To sickness still, and still to grief a prey, Health turns from me her rosy face away. Just Heaven! what sin ere life begins to bloom, Or know a thought but all the world might know? But why repine? Does life deserve my sigh; I neither envy nor regard their fate. I care not; though this face be seen no more, Their praise would crown me as their precepts mend: Sir Gilbert Elliot (1722-77), author of Amynta, which Sir Walter Scott called 'the beautiful pastoral song,' was third baronet of Minto, and brother of Jean Elliot. Sir Gilbert was educated at Edinburgh and Leyden for the Scottish Bar; he was twenty years in Parliament as member successively for the counties of Selkirk and Roxburgh, and was distinguished as a speaker. He was in 1756 made a Lord of the Admiralty, in 1767 Keeper of the Signet in Scotland, and in 1770 Treasurer of the Navy. He died at Marseilles, whither he had gone for the recovery of his health, in 1777. He was the intimate friend of Home, author of Douglas, and David Hume, but disliked the sceptical tendency of Hume's philosophy; and it was he who kept Hume from publishing the Dialogues during his own lifetime. Amynta. My sheep I neglected, I broke my sheep-hook, Christopher Smart, an unfortunate man of genius, was born 11th April 1722 at Shipbourne near Tunbridge, whither his father had migrated from Durham as steward to Viscount Vane. Through the influence of this nobleman, Christopher procured from the Duchess of Cleveland an allowance of £40 per annum. He was admitted to Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, in 1739, and elected a Fellow in 1745. At college Smart was remarkable for folly and extravagance, and his distinguished contemporary Gray prophesied truly that the result of his conduct would be a jail or bedlam. In 1747 he wrote a comedy called a Trip to Cambridge, or the Grateful Fair, which was acted in Pembroke College Hall. No remains of this play have been found, excepting a few songs and a mock-heroic soliloquy containing this: Thus when a barber and a collier fight, And beats the collier and the barber red; with the bookseller's family, and married his stepdaughter, Anna Maria Carnan, in 1753. He now removed to London and endeavoured to subsist by his pen. The notorious 'Sir' John Hill-whose wars with the Royal Society, with Fielding, Garrick, and others, are well known; an apothecary, hackwriter, and scurrilous pamphleteer who closed his life by becoming a quack-doctor-having insidiously attacked Smart, the latter replied by a spirited satire entitled The Hilliad. Among his various tasks was metrical translations of the Fables of Phædrus and of the Psalms and the parables, with a prose translation of Horace. In 1756 he was one of the conductors of a monthly periodical called The Universal Visiter; and to assist him, Johnson -who sincerely sympathised, as Boswell records, with Smart's unhappy mental crises-contributed a few essays. In 1763, as previously in 1751, the poor poet was confined in a madhouse. 'He has partly as much exercise,' said Johnson, 'as he used to have, for he digs in the garden. Indeed, before his confinement, he used for exercise to walk to the ale-house; but he was carried back again. I did not think he ought to be shut up. His infirmities were not noxious to society. He insisted on people praying with him-also falling upon his knees and saying his prayers in the street, or in any other unusual place; and I'd as lief pray with Kit Smart as any one else. Another charge was, that he did not love clean linen; and I have no passion for it.' During his confinement, it is said, writing materials were denied him, and Smart used to inscribe his poetical thoughts with charcoal on the walls of Bethlehem Hospital, or with a key on the wainscot. Obviously he could not have written down in this way the eighty-four six-line stanzas of the Song to David, composed during his saner intervals; the bulk of it presumably composed and carried in the memory. Smart was afterwards released from his confinement; but debt and ill-fortune still pursued him. He was committed to the King's Bench prison for debt, and died there, after a short illness, 21st May 1771. The Song to David is every way one of the most remarkable things in English poetry, and not merely, as it might in virtue of its origin and history be called, a 'curiosity of literature.' Even if it be not, as D. G. Rossetti said, 'the only great accomplished poem of the last [i.e. the eighteenth] century,' and though we do not quite agree with Mr Gosse in calling it 'a portent of beauty and originality, it is an amazing burst of devout imagination, in some passages attaining unmistakable splendour of thought and expression, marked by rich imagery, memorable phrasing, and majestic rhythms. Professor Palgrave and Mr Stopford Brooke are equally warm in commendation of the poem. Browning praised it in his Parleyings, and says it'stations Smart on either hand with Milton and with Keats.' There are evident traces in it of want of mental balance; but it is amazing to know that though it was printed by Smart in 1763 it was omitted from his collected poems in 1791 as 'exhibiting [only ?] too melancholy proof of the estrangement of Smart's mind.' Anderson and Chalmers in their collections gave large extracts from Smart, but could not find a copy of the Song to quote from. It was reprinted in 1819 and 1827, and the whole of it was given in the first edition of this work (1843). It has since then been repeatedly printed, a recent editor being Mr Tutin (1898). Song to David. O thou, that sit'st upon a throne, To praise the King of kings: To bless each valley, grove, and coast, And charm the cherubs to the post Of gratitude in throngs; To keep the days on Zion's Mount, O servant of God's holiest charge, Which thou may'st now receive; From thy blest mansion hail and hear, From topmost eminence appear To this the wreath I weave. Great, valiant, pious, good, and clean, Sublime, contemplative, serene, Strong, constant, pleasant, wise! Bright effluence of exceeding grace; Best man! the swiftness and the race, The peril and the prize! Great-from the lustre of his crown, For all the host, from rear to van, Pious-magnificent and grand, Good-from Jehudah's genuine vein, To pity, to forgive, to save, And Shimei's blunted dart. Clean-if perpetual prayer be pure, Clean in his gestures, hands, and feet, Sublime-invention ever young, O'er meaner strains supreme. The Sabbath-day he blest; 'Twas then his thoughts self-conquest pruned, And heavenly melancholy tuned, To bless and bear the rest. Serene-to sow the seeds of peace, When God had calmed the world. Strong in the Lord, who could defy To his undaunted might. Constant-in love to God, the Truth, His endless fame attend. Pleasant-and various as the year; In armour or in ephod clad, Wise-in recovery from his fall, The light of Israel in his ways, His muse, bright angel of his verse, He sang of God-the mighty source From whose right arm, beneath whose eyes, Angels—their ministry and meed, Which to and fro with blessings speed, Or with their citterns wait; Where Michael, with his millions, bows, Where dwells the seraph and his spouse, The cherub and her mate. Of man-the semblance and effect To rule the land, and briny broad, And heroes in his cause. The world-the clustering spheres he made, The multitudinous abyss, Where secrecy remains in bliss, And wisdom hides her skill. Trees, plants, and flowers-of virtuous root; Gem yielding blossom, yielding fruit, Choice gums and precious balm; Of fowl-e'en every beak and wing Of fishes-every size and shape, Devouring man to shun : The shells are in the wealthy deep, Of beasts-the beaver plods his task; Nor yet the shades arouse ; Her cave the mining coney scoops; Of gems-their virtue and their price, Blest was the tenderness he felt, His furious foes no more maligned And sense and soul detained; He sent the godly sounds aloft, Or in delight refrained. When up to heaven his thoughts he piled, As blush to blush she stood; The pillars of the Lord are seven, Which stand from earth to topmost heaven; O David, scholar of the Lord! O strength, O sweetness, lasting ripe ! God's harp thy symbol, and thy type The lion and the bee! There is but One who ne'er rebelled, But One by passion unimpelled, By pleasures unenticed; He from himself his semblance sent, Grand object of his own content, And saw the God in Christ. 'Tell them, I Am,' Jehovah said At once above, beneath, around, Sweet the young nurse with love intense, Sweet when the lost arrive : Sweet the musician's ardour beats, While his vague mind 's in quest of sweets, The choicest flowers to hive. Sweeter in all the strains of love Paired to thy swelling chord; Strong is the horse upon his speed; Which makes at once his game: Strong the tall ostrich on the ground; Strong thro' the turbulent profound Shoots xiphias to his aim. Strong is the lion-like a coal But stronger still, in earth and air, And far beneath the tide; Glorious the sun in mid career; Glorious the comet's train: Glorious the northern lights astream; Glorious hosanna from the den; Glorious the martyr's gore: Glorious-more glorious-is the crown William Mason (1724-97), the friend and literary executor of Gray, long survived the association which did him so much honour, but he had appeared early as a poet. Born at Hull, the son of a clergyman, he took his B.A. from St John's College, Cambridge, in 1745, and was elected a Fellow of Pembroke through the influence of Gray, who had been attracted to him by his Musaus (1747), a lament for Pope in imitation of Lycidas. To his poem Isis (1748), an attack on the Jacobitism of Oxford, Thomas Warton replied in his Triumph of Isis. In 1753 appeared his tragedy of Elfrida, 'written,' as Southey said, 'on an artificial model, and in a gorgeous diction, because he thought Shakespeare had precluded all hope of excellence in any other form of drama.' Mason's model was the Greek drama, and he introduced into his play the classic accompaniment of the chorus. A second drama, Caractacus (1759), is of a higher cast than Elfrida: simpler in language, and of more sustained dignity in scenes, situations, and characters. Mason also wrote odes on Independence, Memory, Melancholy, and the Fall of Tyranny, in which his sonorous diction swells into extravagance and bombast. His longest poetical work is his English Garden, a descriptive poem in four books of blank verse (1772-82). He also indited odes to the naval officers of Great Britain, to the Honourable William Pitt, and in commemoration of the Revolution of 1688. Under the name of Malcolm Macgregor, he published in quite another vein A# Heroic Epistle to Sir William Chambers, Knight (1773), in which the taste for Chinese pagodas and Eastern bowers is cleverly ridiculed. Gray left him a legacy of £500, together with his books and manuscripts; and Mason in 1775 published his friend's poems with a memoir. In that memoir he made a greater and more important innovation than he had done in his dramas; instead of presenting the continuous narrative in which the biographer alone is heard, he incorporated the poet's journals and letters in chronological order, thus making the subject of the memoir in some degree his own biographer. This plan was afterwards adopted by Boswell in his Life of Johnson. Mason became vicar of Aston in Yorkshire in 1754, and Canon of York in 1762. When politics ran high he took an active part on the side of the Whigs, but retained the respect of all parties. His poetry is lamentably lacking in simplicity, yet at times his rich diction has a fine effect. In his English Garden, though it is verbose and languid as a whole, there are some fine things. Gray quoted as 'superlative' from one of the odes: While through the west, where sinks the crimson day, Meek twilight slowly sails, and waves her banners gray. Apostrophe to England. In thy fair domain, Yes, my loved Albion! many a glade is found, And there are scenes where, though she whilom trod, (From The English Garden.) Snowdon. Mona on Snowdon calls: Meet upon thy front of snow; And burst thy base with thunder's shock: Shall Mona use, than those that dwell Busy murmurs hum around, Through the twilight, through the shade, (From Caractacus.) Epitaph on his Wife. Take, holy earth! all that my soul holds dear : Her faded form; she bowed to taste the wave, Even from the grave thou shalt have power to charm.. Bid them be chaste, be innocent, like thee; Bid them in duty's sphere as meekly move; And if so fair, from vanity as free; As firm in friendship, and as fond in love. Tell them, though 'tis an awful thing to die— Twas e'en to thee-yet the dread path once trod, Heaven lifts its everlasting portals high, And bids the pure in heart behold their God. The last four lines, which form a worthy climax to the whole, were added by Gray. George Campbell (1719-96), minister in Aberdeen and Principal of Marischal College, was a theologian and critic of vigorous intellect and various learning. His Dissertation on Miracles (1762), written in reply to Hume, was at the time greatly admired as a masterly piece of reasoning; and his Philosophy of Rhetoric, published in 1776, was praised (unreasonably) as perhaps the best book of the kind since Aristotle, but may yet be studied as an acute and well-written statement of contemporary critical opinion. Other works were a Translation of the Four Gospels, some sermons, and a series of Lectures on Ecclesiastical History. Hume admitted the ingenuity of Campbell's reply to his thesis on the impossibility of proving a miracle. Hume's contention was that no testimony for any kind of miracle can ever amount to a probability, much less to a proof. Miracles can only be proved by testimony, and no testimony can be so strong as our own experience of the uniformity of nature. Campbell argued that testimony has a natural and original influence on belief, antecedent to experience; and insisted that the earliest assent which is given to testimony by children, and which is previous to all experience, is in fact the most unlimited. The improbability of an event may be outweighed by slight direct evidence. His answer was divided into two parts: that miracles are capable of proof from testimony, religious miracles not less than others; and that the miracles on |