Swift took much pleasure in his garden at Laracor; converted a rivulet that ran through it into a regular canal, and planted on its banks avenues of willows. As soon as he was settled, Stella, and her companion, Mrs. Dingley, came over and settled down too. They had a house near the gate of Knightsbrook, the old residence of the Percivals, almost half a mile from Swift's house, where they lived when Swift was at Laracor, or were the guests of the hospitable vicar of Trim, Dr. Raymond. Whenever Swift left Laracor for a time, as on his annual journeys to England, the ladies then took possession of the vicarage of Laracor, and remained there during his absence. The site of Stella's house is marked on the Ordnance Survey of the county of Meath.

The residence of Swift at Laracor includes a most important portion of his life. It was, at the least, twelve years, as he took possession of his living in 1700, and quitted it for the deanery of St. Patrick in 1713. Here he was fully occupied with the duties of his parish, and the united labors of authorship and politics. Hardly was he settled when he wrote his pamphlet on the Dissensions between the Nobles and Commons of Rome, which applied to the impeachment by the Commons of Lords Somers, Oxford, Halifax, and Portland, on account of their share in the partition treaty. This brought him at once into the intimacy of Somers, Sunderland, and Halifax. Here he soon after published his Tale of a Tub, which had been written at Moorpark. This created a vast sensation, and though anonymous, like most of Swift's works, was soon known to be his, and his society was eagerly sought by men of the highest distinction both for rank and genius. Among the latter, Addison, Steele, Tickell, Philips, and others, at once became his friends. He now made use of his influence with government to obtain the gift of the first-fruits and tenths to the Church of Ireland, which he effected. Besides this boon to the Church at large, he increased the glebe of Laracor from one acre to twenty; and purchasing the tithes of Effernock, when he was not overburdened with money, settled them forever on his successors. Here he amused himself with his quizzes upon Partridge the astrologer, under the title of Isaac Bickerstaff, which almost drove that notorious impostor mad. Here he wrote the celebrated verses on Baucis and Philemon, and other of his poems. Here, in 1710, he made his grand political transit from the Whigs to the Tories, and became the great friend, assistant, and political counselor of Harley and Bolingbroke; living, during his long sojourns in London, on the most familiar terms with those noblemen, and also with Pope, Gay, and all the more celebrated authors.

It is a singular subject of contemplation, and shows what momentous influence a mere private man may acquire in England by his talents, that of Swift's political achievements at this time. Here was a country clergyman of an obscure parish in Meath, with a congregation, as he himself said, of "some half-score persons," who yet wielded the destinies of all Europe. It was more by the power of his pen in "The Examiner," and by his counsels and influence, than by any other means, that the Tories were enabled to turn out of office the long-triumphant Whigs, and, by the peace of Utrecht, put a stop to the triumphs of Marlborough on the Continent. The vengeance which the Tories took on their adversaries the Whigs, on regaining power for a time, in Anne's reign, is, perhaps, the most startling thing in the history of party. The Whigs had steadily pursued the war against Louis the Fourteenth, in which William had been engaged all his life. For nearly half a century, that is, from 1667 to 1713, had that French monarch driven on a desperate contest for the destruction of the liberties of Europe. In Spain, in the Netherlands, in Holland, in Italy, and Germany, had his generals, Catinat, Luxemburg, Condé, Turenne, Vendôme, Villars, Melac, Villeroi, Tallard, &c., &c., led on the French armies to the most remorseless devastations. To this day, the successive demon deeds of Turenne, Melac, Créqui, and their soldiers, are vividly alive in the hearts and the memories of the peasantry of the Palatinate, where they destroyed nearly every city, chased the inhabitants away, leaving all that beautiful and fertile region a black desert, and, throwing the bones of the ancient Germanic emperors out of their graves in the Cathedral of Speir, played at bowls with their skulls. To extinguish Protestantism, and to extend the French empire, appeared Louis's two great objects, in which he was supported by all the spiritual power of the king of superstitions, the pope. Revoking the Edict of Nantes, he committed the most horrible outrages and destruction on his own Protestant subjects. He hoped, on the subjugation of Holland and the reformed states of Germany, to carry out there the same horrors of religious annihilation. Except in the person of Bonaparte, never has the spirit of conquest and of political insolence shown itself in so lawless, determined, and offensive a form as in this ostentatious monarch. William III., before his accession to the British throne, had been the most formidable opponent to his progress. But he had contrived to set his grandson, Philip V., on the throne of Spain, in opposition to the claims of Austria, and, by the fear of the ultimate union of these two great nations under one sceptre, alarmed all Europe. In vain was the united resistance of Austria and Holland, till England sent out its great general, Marlborough; and the names of Marlborough and the Savoyard, Prince Eugene, became as those of the demi-gods in the temple of war; and Blenheim, Ramillies, Oudenarde, and Malplaquet, arose from their ages of obscurity into continental pyramids of England's military renown.

But of what avail was all this renown? What was won by it, except the empty glory itself? At the crowning moment—at the hour of otherwise inevitable retribution to the bloody and unprincipled monarch of France, and of recompense to those nations whose blood he had so lavishly shed, and whose surface he had covered with ashes, ruins, and horrors, instead of cities, peaceful villages, and fair fields—the Whigs were expelled from office by the Tories, and all the fruits of this long and bitter war were snatched away from us and our allies. To deprive the Whigs of the glory of a successful war, to dash down as abortive all the triumphs of the Whig general, Marlborough, these men rushed into peace without consulting the allies, and left no results to the great European struggle but the blood which had been shed and the misery that had been endured. Louis, then eighty-five years of age, and tottering toward the grave, saw himself at once released from the most terrible condition into which his wicked ambition had plunged him—from the most terrible prospect of humiliation and disgrace which could wring such a mind. He had reduced his kingdom to the last stage of exhaustion by half a century's incessant contest with Europe; by bribing the English monarchs, Charles II. and James II., and many English nobles, to refuse help to the suffering Continent; and by bribing and paying the armies of German princes whom he could induce to become traitors to their nation. His people were fiercely imbittered against him; no taxes could be raised; his best generals were defeated on all hands, and a short time would, most probably, have seen Marlborough and Eugene anticipate the allies of our day, by marching directly upon and taking possession of Paris. So sensible of this was Louis, that his haughty tone was totally gone; he ordered his embassadors to give up Alsace, and even to assist in driving Philip, his own grandson, out of Spain, by privately paying the allies a million of livres monthly for the purpose. The Tories came in at this critical juncture, and all was changed. They offered Louis a most unexpected peace. At once he lifted again his head and his heart; Alsace remains to this day a part of France, Spain has descended to the Bourbon, and the glory of Marlborough is without a single result except Blenheim House, the dukedom to his family, and sixty-two millions and a half of taxation, which that war cost the English people. The peace of Utrecht roused the indignation of the whole civilized world. Volumes have been written in reprehension of it, and even enlightened Conservatives of our time, as Hallam in his Constitutional History, join in the condemnation.

Yet this mighty change, with all its countless consequences, could be effected, almost wholly, by the simple vicar of a simple Irish parish. It was Swift who helped to plan and carry out this grand scheme of defeat and mortification to the Whigs, who had excited his wrath by withholding from him preferment. It was he, more than all men together, who, in the Examiner, painted the scheme in all his affluence of delusive colors to the nation, and roused the English people, by the cry of English blood and English money wasted on the Continent, to demand immediate peace. While we lament the deed, we must confess the stupendous powers of the man.

But all this could not win him the keenly-coveted bishopric. He could reverse the history of total Europe, he could reverse the victorious arms of Marlborough and Eugene, he could put forth his hand and save France and its proud monarch from just humiliation, but he could not extort from the reluctant queen, even by the combined hands of Oxford and Bolingbroke, the object of his own ambition, a mitre. The Tale of a Tub stood in his way; it was only just in time that his friends, themselves falling, secured for him the deanery of St. Patrick's, to which he retired to act the ostensible patriot by indulging his own private resentment against his enemies and his fate.

Laracor is about two English miles from Trim. It lies in a drearyish sort of a farming country, and to Swift, full of ambition, and accustomed to town life and the stirring politics of the time, with which he was so much mixed up, one would have thought must prove a perfect desert. There is no village there, nor does there appear to have been one. It was a mere church and parsonage, and huts were very likely scattered about here and there, as they are now. The church still stands; one of the old, plain, barn-like structures of this part of the country, with a low belfry. The grave-yard is pretty well filled with headstones and tombs, and some that seem to belong to good families. The church-yard is surrounded by a wall and trees, and in a thatched cottage at the gate lives the sexton. He said he had built the house himself; that he was seventy-five or so; and his wife, who had been on the spot fifty years, as old; but that the incumbent, a Mr. Irvine, was eighty-four, and that he was but the third from Swift. Swift held it fifty-five years, the next incumbent nearly as long, and this clergyman thirty-six, or thereabouts. It must, therefore, be a healthy place. The old man complained that all the gentry who used to live near were gone away. His wife used to get £20 at Christmas for Christmas-boxes, "and now she does not get even a cup o' tay. Poor creature! and she so fond of the tay!"

Like his house at Dublin, Swift's house here is gone. There remains only one tall, thick ruin of a wall. "What is that?" I asked of a man at a cottage door close by. "It's been there from the time of the dane," said he. For a moment I imagined he meant the Danes, but soon recollected myself. Close to it, at the side of the high road, is a clear spring, under some bushes, and margined with great stones, which they call "the Dane's Cellar" and "the Dane's Well." "He was a very good man to the poor," say they. "He was a fine, bright man." This, however, is all the remains of his place here. The present vicar has built himself a good house in the fields, nearer to Trim; and not only the dean's house is all gone except this piece of wall, but his holly hedge, his willows, and cherry-trees have vanished. A common Irish hut now stands in what was his garden. The canal may still be traced, but the river walk is now a marsh.

Trim, where Stella lived when Swift was at Laracor, though the county town of Meath, is now little more than a large village. It bears, however, all the marks of its ancient importance. The ruins all about it, on the banks of the Boyne, are most extensive. They are those of a great palace, a castle, a cathedral, and other buildings. It is a great haunt for antiquarians, and not far distant from it is Tara, with its hill, the seat of ancient kings. As you leave the town to go to Laracor, you come, at the town-end, to a lofty column in honor of Wellington, who was born at Dangan Castle, a few miles beyond Laracor. The way to Laracor then lies along a flattish country, with a few huts here and there by the wayside. On your left, as you approach Laracor, runs an old ruinous wall, with tall trees within it, as having once formed a park. The first object, connected with Swift, which arrests your attention, is the ruin of his house, with its spring, which lies on the right hand of the road; and on the left side of the road, perhaps a hundred yards further, stands the church in its inclosure.

From Laracor, Swift's remove was to Dublin, where he spent the remainder of his life. Here the deanery has been quite removed, and a modern house occupies its place. The old Cathedral of St. Patrick is a great object connected with his memory here. Though wearing a very ancient look, St. Patrick's was rebuilt after its destruction in 1362, and its present spire was added only in 1750. In size and proportion the cathedral is fine. It is three hundred feet long, and eighty broad. It can not boast much of its architecture, but contains several monuments of distinguished men; among them, those of Swift and Curran. These two are busts. Aloft in the nave hang the banners of the Knights of St. Patrick; and again, in the choir, hang newly-emblazoned banners of the knights; and over the stalls which belong to the knights are fixed gilt helmets, and by each stall hangs the knight's sword. The whole fabric is now undergoing repair, and not before it was needed. Of course, the monuments of highest interest here are those of Swift and Stella. These occupy two contiguous pillars on the south side of the nave. They consist of two plain slabs of marble, in memory of the dean and Mrs. Johnson—Stella. The inscription on the dean's slab is expressive "of that habit of mind which his own disappointments and the oppressions of his country had produced." It was written by himself:

Over this monument has been placed his bust in marble, sculptured by Cunningham, and esteemed a good likeness. It was the gift of T. T. Faulkner, Esq., nephew and successor to Alderman George Faulkner, Swift's bookseller, and the original publisher of most of his works. The inscription over his amiable and much-injured wife is as follows: "Underneath lie the mortal remains of Mrs. Hester Johnson, better known to the world by the name of Stella, under which she is celebrated in the writings of Dr. Jonathan Swift, dean of this Cathedral. She was a person of extraordinary endowments and accomplishments of body, mind, and behavior, justly admired and respected by all who knew her, on account of her many eminent virtues, as well as for her great natural and acquired perfections. She died January 27th, 1727-8, in the forty-sixth year of her age, and by her will bequeathed one thousand pounds toward the support of a chaplain to the hospital founded in this city by Dr. Steevens."

In an obscure corner, near the southern entrance, is a small tablet of white marble, with the following inscription: "Here lieth the body of Alexander M'Gee, servant to Doctor Swift, dean of St. Patrick's. His grateful master caused this monument to be erected in memory of his discretion, fidelity, and diligence in that humble station. Obiit Mar. 24, 1721-2. Ætatis 29."

There are other monuments, ancient and modern, in the cathedral worthy of notice, but this is all that concerns our present subject. How little, indeed, seems to remain in evidence of Swift, where he lived so many years, and played so conspicuous a part. The hospital for the insane which he founded is perhaps his most genuine monument. It still flourishes. The sum which was made over by the dean's executors for this purpose was £7720. This has been augmented by Parliamentary grants and voluntary donations, and is capable of accommodating upward of a hundred pauper patients, besides nearly an equal number of paying ones.

At the deanery house there is an excellent portrait of Swift, by Bindon. Another, by Bindon, and said to be one of the best likenesses of him, is in the possession of Dr. Hill, of Dublin; and there is a third at Howth Castle. But nothing can, to the visitor, fill up the vacuum made by the destruction of the house in which he lived. We want to see where the author of the Drapier's Letters and of Gulliver's Travels lived; where he conversed with Stella and Mrs. Whiteway, and joked with Sheridan and Delany, and where he finally sank into moody melancholy, and died.

Of all the lives of Swift which have been written, it would be difficult to say whether Dr. Johnson's or Sir Walter Scott's is the most one-sided. Johnson's is like that of a man who had a personal pique, and Scott's is that of a regular pleader. In his admiration of his author, he seems unconsciously to take all that comes as excellent and right, and slurs over acts and principles in Swift which in another he would denounce as most disgraceful. When we recollect that Swift was bitterly disappointed in his ambition of a miter, and that he retired to Ireland to brood not only over this, but over the utter wreck of his political patrons and party, the impartial reader finds it difficult to concede to him so much the praise of real patriotism as of personal resentment. He was ready to lay hold on any thing that could at once annoy government and enhance his own popularity. In all relations of life, an intense selfishness was his great characteristic, if we except this in his character of author: there he certainly displayed a great indifference to pecuniary profit, and was not only a stanch friend to his literary associates, but allowed them to reap that profit by his writings which he would not reap himself. But in all other respects his selfishness is strikingly prominent. He did not hesitate to sacrifice man or woman for the promotion of his comfort or his ambition. We have spoken of his treatment of women, we may take a specimen of his treatment of men. In the celebrated case of Wood, the patentee, and the Drapier's Letters, nothing could be more recklessly unjust than his conduct, or more hollow than his pretenses. He wanted a cause of annoyance to Walpole, and against the government generally. Government had given a contract to Wood to coin a certain quantity of halfpence for Ireland, and this he seized hold on. He represented Wood as a low iron-monger, an adventurer; his halfpence as vile in quality and deficient in weight; and the whole as a nuisance, which would rob Ireland of its gold, and enrich England at its expense. Now Scott himself is obliged to admit that the whole of this was false. Wood, instead of the mere iron-monger on whom he heaped all the charges and epithets of villainy and baseness that he could, even to that of a "wood-louse," was a highly respectable iron-master of Wolverhampton. His coinage, on this outcry being raised by Swift, was submitted by government to Sir Isaac Newton to be assayed, when it was reported by Sir Isaac to be better than bargain; and is admitted by Scott to have been better than Ireland had been in the habit of having, and, in fact, he says, a very handsome coinage. So far from an evil to Ireland, Scott admits, as is very obvious, that it was one of the best things Ireland could have, a sufficient stock of coin. But the ignorant population, once possessed with the idea of imposition, grew outrageous, and flung the coinage into the Liffey, and Swift chuckled to himself over the success of his scheme, and the acquisition of the reputation of a patriot. In the mean time, he had inflicted a real injury on his infatuated fellow-countrymen, and a loss of £60,000 on his innocent victim, Wood. Scott says that Wood was indemnified by a grant of £3000 yearly for twelve years. The simple fact I believe to be, that, though granted, it was never paid; Wood, who had nine sons, lost by this transaction the fortune that should have provided for them. One of these sons was afterward the introducer of platina into England. The real facts respecting Wood's coinage may be found in "Ruding's Annals of Coinage."

There is another point in which Swift's biographers and critics have been far too lenient toward him. Wonderful as is his talent, and admirable as his wit, these are dreadfully defiled by his coarseness and filthiness of ideas. Wit has no necessary connection with disgusting imagery; and in attempting to excuse Swift, his admirers have laid the charge upon the times. But Swift out-Herods the times and his cotemporaries. In them may be found occasional smuttiness, but the filthy taint seemed to pervade the whole of Swift's mind, and his vilest parts are inextricably woven with the texture of his composition, as in Gulliver's Travels. There is nothing so singular as that almost all writers speak of the wit of Swift and of Rabelais, without, as it regards the latter, once warning the reader against the mass of most revolting obscenity which loads almost every page of the Frenchman. Even Rogers, moral and refined in his own writings, talks of "laughing with Rabelais in his easy chair," but he never seems to reflect that far the greater portion of readers would have to blush and quit his company in disgust. It is fitting that in an age of moral refinement, youthful readers should at least be made aware that the wit that is praised is combined with obscenity or grossness that can not be too emphatically condemned.

Among the places connected with the history of Swift's life, the residence of Miss Vanhomrigh—Vanessa—is one of the most interesting. The account of it, procured by Scott, was this: "Marley Abbey, near Celbridge, where Miss Vanhomrigh resided, is built much in the form of a real cloister, especially in its external appearance. An aged man, upward of ninety by his own account, showed the grounds to my correspondent. He was the son of Miss Vanhomrigh's gardener, and used to work with his father in the garden when a boy. He remembered the unfortunate Vanessa well, and his account of her corresponded with the usual description of her person, especially as to her embonpoint. He said she went seldom abroad, and saw little company; her constant amusement was reading, or walking in the garden. Yet, according to this authority, her society was courted by several families in the neighborhood, who visited her, notwithstanding her seldom returning that attention; and he added, that her manners interested every one who knew her. But she avoided company, and was always melancholy, save when Dean Swift was there, and then she seemed happy. The garden was to an uncommon degree crowded with laurels. The old man said that when Miss Vanhomrigh expected the dean, she always planted with her own hand a laurel or two against his arrival. He showed her favorite seat, still called Vanessa's Bower. Three or four trees and some laurels indicate the spot. They had formerly, according to the old man's information, been trained into a close arbor. There were two seats and a rude table within the bower, the opening of which commanded a view of the Liffey, which had a romantic effect, and there was a small cascade that murmured at some distance. In this sequestered spot, according to the old gardener's account, the dean and Vanessa used often to sit, with books and writing materials on the table before them. Vanessa, besides musing over her unhappy attachment, had, during her residence in this solitude, the care of nursing the declining health of her younger sister, who at length died about 1720. This event, as it left her alone in the world, seems to have increased the energy of her fatal passion for Swift, while he, on the contrary, saw room for still greater reserve, when her situation became that of a solitary female without the society or countenance of a female relation."

Marley Abbey, Vanessa's house, is now the residence of Mr. Henry Grattan, M.P.

In D'Alton's History of the County of Dublin, p. 344, there is an account of the present state of Delville, the residence of Dr. Delany.

JAMES THOMSON.

The author of The Seasons was born at Ednam, a couple of miles or so from Kelso, on the 11th of September, 1700. His father was the minister of the parish, and it was intended to bring him up to the same profession. The early childhood only of Thomson was spent here, for his father removed to Southdean, near Jedburgh, having obtained the living of that place.

Ednam has nothing poetical about it. It lies in a rich farming country of ordinary features. The scenery is flat, and the village by no means picturesque. It consists of a few farm-houses, and long rows of hinds' cottages. David Macbeth Moir, the Delta of Blackwood's Magazine, described the place some years ago in these lines:

Yet even this description is too favorable. It would induce us to believe that the spot had something of the picturesque—it has nothing of it. The streamlet sings little even to itself through that flat district; the mossy bridge has given way to a good, substantial, but unpoetical stone one. The landscape is by no means over-enriched by fine trees. There are some limes, I believe they are, in the churchyard. The old church has been pulled down since Thomson's time, and the new one now standing is a poor, barn-like affair, with a belfry that would do for a pigeon cote. The manse in which the poet was born has also disappeared, and a new, square, unpicturesque one been built upon the site. Perhaps no class of people have less of the poetical or the picturesque in them than the Presbyterian clergy of Scotland. The hard, dry, stern Calvinism imparted by John Knox has effectually expelled all that. The country people of Scotland are generally intelligent, and have a taste for poetry and literature; but to a certainty they do not derive this from their clergy. In no country have I found the parish clergy so ignorant of general literature, or so unacquainted with any thing that is going on in the world, except the polemics of their own Church. The cargo of Geneva which Knox imported has operated on the religious feeling of Scotland worse than any gin or whisky on its moral or physical condition. It is a spirit as unlike Christianity as possible. One is all love and tenderness; the other all bitterness and hardness: the one is gentle and tolerant; the other fierce and intolerant: the one careless of form, so that the life and soul of charity and piety are preserved; the other is all form and doctrine—doctrine, hard, metaphysical, rigid, and damnatory. On the borders, too, in many places, the very people seem to me more ignorant and stupid than is the wont of Scotland; they would match the Surrey chopsticks or Essex calves of England.

I walked over from Kelso on the Sunday morning to Ednam. The people were collected about the church door, waiting for the time of service. I thought it a good opportunity to hear something of the traditions of the country about Thomson. Nobody could tell me any thing. So little idea had they of a poet, that they informed me that another poet had been born there besides Thomson. I asked whom that might be. They said, "One White, a decrepit old man who used to write under the trees of the church-yard;" and this they thought having another poet! Such—as we are often obliged to exclaim—is fame!

An old woman, into whose cottage I stepped, on returning, to avoid a shower, was more intelligent. She told me that her mother had lived at the old manse, and frequently heard what had been told to inquirers. The manse in which Thomson was born, she said, was of mud; and he was born in the parlor, which had a bed in a recess concealed by a curtain.

The present minister is the son of a saddler at Hawick. I stayed the service, or at least nearly three hours of it. It is the odd custom of many country places in Scotland, where the people have too far to come to be able to do it twice in the day, to actually have two services performed all at one sitting. With that attention to mere rigid formality which this Calvinism has introduced, that task-work holiness which teaches that God's wrath will be aroused if they do not go through a certain number of prayers, sermons, and ceremonies in the day, they have the morning and afternoon services all at once. There were, therefore, two enormously long sermons, three prayers, three singings, and, to make worse of it, the sermons consisted of such a mass of doctrinal stubble as filled me with astonishment that such actual rubbish, and worse than rubbish, could at the present day be inflicted on any patient and unoffending people. What a gross perversion and misconception of Christianity is this! How my heart bled at the very idea that the State paid and upheld this system, by which the people were not blessed with the pure, simple, and benign knowledge of that simplest, most beautiful, and love-inspiring of all systems, Christianity, but were actually cursed with the drawing of the horrid furze-bushes of school divinity and Calvinistic damnation across their naked consciences.

Imagine a company of hard-working and care-worn peasants, coming for five or ten miles on a Sunday to listen to such chopped-straw preaching as this. The sermons were to prove that the temptation of Christ in the wilderness was a bonâ fide and actual history. And first, the preacher told them what profound subtlety the temptations of Satan showed, such as advising Christ after forty days' fast to cause the stones to be made bread; as if Christ could not have done that if he needed, without the devil's suggestion. And then he told them that Christ was God himself, so that the devil knowing that, instead of showing such profound subtlety, must have been a very daft devil indeed to try to tempt him at all. Poor people! of all the beautiful sayings and doings in the life of our Savior; of all the divine precepts which he peculiarly brought down from heaven for the especial consolation and invigoration of the poor; of all the deeds and the expressions of an infinite love; of all those teachings that "the Sabbath is made for man, and not man for the Sabbath;" of all the gracious declarations that it was not by doctrine and cunningly-devised fables, but by the great spirit of love—love to God and to one another, and by keeping his commandments, that we are to be saved, was there nothing that could be dealt out to you? Could your dry and thirsting spirits receive nothing but this dry and musty fodder of sectarian disquisition? Oh! how much better were one simple word of genuine feeling from the most unlettered preacher on a bare hill-side!

My only wonder was to find any body in the church at all, for I thought I must have met the whole village going to Kelso, where they have eight different sects, the most zealous of all being the Free Church. It is only by a passage through Scotland that you get a living idea of what a movement the movement of this Free Church has been. In every town, from the extremest south to the extremest north, you see free churches rising or arisen. Even in little Melrose there is a large one; and I observed that they built them as near, on all occasions, as possible to the established one, and, if compassable, exactly opposite. Indeed, I have been told that land has, in many instances, been offered gratuitously to build a free church upon, and has been refused because it was not opposite to the established one. Such is the fruit of an Establishment in Scotland, and such were the evidences of its teachings in Ednam. How different to the fine, genial, and genuine faith of James Thomson!

On a hill on the right hand of the road, proceeding from Kelso to Ednam, and about a quarter of a mile from that village, a plain obelisk has been erected to the memory of the poet, bearing this inscription: "Erected in memory of James Thomson, Author of the Seasons. Born at Ednam, 11th of September, A.D. 1700."

The Earl of Buchan, who erected a temple of the Muses at Dryburgh, in the center of which he placed Thomson, and who placed the brass tablet to his memory in the church at Richmond, also instituted an annual commemoration of his fame at Ednam, which has long fallen into desuetude. For the first meeting of this kind, Burns wrote his Address to the Shade of Thomson in crowning his bust at Ednam.

Of Thomson's sojourn at Southdean, nearly all that is now known is comprehended in the following passage in Mr. Robert Chambers's "Picture of Scotland:" "The father of James Thomson was removed from Ednam to this parish while the poet was a child; and here, accordingly, the author of the Seasons spent the days of his boyhood. In the churchyard may still be seen the humble monument of the father of the poet, though the inscription is nearly obliterated. The manse in which that individual reared his large family, of whom one was destined to become so illustrious, was what would now be described as a small thatched cottage. It is traditionally recollected that the poet was sent to the University of Edinburgh, seated behind his father's man on horseback, but was so reluctant to quit the country for a town life, that he had returned on foot before his conductor, declaring that he could study as well on the braes of Sou'den—so Southdean is generally pronounced—as in Edinburgh."

Here Thomson undoubtedly acquired that deep love for nature, and that intimate acquaintance with it, which enabled him to produce the poem of the Seasons, which, with considerable faults of style, is one of the richest compositions in the language, in the legitimate subject matter, in the grandeur of its scenery, drawn from all regions of the earth, and in the broad and beautiful spirit of its religious philosophy. It has stood the test of more than a century, during which time great changes have taken place in the theory of versification and in public taste. Compositions of great variety, and of the most splendid character, have since rendered fastidious the public judgment, yet the Seasons are and will continue to be read with pleasure.

Though the old man-servant who had jogged along to Edinburgh with little Jemmy Thomson behind him was astonished, on his return, to find him at home again, yet another attempt must have been more successful, for at the University of Edinburgh he finished his education. The poetic nature, however, convinced him by that time that it was not his vocation to preach the arid notions of Knox, and palm them off as the grand, heart-opening truths of Christianity. His father had died two years after his coming to Edinburgh, leaving his mother with a considerable family, who raised upon her little estate, by mortgage, what she could, and came to reside in Edinburgh. James resolved not to weigh upon her resources longer than needful, but set out for London with his poem of Winter in his pocket. He had introductions to several influential persons, and one of them to Mr. Mallet, then tutor to the sons of the Duke of Montrose. His great want, Dr. Johnson says, on reaching London, was a pair of shoes. To make his calls, these were necessary, and his Winter was his sole resource. It was a wintery one, for he could find no purchaser for it for a long time, and when purchased, it did not for a good while sell. At length it fell under the eye of a Mr. Whatley, who instantly perceived its merit, and zealously spread the information. Thomson was quickly a popular author, and from this time resided chiefly in the neighborhood of London. He made one tour on the Continent as companion to Mr. Talbot, the eldest son of the chancellor. The despotism which he saw abroad induced him to write his poem of Liberty, one of his very worst productions, and which lost him much government preferment; and when the public complained of this, a ministerial writer remarked that "Thomson had taken a Liberty which was not agreeable to Britannia in any Season."

Government preferment, however, he did receive. The chancellor conferred on him the place of Secretary of the Briefs, which made him independent. On the death of the Chancellor Talbot he lost this post, through being too indolent to make application to Lord Hardwicke for it, though Hardwicke kept it open for some time that he might. For a time he was again reduced by this circumstance to poverty and difficulty. Out of this he was, after a while, permanently raised through the influence of Lord Lyttleton, a pension of a hundred a year being conferred on him. This removed the pressure of utter necessity, but compelled him to work, without which compulsion, perhaps, no man would have worked less. About three years before his death, Lord Lyttleton, being then in power, made him Surveyor-general of the Leeward Islands. Those islands he surveyed from his elevation on Richmond Hill, and very general his survey of course must have been. The particular and actual survey was left to his deputy in the islands themselves, and Thomson netted a yearly balance, the deputy being paid, of three hundred a year, which, with his pension, left him most comfortably at ease in the castle of indolence. Besides his two principal poems, he wrote several tragedies, as Sophonisba, in which the unfortunate line,

was parodied by a wag with

and was echoed through the town every where and for a long time. Agamemnon was another, Edward and Eleonora a third, and Tancred and Sigismunda his last and best, except a posthumous one—Coriolanus.

Among the haunts of Thomson were the country houses of many of the more literary or more tasteful noblemen of the time, as Hagley, the seat of Lord Lyttleton; Bub Doddington's seat in Dorsetshire; Stowe, then the seat of Lord Cobham; the seat of the Countess of Hertford, &c. The last place, however, it seems, only received Thomson once. It was the practice, says Johnson, of the Countess of Hertford, to whom Thomson dedicated his poem of Spring, to invite some poet every summer into the country to hear her verses and assist her studies. This honor was once conferred on Thomson, who took more delight in carousing with Lord Hertford and his friends than assisting her ladyship's poetical operations, and never, therefore, received another summons.

Thomson was, in fact, the last person to hope for much literary and understrapper service from, though in the shape of a countess, where, on the one hand, bad verses had to be inflicted on him, and, on the other, there was a good table and good talk. Indolence and self-indulgence were his besetting sins. Every one has heard of the lady who said she had discovered three things concerning the author in reading the Seasons: that he was a great lover, a great swimmer, and rigidly abstinent; at all which, Savage, who lived much with him, laughed heartily, saying that he believed Thomson was never in cold water in his life, and that the other particulars were just as true. The anecdote of Quin, regarding Thomson's splendid description of sunrise, has been equally diffused. He, like Savage, asserted that he believed Thomson never saw the sun rise in his life, and related that, going one day to see him at Richmond, he found him in bed at noon, and asking him why he did not get up earlier, he replied, listlessly, that "he had nae motive."

That no man ever lived more completely in a castle of indolence there can be little question, and perhaps as little that it cut his life short. He died at forty-eight, of cold taken on the Thames between Kew and Richmond. He used, it seems, to be in the habit of walking from town to his house at Richmond, and crossed at a boat-house somewhere here about, which being also a public house, he there took a rest and refreshment. The place is still shown. Here, it would seem, he came warm from his walk, and, crossing in a damp wind, took cold; but this susceptibility to cold was the direct result of his indolent, self-indulgent, and effeminate habits. Had he followed those practices of healthy activity so finely described in his poem, how much longer and more useful might his life have been! Yet it must be a fact unquestionable, that Thomson, as a boy, rose early, saw both sunrises and all the glories of nature, plunged into the summer flood, and braved the severity of winter. No man could so vividly or so accurately describe what he had not experienced, and they who know best the country know how exact is his knowledge of it. Every one can feel how masterly are his descriptions of the grandest phenomena of nature in every region of the world, when such descriptions are deducible from books. In those, however, which came under his own eye, there is a life, and there are beauties that attest that personal knowledge. The faults of his Seasons are those of style. His blank verse is peculiar; you can never mistake it for that of any other poet; but it has not the charm of that of Milton, of Wordsworth, or of various other poets. It is often turgid, and still more often prosaic. There are strange inversions used; and with his adverbs and adjectives he plays the most terrible havoc. Frequently the adjective is tossed behind the substantive, just for the sake of the meter, and regardless of all other effect, as,

instead of the delightless day. His adverbs are continually lopped of their last syllable, and stand like wretched adjectives out of place; as, the sower "liberal throws the grain," instead of liberally: clouds, "cheerless, drown the crude, unripened year," instead of cheerlessly: the herb dies, though with vital power: "it is copious blest," instead of copiously. These barbarisms, which greatly deface this poem, abound; but especially in the Spring, which was not published first in its native position, but third, the routine of appearance being Winter, Summer, Spring, and Autumn.

But, above its faults, how far ascend the beauties and excellences of this poem, the finest of which spring out of that firm, glowing, and noble spirit of patriotism and religion which animated James Thomson. His patriotism bursts forth on all occasions, but more especially in that elaborate description of England, her deeds and worthies, in the Summer, commencing,

His piety, the piety of love and wonder, of that profound admiration which the contemplation of the works of the Divine Creator had inspired him with, and of that grateful love and trust which the manifestations of parental goodness every where had impressed upon his heart, these are, as it were, the living soul of the poem, and the principles of imperishable vitality. These sentiments, diffused throughout the poem itself, concentrate themselves at its conclusion as predominant over all others, and burst forth in that magnificent hymn, which has no rival in the language except the glorious one of Milton, the morning hymn of our first parents, beginning,