Gay, who enjoyed an unbroken friendship with the brotherhood of wits, and was treated by them like a spoilt child, was born at Barnstaple in 1685, and left an orphan at the age of ten. He was educated at the free grammar school in the town, and was afterwards, to his discontent, apprenticed to a mercer in London. He escaped from this uncongenial employment to be dependent on an uncle, and thus early exhibited his life-long disposition to rely upon others for support. 'Providence,' Swift writes, 'never designed Gay to be above two-and-twenty by his thoughtlessness and gullibility. He has as little foresight of age, sickness, poverty, or loss of admirers as a girl of fifteen.' His weakness, it has been said, appealed to Swift's strength, and Swift, Pope, and Arbuthnot were Gay's most faithful friends. They found something in him to laugh at and to love. Ladies, too, treated him with the kind of friendliness which has a touch of commiseration. In 1714 Gay was appointed secretary to Lord Clarendon, a post which he owed to Swift, but the death of Queen Anne in that year brought the Whigs into office, and destroyed the poet's prospects. Prior to this he had been secretary to the imperious Duchess of Monmouth. He was now left without money or employment, and owed much to the generosity of Pope. It was Gay's lot 'in suing long to bide,' to be always hoping, and nearly always disappointed. 'He seems,' says his latest biographer, 'to have begun his career under the impression that it was somebody's duty to provide for him in the world, and this impression clung to him through nearly the whole of a lifetime.'[27] Ten years before his death he was eagerly looking to others for support. Writing to Swift, he says: 'I lodge at present in Burlington House, and have received many civilities from many great men, but very few real benefits. They wonder at each other for not providing for me, and I wonder at them all.'

Gay's first poem of any mark was The Shepherd's Week (1714), six burlesque pastorals, a subject proposed to him by Pope, who was then smarting from the praise Philips had received in The Guardian. But if Pope meant Gay to poke his fun at Philips in The Shepherd's Week, he must have been disappointed, for the poems were accepted as genuine bucolics, and although humorously absurd, are, to say the least, more true to rustic life than the pastorals either of Philips or of Pope. The Shepherd's Week was followed by Trivia (1715), a piece suggested by Swift's City Shower. It is one of Gay's most notable productions, not as a poem, but as a vivid description of the streets of London nearly two hundred years ago. The great reputation he obtained as the author of The Fables (1727), and still more of The Beggar's Opera (1728), the idea of which was suggested to Gay by Swift, survived him for some years. The Fables were written for and dedicated to the youthful Duke of Cumberland, who is asked to "accept the moral lay, and in these tales mankind survey." There is skill and ingenuity in the poems, but higher merit they cannot boast, and young readers are likely to prefer the illustrations which generally accompany The Fables to the letterpress. Many of Gay's allusions are beyond the apprehension of the young, and have a political flavour. The Beggar's Opera was intended as a burlesque of the Italian opera, which had been long the laughing-stock of men of letters, and as the play was thought to have political significance, and the character of Macheath to be a portrait of Walpole, it was received with enthusiasm, and acted in London for about sixty nights. So popular did the opera become, that ladies carried about the songs on their fans.

Eight years before, Gay had published his poems by subscription, and in those happy days for versemen had gained £1,000 by the venture. He put the money into South Sea stock, and lost it all. For The Beggar's Opera he received about £800. It was followed by Polly, a play of the same coarse character, which, for political reasons, was not allowed to be acted. The result was that it had a large sale, and put money in Gay's purse. Ten thousand five hundred copies are said to have been printed in one year, and the £1,200 realized by the sale were very wisely retained for the poet's use by the Duke of Queensberry, under whose roof he had at length found a warm nest. To the student Gay is chiefly interesting as the only noteworthy poet of the period, south of the Tweed, gifted with a lyrical capacity. Two or three of his songs and ballads, and especially Black-Eyed Susan, have a charm beyond the reach of the mechanical versifier. But the art of song is at a low level even in the hands of Gay. The lyric which the Elizabethan and Jacobean poets loved so well, and of which the present century has produced specimens to be matched only by Shakespeare, may be said to have been lost to English poetry for the first half of the last century, since neither Prior's verse, delightful though it be, nor the songs of Gay, have enough of the poetical element to form exceptions to this statement.

In his Tales he follows Prior in grossness, while inferior to him in art. Like the greater number of the Queen Anne poets, Gay flatters with a free hand. In an epistle addressed to Lintot, the bookseller, he declares that Anacreon lives once more in Sheffield, and Waller in Granville, that Buckingham's verse will last to distant time; while Ovid sings again in Addison, and 'Homer's Iliad shines in his Campaign.'

One of the liveliest and most graceful of Gay's poems is addressed to Pope 'On his having finished his translation of Homer's Iliad.' It is called A Welcome from Greece, and describes the friends who assembled to greet the poet on his return to England.

Three stanzas from the Epistle shall be quoted:

Gay's love of good living was known to all his friends. 'As the French philosopher,' Congreve wrote, 'used to prove his existence by cogito ergo sum, the greatest proof of Gay's existence is edit ergo est.' For a long time his health compelled him to give up wine, and he tells Swift that he had also left off verse-making, 'for I really think that man must be a bold writer who trusts to wit without it.' He was dispirited, he told Swift not long before his death, for want of a pursuit, and found 'indolence and idleness the most tiresome things in the world.'

Gay died in 1732 at the Duke of Queensberry's house, and Pope grieved that one of his nearest and longest ties was broken. He was interred, to quote Arbuthnot's words, 'as a peer of the realm,' in Westminster Abbey. The superficial character of the poet may be seen in his couplet transcribed upon the monument:

Gay's moderate gift of song was withheld from the famous author of the Night Thoughts. Yet Young was vain enough to think that he possessed it, and wrote a patriotic ode called Ocean, preceded by an elaborate essay on lyric poetry. He also produced Imperium Pelagi (1729), A Naval Lyric written in Imitation of Pindar's spirit. The lyric, which was travestied by Fielding in his Tom Thumb,[28] reads like a burlesque, and badly treated though Pindar was by the versemen of the last century, there is perhaps not one of them who mocks him more outrageously than Young. He says that this ode is an original, and no critic is likely to dispute the assertion.

Young was born in 1684 at Upham, near Winchester, his father, who was afterwards Dean of Sarum, being at that time the rector of the village. Edward was placed upon the foundation at Winchester College, and remained there until he was eighteen. He was then sent up to New College, and afterwards removed to Corpus. At the age of twenty-seven he was nominated to a law fellowship at All Souls, and took his degree of B.C.L. and his doctor's degree some years later. Characteristically enough he began his poetical career by An Epistle to Lord Lansdowne (1712), who is praised for his heavenly numbers, and is said to have been born "to make the muse immortal." His next poem of any consequence, The Last Day, written in heroic couplets, and filling three books, is correct, or fairly so, in versification, and execrable in taste. Young, it may be supposed, wished to produce a sense of solemnity in the treatment of his theme, and he does so by lamenting that the very land 'where the Stuarts filled an awful throne' will in that day be forgotten. The want of taste which so often deforms Young's verse is also seen in the imagery he employs to illustrate the fear which even good men may have on appearing before that 'dread tribunal.'

His next poem, The Force of Religion, or Vanquished Love, was suggested by the execution of Lady Jane Grey and Lord Guildford, a subject chosen for a tragedy by John Banks (1694), by Rowe in 1715, and treated with considerable dramatic power in our own day by Ross Neil. In Young's hands this fine theme becomes a rhetorical exercise without poetry and without pathos. A few lines will suffice to show the style of the poem. Jane and Dudley, it must be premised, are imprisoned in a gloomy hall:

Verse of this quality, which might be amply quoted, is of interest to the student of literature, since in Young's day it passed current for poetry. But in accepting his claims as a poet the faith of the age must have been often strained.

Walpole, who despised the whole tribe of poets, and cared nothing for literature, had by some strange chance awarded to Young a pension of £200 a-year, whereupon in a piece called The Instalment, addressed to Sir Robert, Britain is called upon to behold

and the poet's breast 'glows with grateful fire' as he exclaims:

Following in the steps of George Sandys, but with inferior power, and in a less racy diction, Young performed the vain task of paraphrasing part of the Book of Job, one of the noblest poems the world possesses, and translated in our authorized version in language not to be surpassed for dignity and simplicity.

In 1719 his Busiris was performed. The Revenge, a better known tragedy, written on the French model, followed in 1721, and kept the stage for some time. Seven years later The Brothers, his third and last tragedy, was in rehearsal, but the poet, who had lately taken holy orders, withdrew it at the last moment. These tragedies, which are full of sound and fury, are destitute of tragic power. The Revenge, in which Zanga acts the part of an Iago, has some forcible scenes, and so, despite much rant and fustian, has Busiris. Plenty of blood is shed, of course, and the heroines of the plays die by their own hands. Tragedy is supposed to exercise an elevating influence, but to counteract this happy result, Busiris and The Revenge are followed by indecent epilogues, in which the speakers jest at the feelings which the plays may have excited. For The Brothers Young wrote his own epilogue. It is decent and dull. His genius was better fitted for satire than for the drama, and The Universal Passion, which consists of seven satires published in a collected form in 1728, brought him reputation and money. The poet Crabbe was never more surprised in his life than when John Murray (the famous 'My Murray' of Byron) gave him £3,000 for the copyright of his poems; Young received the same sum for work immeasurably inferior in value, and in a less legitimate way. Two thousand pounds, it is stated, was a gift from the Duke of Grafton, who said it was the best bargain he ever made, as the satires were worth £4,000. Young, it will be seen, preceded Pope as a satirist. He is more generous and humane, and has none of the venomous attacks on living persons by which Pope added piquancy to his verse. But he is a careless writer, and for the most part lacks the exquisite precision, the subtle wit, the rhythmical felicity, which make the couplets of Pope so memorable. The Dunciad, the Moral Essays, and the Imitations are read by all lovers of literature, but The Universal Passion is forgotten. Of the six satires, the two on women are the most spirited, and may be compared with Pope's on the same subject. The different foibles, and faults worse than foibles of the women of that day are exhibited with a satirist's licence, and occasionally with a Pope-like terseness. Take the following, for example:

It was not until he was nearly fifty that Young, disappointed of the preferment he sought, took holy orders, and in 1730 accepted the college living of Welwyn, in Herts, which he held till his death.

In the following year the poet married Lady Elizabeth Lee, a daughter of the Earl of Lichfield, a union that lasted ten years. One son was the offspring of this marriage. Lady Elizabeth had a daughter by a former marriage, who was married to Mr. Temple, a son of Lord Palmerston, and shortly before her own death she lost both daughter and son-in-law, who, there can be little doubt, are the Philander and Narcissa of the Night Thoughts, the earlier books of which were published in 1742. This once celebrated poem, written in his old age, is the one effort of Young's genius that has enjoyed a great popularity. It suited well an age which, while far from moral, delighted in moral treatises and in didactic verse. In the Night Thoughts Young remembers that he is a clergyman, and puts on his gown and bands. He puts on also his singing robes, and shows the reader what none of his earlier poems prove, that he is in the presence of a poet.

The Night Thoughts is remarkable in its finest passages for a strong, but sombre imagination, and for a command of his instrument that puts Young at times nearly on a level with the greatest masters of blank verse. On this height, however, he does not stay long. He is rich in great thoughts, but they do not fall unconsciously, as it were, while the poet pursues his argument. They are aphorisms uttered generally in single lines which are apt to break the continuity of the poem and to injure the harmony of its versification. The theme of Life, Death, and Immortality is not a narrow one, and affords ample space for imaginative treatment. Young's treatment of it is too often declamatory; he drops the poet in the rhetorician and the wit. There is much of the false sublime in the poem, and much that reveals the hollow character of the writer. The first book is the finest, sparkling with felicitous expressions and rising frequently to true poetry. The poetical quality of that book, however, is lessened by the author's passion for antithesis. The merit of the following passage, for example, is not due to poetical inspiration:

The opening of the ninth and last book will give a more favourable illustration of Young's style:

While moralizing on man's mortality Young is seldom a cheerful monitor, he dwells with too great persistence on the incidents of death and of bodily corruption, too little on life with which we have more to do than with death. Thus with a strange perversion he exclaims:

and harping on the same theme in the ninth book, says:

On laying down the Night Thoughts the student may be advised to read Blair's Grave, a poem in less than 800 lines of blank verse, composed in a fresher and more rigorous style than the far larger work of Young, and rather moulded, as Mr. Saintsbury has observed, 'upon dramatic than upon purely poetical models.' The Grave, which was written before the publication of the Night Thoughts,[29] abounds with poetical felicities, and is pregnant with suggestions that seize the imagination, and appeal alike to the intellect and the heart. The brevity of the piece is in its favour; there is not a line that flags.

Blair, who was a Scotch clergyman, wrote also an Elegy in Memory of William Law, a Professor of Moral Philosophy in Edinburgh, whose daughter he married. He writes in a masculine and homely style. His imagery is often more powerful than pleasing, but some of his similes win attention by their beauty. For example:

Among the victims claimed by the grave is

And the death of a good man is pictured in this musical couplet:

Cowper, referring to the poets of his century, said that every warbler had Pope's tune by heart. But if they had the tune by heart, many of them did not make it a vehicle for their verse, and among these are poets of the weight and worth of Thomson and Young, of Gray and Collins. Poets of a minor order, too, such as Somerville, Armstrong, Glover, Shenstone, Akenside, and John Dyer, either did not use the heroic distich which Pope crowned with such honour, or used it in their least significant poems.

Thomson's influence, though less visible than Pope's, was probably as great. It was felt by the poets who loved Nature, and had no turn for satire. To pass to him from Prior, Gay, and Young is to leave the town for the country. English poetry owes much to the author of The Seasons, who was the first among the poets of his century to bring men back to 'Nature, the Vicar of the Almighty Lord.' He could not, indeed, shake off altogether the fetters of the conventional diction current in his day, and his style is often turgid and verbose. But Thomson had, to use a phrase of his own, 'a fine flame of imagination,' and when brought face to face with Nature he has the inspiration of a poet who discerns the lessons which Nature is ready to teach.

James Thomson was born at Ednam, on the banks of the Tweed, on September 11th, 1700, but his father removed to Jedburgh shortly afterwards, and there the future poet gained his first impression of rural scenes. He began to rhyme in boyhood, but, unlike most young poets, had the good sense to make an annual bonfire of his youthful effusions. At the early age of fifteen he was sent to the university at Edinburgh, his father, who was a Presbyterian minister, wishing that his son should follow the same vocation. But Thomson was not destined to 'wag his head in a pulpit.' He had a friend at this time in David Mallet, a minor poet of more prudence than principle, and when Mallet had the good fortune to gain a tutorship in London, his companion also started for the metropolis in search of money and fame. It was a desperate venture, and the young poet's difficulties were increased by the loss of his letters of introduction. Scotchmen however have always countrymen willing to help them, and Thomson whose pedigree on the mother's side connected him with the famous house of Home, found temporary employment as tutor to a child of Lord Binning who belonged by marriage to the same family. Afterwards he resided with Millan, a bookseller at Charing Cross, and then having finished Winter (1726), on which he had been at work for some time, he sold it to the publisher for three guineas. Before long it was read and warmly praised by Aaron Hill, then a man of mark in the world of letters. Sir Spencer Compton, the Speaker, to whom the poem was dedicated, gave the poet twenty guineas for the compliment; Rundle, the Bishop of Derry, and several ladies of rank cheered him with their praise, and Thomson's success was assured. It was the age of patrons, and he practised without shame and without discrimination the art of flattery. Each book of The Seasons had a dedication, and the honour was one for which some kind of payment was expected. Summer appeared in 1727 and Spring in the year following. In 1729 the appearance of Britannia showed the popularity of the poet and of his theme, for three editions were sold. It is a distinctly party poem, and contains an attack upon Walpole—whom he had previously praised as the 'most illustrious of patriots'—for submitting to indignities from Spain. The British Lion roars loudly in it, but there is more of fustian in the piece than of true patriotism. 'How dares,' the poet exclaims, 'the proud Iberian rouse to wrath the masters of the main:'

In February, 1729-30, Thomson's tragedy of Sophonisba, a subject previously chosen by Marston (1606), and by Lee (1676), was acted at Drury Lane. The play was dedicated to the queen, and on the opening night the house was crowded, but the success of the piece was slight. Thomson's genius was not dramatic, and while his characters declaim, they do not act. His next play, Agamemnon (1738), was not lost for want of labour or of friends. Pope appeared in the theatre on the first night, and was greeted with applause. The Prince and Princess of Wales were present on another occasion, but the play did not live long. His third attempt, Edward and Eleanora, was prohibited by the Lord Chamberlain, since it was supposed to praise the Prince of Wales at the expense of the Court. In 1740 the Masque of Alfred, by Thomson and Mallet, was performed. Tancred and Sigismunda followed in 1745, and this tragedy, in which Garrick played the leading part, had at the time a considerable measure of success. The plot is more interesting than that of Sophonisba, and the characters are more life-like. Despite its effusive sentiment, Garrick's splendid acting would, no doubt, make the tragedy effective on the stage, but it does not add to the literary reputation of the poet. Coriolanus, Thomson's last drama, was not performed upon the stage until the year after his death.

Voltaire, who had met Thomson and liked him—the liking, indeed, seemed to be universal—praised his tragedies for being 'elegantly writ.' 'It may be,' he says, 'that his heroes are neither moving nor busy enough, but taking him all in all, methinks he has the highest claim to the greatest esteem.' The value of Voltaire's criticism of an English dramatist is best appreciated by remembering his ignorant judgment of Shakespeare.

Thomson's laurels were gained in another field of poetry. On the production of Autumn in 1730, The Seasons in its complete form was published by subscription in quarto. The four books, as we have already said, appeared at different times, Winter being the first in order and Autumn the latest. The Hymn with which the poem concludes may be compared, and will not greatly suffer in the comparison, with Adam's morning hymn in the fifth book of Paradise Lost, and with Coleridge's Hymn in the Valley of Chamouni. Like them it is raised, to use the poet's own words, to an 'Almighty Father.' A brief extract shall be given:

Swift complains that the Seasons, being all descriptive, nothing is doing, a defect inseparable from the subject. But the work has a poet's best gift—imagination—and a poet's instinct for apprehending the charm of what is minute in Nature, as well as of what is grand.

Thomson has been called the naturalist's poet, and Hartley Coleridge observes that he is 'a perfect reservoir of natural images.' In his account of what he had learnt only by report he depends sometimes on the ignorant traditions of the country people; but in describing what he observes with the bodily eye, and with the eye of the mind, he is faithful to what he sees, and to what he perceives. No Dutch painter can be more exact and accurate than Thomson in the delineation of familiar scenes, and of animal life. In illustration of this gift, which Cowper shares with him, a scene, not to be surpassed for truthfulness of description, shall be quoted from Winter:

Thomson loves also to paint the landscape on a broad scale, and though his diction is sometimes too florid, he generally satisfies the imagination, as, for instance, in the splendid description in Summer of a sand-storm in the desert.

The Seasons was at one time, and for many years the most popular volume of poetry in the country. It was to be found in every cottage, and passages from the poem were familiar to every school-boy. The appreciation of the work was more affectionate than critical, and Thomson's faults were sometimes mistaken for beauties; but the popularity of the Seasons was a healthy sign, and the poem, a forerunner of Cowper's Task, brought into vigorous life, feelings and sympathies that had been long dormant.

Pope, who is twice mentioned in the poem, took a great interest in its progress through the press. Thomson consulted him frequently, and accepted many of his suggestions, while apparently retaining at all times an independent judgment. To the familiar episode of 'the lovely young Lavinia' the following graceful passage is said, but on very doubtful authority to have been added by Pope.[30] The first line, given for the sake of the context, is from Thomson's pen:

Thomson had now gained the highest mark of his fame, and, like Pope, had won it in a few years. Nearly two years of foreign travel followed, the poet having obtained the post of governor to a son of the Solicitor-General. The fruit of this tour was a long poem in blank verse on Liberty, which probably gave him infinite labour, but his ascent upon this occasion of what he calls 'the barren, but delightful mountain of Parnassus,' was labour lost. It is enough to say of Liberty, that it contains more than three thousand lines of unreadable blank verse. Sinecures were the rewards of genius in Thomson's day, and he was made Secretary of Briefs in the Court of Chancery. He took a cottage at Richmond, within an easy walk of Pope, and the two poets met often and lived amicably.

Thomson did not enjoy his official fortune long, for his patron died, and though he might have kept his post had he applied to the Lord Chancellor, in whose gift it was, he appears to have been too lazy to do so. His friend Lyttelton in this emergency introduced him to the Prince of Wales, who, on learning that his affairs 'were in a more poetical posture than formerly,' gave him a pension of £100 a year. There was no certainty in a gift of this nature, and in about ten years it was withdrawn.

The Castle of Indolence (1748) was the latest labour of Thomson's life, and in the judgment of many critics takes precedence of The Seasons in poetical merit. This verdict may be questioned, but the poem, written in the Spenserian stanza, has a soothing beauty and an enchanting felicity of expression which show the poet's genius in a new light. It is unlike any poetry of that age, and when compared with The Seasons, the verse, as Wordsworth justly says, 'is more harmonious and the diction more pure.' All the imagery of the poem is adopted to the vague and sleepy action of the characters represented in it. It is a veritable poet's dream, which carries the reader in its earliest stanzas into 'a pleasing land of drowsy-head:'