in this enchanted keep lie steeped in drowsy luxury. The good knight Industry breaks the magician's spell; but (alas for the moral teaching of the allegory!) we have grown so delighted with the still and cushioned life, whose hours glide slumberously by, that we feel almost angry with the restless being who dissolves the delicious charm. No man or boy need hope to be lured into early rising by the study of this poem. That Thomson's forte lay

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