THOMOND, EARL AND MARQUESS-THOMPSON, SIR H. 869

deep. Thomasville was settled about 1825, was incorporated as a town in 1831, and was chartered as a city in 1889.

THOMPSON, FRANCIS (1860-1907), English poet, was born at Ashton, Lancashire, in 1860. His father, a doctor, became a convert to Roman Catholicism, following his brother Edward Healy Thompson, a friend of Manning. The boy was accord

THOMOND, EARL AND MARQUESS OF, Irish titles borne by the great family of O'Brien, the earldom from 1543 to 1741 and the marquessate from 1800 to 1855. Thomond, or Tuaidh-ingly educated at Ushaw College, near Durham, and subseMuin, was one of the three principalities of Munster, forming the northern part of the province. Its earls were descended from Turlough O'Brien (c. 1009-1086), king of Munster, and through him from the celebrated king of Ireland, Brian Boroimhe. Turlough's descendants, Conchobhar O'Brien (d. 1267) and Brian Ruadh O'Brien (d. 1276), kings of Thomond, were both typical Irish chieftains. Conchobhar's tomb and effigy with a crown are still to be seen in the ruined abbey of Corcomroe, Co. Clare. His descendant Conor O'Brien (d. 1539), prince of Thomond, took part in the feud between the great families of Fitzgerald and Butler and was the last inde- | pendent prince of Thomond. It is interesting to learn that in 1534, when he was in some straits, he wrote to the emperor Charles V. offering to submit to his authority. Conor's brother, Murrough O'Brien (d. 1551), prince of Thomond, the succeeding chief of the race, gave up his " captainship, title, superiority and country" to Henry VIII. in 1543, when he was created earl of Thomond. By special arrangement the earldom descended, nct to his son Dermod, but to his nephew, Donough, who became the 2nd earl. Dermod, however, inherited the barony of Inchiquin, which was conferred upon his father at the same time as the earldom.

Conor O'Brien, the 3rd earl (c. 1534-c. 1582), was for some years at the outset of his career, harassed by the attacks of his discontented kinsmen. Then in his turn he rose against the English, but was defeated and fled to France; in 1571, however, he was pardoned and formally surrendered his lands to Elizabeth. One of his younger sons was Daniel O'Brien (c. 1577c. 1664) who, after loyally serving Charles I. and Charles II., was created Viscount Clare in 1663. His grandson Daniel, the 3rd viscount (d. 1691) served James II. in Ireland, being outlawed and deprived of his estates by the English parliament. The three succeeding viscounts Clare all distinguished themselves in the service of France. Daniel, the 4th viscount, was mortally wounded at the battle of Marsaglia in 1693; his brother Charles, the 5th viscount (d. 1706), was killed at the battle of Ramillies; and the latter's son Charles, the 6th viscount (16991761) after a brilliant military career, was made a marshal of France in 1757.. When Charles, the 7th viscount, died in 1774 the title became extinct.

Donough O'Brien, the 4th earl (d. 1624), called the " great earl," was the son and successor of the 3rd earl. He served England well in her warfare with the rebellious Irish during the closing year of Elizabeth's reign and was made president of Munster in 1605. He had two sons, Henry, the 5th earl, (d. 1639) and Barnabas, the 6th earl (d. 1657). During the Irish rebellion of 1640-41 Barnabas showed a prudent neutrality, and then joined Charles I. at Oxford, where in 1645 he was created marquess of Billing, but the patent never passed the great seal and the title was never assumed. The succeeding earls were Barnabas's son Henry (c. 1621-1691) and Henry's grandson Henry (1688-1741) who was created an English peer as Viscount Tadcaster. When he died the earldom of Thomond became extinct.

The estates of the earldom descended to the last earl's nephew, Percy Wyndham (c. 1713-1774), a younger son of Sir William Wyndham, Bart. He took the additional name of O'Brien and was created earl of Thomond in 1756. When he died unmarried the title again became extinct.

In 1800 Murrough O'Brien, 5th earl of Inchiquin (c. 17241808), was created marquess of Thomond. He was succeeded by his nephew William (c. 1765-1846) who was created a British peer as Baron Tadcaster in 1826. His brother James, the 3rd marquess (c. 1768-1855), was an officer in the navy and became an admiral in 1853. When he died the marquessate became extinct. See John O'Donoghue, Historical Memoirs of the O'Briens (Dublin, 1860).

quently studied medicine at Owens College, Manchester; but
he took no real interest in the profession of a doctor and was bent
on literary production. A period of friendlessness and failure
(from the point of view of "practical life") followed, in which
he became a solitary creature who yet turned his visions of
beauty into unrecognized verse. It was not till 1893 that,
after some five obscure years, in which he was brought to the
lowest depths of destitution and ill health, his poetic genius
became known to the public. Through his sending a poem to
the magazine Merrie England, he was sought out by Mr and
Mrs Wilfrid Meynell and rescued from the verge of starvation
and self-destruction, and, these friends of his own com-
munion, recognizing the value of his work, gave him a
home and procured the publication of his first volume of
Poems (1893). His debt to Mrs Meynell was repaid by
some of his finest verse. The volume quickly attracted
the attention of sympathetic critics, in the St James's
Gazette and other quarters, and Coventry Patmore wrote a
eulogistic notice in the Fortnightly Review (Jan. 1894). An
ardent Roman Catholic, much of Francis Thompson's verse
reminded the critics of Crashaw, but the beauty and splendid
though often strange inventiveness of his diction were imme-
diately recognized as giving him a place by himself among
contemporary poets, recalling Keats and Shelley rather than any
of his own day. Persistent ill health limited his literary output,
but Sister Songs (1895) and New Poems (1897) confirmed the
opinion formed of his remarkable gifts. But his health was
hopelessly broken down by tuberculosis. Cared for by the
friends already mentioned, he lived a frail existence, chiefly at
the Capuchin monastery at Tanlasapt, and later at Storrington;
and on the 13th of November 1907 he died in London. He had
done a little prose journalism, and in 1905 published a treatise
on Health and Holiness, dealing with the ascetic life; but it is
with his three volumes of poems that his name will be connected.
Among his work there is a certain amount which can justly be
called eccentric or unusual, especially in his usage of poetically
compounded neologisms; but nothing can be purer or more
simply beautiful than "The Daisy," nothing more intimate and
reverent than his poems about children, or more magnificent
than "The Hound of Heaven." For glory of inspiration and
natural magnificence of utterance he is unique among the poets
of his time.
(H. CH.)

THOMPSON, SIR HENRY, BART. (1820-1904), English surgeon, was born at Framlingham, Suffolk, on the 6th of August 1820. His father wished him to enter business, but circumstances ultimately enabled him to follow his own desire of becoming a physician, and in 1848 he entered the medical school of University College, London. There he had a brilliant career, and obtained his degree at London University in 1851 with the highest honours in anatomy and surgery. In 1851 he married Miss Kate Loder, a talented pianist, who, though stricken with paralysis soon afterwards, was always a devoted helpmate to him. In 1853 he was appointed assistant surgeon at University College Hospital, becoming full surgeon in 1863, professor of clinical surgery in 1866, and consulting surgeon in 1874. In 1884 he became professor of surgery and pathology in the Royal College of Surgeons, which in 1852 had awarded him the Jacksonian prize for an essay on the Pathology and Trealment of Stricture of the Urethra, and again in 1860 for another on the Health and Morbid Anatomy of the Prostate Gland. These two memoirs indicate the department of medical practice to which he devoted his main attention. Specializing in the surgery of the genito-urinary tract, and in particular in that of the bladder, he went to Paris to study under Civiale, who in the first quarter of the 19th century proved that it is possible to crush a stone within the human bladder, and after his return he soon acquired a high reputation as a skilful operator in that

1854. He entered parliament as member for Hull (1835–1837), ❘ from 1883 to 1892 he acted as director, and from 1856 to 1866 and afterwards sat for Bradford (1847-1852, 1857-1859). He he was on the staff of the military high school. In 1866 he was took a prominent part in the corn-law agitation, his Catechism appointed professor of chemistry at the university, and retained of the Corn Laws (1827) being by far the most effective pamphlet that chair until his retirement from active work in 1891. His published on the subject. In 1829 he became the proprietor name is famous for his researches in thermochemistry, and, of the Westminster Review, to which he contributed a large especially between 1869 and 1882, he carried out a great number number of articles, republished in 1842 in six volumes, under the of determinations of the heat evolved or absorbed in chemical title Exercises, Political and Others. His mathematical publica- reactions, such as the formation of salts, oxidation and reduction, tions were of a somewhat eccentric kind. He published a and the combustion of organic compounds. His collected Theory of Parallels (1844), and was also the author of Geometry results were published in 1882-1886 in four volumes under the without Axioms, in which he endeavoured to "get rid" of title Thermochemische Untersuchungen, and also a résumé in axioms and postulates. His new Theory of Just Intonation English under the title Thermochemistry in 1908. In 1857 he (1850) was, however, a contribution of great value to the established in Copenhagen a process for manufacturing soda science of musical acoustics, and went through many editions. from cryolite, obtained from the west coast of Greenland. He It may be said to have formed the basis of the tonic sol-fa died on the 13th of February 1909. His brother, Carl August system of music. He died at Blackheath, near London, on Thomsen (1834-1894), was lecturer on technical chemistry at the 7th of September 1869. the Copenhagen Polytechnic, and a second brother, Thomas See Colonel C. W. Thompson's memoir in the Proc. Roy. Soc. Gottfried Thomsen (1841-1901), was assistant in the chemical (1869). laboratory at the university till 1884, when he abandoned science for theology, subsequently becoming minister at Norup and Randers. THOMSON, SIR CHARLES WYVILLE (1830-1882), Scottish naturalist, was born at Bonsyde, Linlithgowshire, on the 5th of March 1830, and was educated at Edinburgh University. In 1850 he was appointed lecturer in, and in 1851 professor of, botany at Aberdeen, and in 1853 he became professor of natural history in Queen's College, Cork. A year later he was nominated to the chair of mineralogy and geology at Queen's 'College, Belfast, and in 1860 was transferred to the chair of natural history in the same institution. In 1868 he assumed the duties of professor of botany at the Royal College of Science, Dublin, and finally in 1870 he received the natural history chair at Edinburgh. He will be specially remembered as a student of the biological conditions of the depths of the sea. Being interested in crinoids, and stimulated by the results of the dredgings of Michael Sars (1805-1869) in the deep sea off the Norwegian coasts, he succeeded, along with Dr W. B. Carpenter, in obtaining the loan of H.M.S. “Lightning "and" Porcupine," for successive deep-sea dredging expeditions in the summers of 1868 and 1869. It was thus shown that animal life exists in abundance down to depths of 650 fathoms, that all invertebrate groups are represented (largely by Tertiary forms previously believed to be extinct), and, moreover, that deep-sea temperatures are by no means so constant as was supposed, but vary considerably, and indicate an oceanic circulation. The results of these expeditions were described in The Depths of the Sea, which he published in 1873. The remarkable results gained for hydrography as well as zoology, in association with the practical needs of ocean telegraphy, soon led to the granting of H.M.S. Challenger for a circumnavigating expedition, and Thomson sailed at the end of 1872 as director of the scientific staff, the cruise lasting three years and a half (see CHALLENGER EXPEDITION). On his return he received many academic honours, and was knighted. In 1877 he published two volumes (The Voyage of the Challenger in the Atlantic), of a preliminary account of the results of the voyage, meanwhile carrying on his administrative labours in connexion with the disposition of the special collections and the publication of the monographs dealing with them. His health, never robust, was meanwhile giving way; from 1879 he ceased to perform the duties of his chair, and he died at Bonsyde on the 10th of March 1882.

THOMPSON, WILLIAM HEPWORTH (1810-1886), English classical scholar and master of Trinity College, Cambridge. was born at York on the 27th of March 1810. He was privately educated before entering the university. In 1834 he became a fellow of Trinity, in 1853 professor of Greek (to which a canonry in Ely Cathedral was then for the first time attached), and in 1866 master of his college. With the exception of the year 1836, when he acted as headmaster of a newly established school in Leicester, his life was divided between Cambridge and Ely. He died at the master's lodge on the 1st of October 1886. Thompson proved a worthy successor to Whewell; the twenty years of his mastership were years of progress, and he himself took an active part in the abolition of tests and the reform of university studies and of the college statutes. As a scholar he devoted his attention almost entirely to Plato; and his Phaedrus (1868) and Gergias (1871), with especially valuable introductions, still remain the standard English editions of these two dialogues. He also edited (1856) from the author's MSS. Lectures on the History of Ancient Philosophy by William Archer Butler (18141848; lecturer on moral philosophy at Trinity College, Dublin), the value of which was greatly enhanced by Thompson's notes. See article by J. W. Clark in Dict. Nat. Biog.; and J. E. Sandys, History of Classical Scholarship‍ (1908), vol. iii.

THOMSEN, GRÍMUR (1820-1896), Icelandic poet and man of letters, was born in 1820. He came in 1837 to the university of Copenhagen, where he first studied law and philology, but later, philosophy and aesthetics. He became an enthusiastic follower of the Pan-Scandinavian movement, although this was not generally favoured by his countrymen. After some years of foreign travel, in 1848 he entered the Danish diplomatic service, and remained in it till 1851, when he returned to Copenhagen, where he became the chief of one of the departments of the Danish foreign office. He retired in 1866, and then went back to Iceland, where he passed the rest of his life, active in the politics and the literature of his native island. He died in 1896. He is the best ballad poet Iceland has produced. His poems are unaffected and mostly free from rhetoric, the besetting sin of Icelandic poets. His subjects are principally taken from Icelandic or Scandinavian history and mythology. He is very unlike most of his contemporaries, both in style and thought: he is Icelandic to the core, and on that account is perhaps the modern Icelandic poet most appreciated by foreigners Besides his poems (two separate collections, Reykjavík, 1880, and Copenhagen, 1895), he is the author of numerous critical and historical essays in Icelandic and Danish, and some larger works in Danish, of which his dissertation on Lord Byron (Copenhagen, 1845) deserves to be mentioned. Grimur Thomsen was a warm admirer of Greek literature, and translated a great number of poems from that language into Icelandic. (S. BL.) THOMSEN, HANS PETER JÖRGEN JULIUS (1826-1909), Danish chemist, was born in Copenhagen on the 16th of February 1826, and spent his life in that city. From 1847 to 1856 he was engaged in teaching chemistry at the Polytechnic, of which

32

See obituary notice in Proc. Soc. Edin. (1883); also Thomson and Murray, Reports of the Voyage of H.M.S. "Challenger" (Edinburgh. 1885).

THOMSON, JAMES (1700-1748), English poet, author of The Seasons, was born at Ednam, in Roxburghshire, on the 11th of September 1700-the third son and fourth child of Thomas Thomson, minister of that place. His mother, Beatrix, was the daughter of Mr Trotter of Fogo, whose wife, Margaret, was one of the Homes of Bassenden. About 1701 Thomas Thomson removed to Southdean near Jedburgh. Here James was educated at first by Robert Riccaltoun, to whose verses on

this year, at the suggestion of Rundle, bishop of Derry, one of his patrons, he accompanied the son of Sir Charles Talbot, solicitor-general, upon his travels. In the course of these he projected his Liberty as "a poetical landscape of countries, mixed with moral observations on their government and people." In December 1731 he returned with his pupil to London. He probably lived with his patrons the Talbots, leisurely meditating his new poem, the first part of which did not appear until the close of 1734 or the beginning of 1735. But meanwhile his pupil died, and in the opening lines of Liberty Thomson pays a tribute to his memory. Two months after his son's death Sir Charles Talbot became chancellor and gave Thomson a sinecure in the court of chancery. About this time the poet worked for the relief of Dennis, now old and in extreme poverty, and induced even Pope to give a half-contemptuous support to the bitter critic of the Rape of the Lock. Liberty was completed in five parts in 1736. The poem was a failure; its execution did not correspond with its design; in a sense indeed it is a survey of countries and might have anticipated Goldsmith's Traveller. It was not, however, the poem which readers were expecting from the author of The Seasons, who had taken them from the town to the country, and from social and political satire to the world of nature. It is in the main a set of wearisome declamations put in the mouth of the goddess, and Johnson rightly enough remarks that "an enumeration of examples to prove a position which nobody denied as it was from the beginning superfluous, must quickly grow disgusting." The truth is that Thomson's poetical gift was for many years perverted by the zeal of partisanship.

Winter he owed the suggestion of his own poem. In 1712 | of The Seasons. It was dedicated to the Speaker, Onslow. In he attended a school at Jedburgh, held in the aisle of the parish church. He learnt there some Latin, but with difficulty, and the earliest recorded utterance of the future poet was "Confound the building of Babel." He began very soon to write verses, and we are told that every January he destroyed almost all the productions of the preceding year. And this was just as well, for the little that has escaped the fire contains no promise of his future powers. In 1715 he went to the university of Edinburgh. It is said that as soon as the servant who brought him thither had quitted him, he returned full speed to his father's house, declaring that he could read just as well at home; he went back, however, and had not been long at college before he lost his father, who died, according to one remarkable but highly improbable story, in the attempt to lay a ghost. The incident should have left more impression than we can trace upon the mind of the poet, at this date nervous and afraid of the dark; but in his Winter he writes of all such stories with a quiet contempt for "superstitious horror." He made friends at the university with David Mallock, who afterwards called himself Mallet, and with Patrick Murdoch, his future biographer. In 1719 he became a divinity student, and one of his exercises so enchanted a certain Auditor Benson, that he urged Thomson to go to London and there make himself a reputation as a preacher. It was partly with this object that Thomson left Edinburgh | without a degree in March 1725. His mother saw him embark, and they never met again; she died on the 10th of May of that year. There is sufficient evidence that on his arrival in London he was not in the extreme destitution which Dr Johnson attributes to him; and in July 1725 we find him engaged, as a make-shift, in teaching "Lord Binning's son to read." This son was the grandson of Lady Grizel Baillie, a somewhat distant connexion of Thomson's mother. She was the daughter of Sir Patrick Home, whom, after the defeat of Argyll, she fed in his concealment near his own castle; she was also, like other Scottish ladies, a writer of pretty ballads. This heroine and poetess is supposed to have encouraged Thomson to come to England, and it is certain that she procured him a temporary home. But he had other friends, especially Duncan Forbes of Culloden, by whom he was recommended to the duke of Argyll, the earl of Burlington, Sir Robert Walpole, Arbuthnot, Pope and Gay. Some introductions to the literary world he may have owed to Mallet, then tutor in the family of the duke of Montrose.

Thomson's Winter appeared in March 1726. It was warmly praised by Aaron Hill, a man of various interests and projects, and in his day a sort of literary oracle. It was dedicated to Sir Spencer Compton, the Speaker, who rewarded the poet, to his great disgust, with a bare twenty guineas. By the 11th of June 1727 a second edition was called for. Meanwhile Thomson was residing at Mr Watts's academy in Tower Street as tutor to Lord George Graham, second son of the duke of Montrose, and previously a pupil of Mallet.. Summer appeared in 1727. It was dedicated in prose, a compliment afterwards versified, to Bubb Dodington. In the same year Thomson published his Poem to the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton, with a fulsome dedication to Sir Robert Walpole, which was afterwards omitted, and the verses themselves remodelled when the poet began to inveigh against the ministry as he did in Britannia, published in 1729. Spring appeared in 1728, published by Andrew Millar, a man who, according to Johnson, dealt handsomely by authors and "raised the price of literature." It was dedicated to the countess of Hertford, afterwards duchess of Somerset, a lady devoted to letters and the patroness of the unhappy Savage. In 1729 Thomson produced Sophonisba, a tragedy now only remembered by the line "O Sophonisba, Sophonisba, O," and the parody "O Jemmy Thomson, Jemmy Thomson, O," which caused him to remodel the unhappy verse in the form, "O Sophonisba, I am wholly thine." A poem, anonymous but unquestionably Thomson's, to the memory of Congreve who had died in January 1729, appeared in that year. In 1730 Autumn was first published in a collected edition

He was established in May 1736 in a small house at Richmond, but his patron died in February 1737 and he lost his sinecure; he then "whips and spurs" to finish his tragedy Agamemnon, which appeared in April 1738, not before he had been arrested for a debt of £70, from which, according to a story which has been discredited on quite insufficient grounds, Quin relieved him in the most generous and tactful manner. Quin, it is said, visited him in the sponging-house and "balanced accounts with him" by insisting on his accepting a hundred pounds as a return for the pleasure which the actor had received from the poet's works. The incident took place probably a little before the production of Agamemnon, in which Quin played the leading part. The play is of course modelled upon Aeschylus and owes whatever of dignity it possesses to that fact; the part of Cassandra, for instance, retains something of its original force, pathos and terror. But most of the other characters exist only for the purpose of political innuendo. Agamemnon is too long absent at Troy, as George is too long absent in Germany; the arts of Aegisthus are the arts of Walpole; the declamations of Arcus are the declamations of Wyndham or Pulteney; Melisander, consoling himself with the muses on his island in Cyclades, is Bolingbroke in exile. Thomson about this time was introduced to Lyttelton, and by him to the prince of Wales, and to one or the other of these, when he was questioned as to the state of his affairs, he made answer that they were "in a more poetical posture than formerly." Agamemnon was put upon the stage soon after the passing of Walpole's bill for licensing plays, and its obvious bias fixed the attention of the censorship and caused Thomson's next venture, Edward and Eleanora, which has the same covert aim, to be proscribed. The fact has very generally escaped notice that, like its predecessor, it follows a Greek original, the Alcestis of Euripides. It has also, what Agamemnon has not, some little place in the history of literature, for it suggested something to Lessing for Nathan der Weise, and to Scott for the Talisman. The rejection of the play was defended by one of the ministry on the ground that Thomson had taken a Liberty which was not agreeable to Britannia in any Season. These circumstances sufficiently account for the poet's next experiment, a preface to Milton's Areopagitica. He joined Mallet in composing the masque of Alfred, represented at Clieveden on the Thames before the prince of Wales, on the 1st of August 1740. There can be little question that "Rule

Britannia," a song in this drama, was the production of Thomson. I could have extorted from the prejudice of Dr JohnsonThe music of the song, as of the whole masque, was composed "Thomson had as much of the poet about him as most writers. by Arne. In 1744 Thomson was appointed surveyor-general of Everything appeared to him through the medium of his the Leeward Islands by Lyttelton with an income of £300 a favourite pursuit. He could not have viewed those two candles year; but his patron fell into disfavour with the prince of Wales, burning but with a poetical eye." and in consequence Thomson lost, at the close of 1747, the pension he received from that quarter. For a while, however, he was in flourishing circumstances, and whilst completing at his leisure The Castle of Indolence produced Tancred and Sigismunda at Drury Lane in 1745. The story is found in Gil Blas, and is ultimately to be traced to The Decameron. It owes much to Le Sage in language, plot and sentiment, and the conflict of emotion, in depicting which Thomson had some little skill, is here effectively exhibited. He was assisted herein by his own experience. The "Amanda" of The Seasons is a Miss Elizabeth Young, a lady of Scottish parentage, whose mother was ambitious for her and forbade her to marry the poet, anticipating that she would be reduced to singing his ballads in the streets. The last years of his life were saddened by this disappointment.

The Castle of Indolence, after a gestation of fifteen years, appeared in May 1748. It is in the Spenserian stanza with the Spenserian archaism, and is the first and last long effort of Thomson in rhyme. It is not impossible that his general choice of blank verse was partly due to the fact that he had not the southron's ear and took many years to acquire it. The great and varied interest of the poem might well rescue it from the neglect into which even The Seasons has fallen. It was worthy of an age which was fertile in character-sketches, and like Gay's Welcome to Pope anticipates Goldsmith's Retaliation in the lifelike presentation of a noteworthy circle. There is in it the same strain of gentle burlesque which appears in Shenstone's Schoolmistress, whilst the tone and diction of the poem harmonize with the hazy landscape, the pleasant land of drowsyhead, in which it is set. It is the last work by Thomson which appeared in his lifetime. In walking from London to his house at Richmond he became heated and took a boat at Hammersmith; he thus caught a chill with fatal consequences and died on the 27th of August 1748. He was buried in Richmond churchyard. His tragedy Coriolanus was acted for the first time in January 1749. In itself a feeble performance, it is noteworthy for the prologue which his friend Lyttelton wrote for it, two lines of which

"He loved his friends-forgive the gushing tear!
Alas! I feel I am no actor here"-

were recited by Quin with no simulated emotion.

For the day of Thomson's birth see the Aldine edition of his poems (1897). In the same volume (pp. 189 seq.) is discussed the question of Pope's contributions to The Seasons. These Pope, if the handwriting be his, made in an interleaved edition of The Seasons dated 1738, and they were for the most part adopted by Thomson in the edition of 1744. The writer seldom makes more than verbal changes in passages of pure description, but sometimes strikingly enhances the scenes in which human character comes into play, adding, for example, the comparison, in Autumn, of the fair Lavinia to a myrtle in the Apennines, of which the first suggestion can be found in The Rape of the Lock. But whereas many years ago the opinion of experts at the British Museum pronounced the handwriting of these notes to be Pope's beyond a doubt, their successors at the present day are equally positive that it is not. Some account should be taken of the cramping of the hand, due to writing on a curved surface, and of the letters at Blenheim (see Pall Mall Magazine for August 1894), which bear a greater resemblance to the disputed handwriting than any specimens in the British Museum.

The first collected editions of The Seasons bear dates 1730, 1738, Liberty in editions after his friend's death. Among the numerous 1744, 1746. Lyttelton tampered both with The Seasons and with lives of the poet may be mentioned those by his friend Patrick Murdoch, by Dr Johnson in Lives of the Poets, by Sir Harris Nicolas (Ald. ed., 1860), by M. Morel, James Thomson, sa vie et ses œuvres Series, by G. C. Macaulay (1908). See also Dr G. Schmeding's (Paris, 1895), and James Thomson, in the English Men of Letters Jacob Thomson, ein vergessener Dichter des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts; the life prefixed to the Aldine edition of his works in 1897; and an excellent edition of The Seasons in the Clarendon Press Series by (D. C. To.) J. Logie Robertson.

It may be questioned whether Thomson himself ever quite realized the distinctive significance of his own achievement in The Seasons, or the place which criticism assigns him as the pioneer of a special literary movement and the precursor of Cowper and Wordsworth. His avowed preference was for great and worthy themes of which the world of nature was but one. Both the choice and the treatment of his next great subject, Liberty, indicate that he was imperfectly conscious of the gift that was in him, and might have neglected it but that his readers were wiser than himself. He has many audacities and many felicities of expression, and enriched the vocabulary even of the poets who have disparaged him. Yet it is difficult to believe that he was not the better for that training in refinement of style which he partly owed to Pope, who almost unquestionably contributed some passages to The Seasons. And, except in The Castle of Indolence, there is much that is conventional, much that is even vicious or vulgar in taste when Thomson's muse deals with that human life which must be the background of descriptive as of all other poetry; for example, his bumpkin who chases the rainbow is as unreal a being as Akenside's more sentimental rustic who has "the form of beauty smiling at his heart." But if Thomson sometimes lacks the true vision for things human, he retains it always for things mute and material, and whilst the critical estimate of his powers and influence will vary from age to age, all who have read him will concur in the colloquial judgment which only candour

THOMSON, JAMES (1834-1882), British poet, best known by his signature "B.V.", was born at Port-Glasgow, in Renfrewshire, on the 23rd of November 1834, the eldest child of a mate in the merchant shipping service. His mother was a deeply religious woman of the Irvingite sect. On her death, James, then in his seventh year, was procured admission into the Caledonian Orphan Asylum. In 1850 he entered the model school of the Military Asylum, Chelsea, from which he went out into the world as an assistant army schoolmaster. At the garrison at Ballincollig, near Cork, he encountered the one brief happiness of his life: he fell passionately in love with, and was in turn as ardently loved by, the daughter of the armourersergeant of a regiment in the garrison, a girl of very exceptional beauty and cultivated mind. Two years later he suddenly received news of her fatal illness and death. The blow prostrated him in mind and body. Henceforth his life was one of gloom, disappointment, misery and poverty, rarely alleviated by episodes of somewhat brighter fortune. While in Ireland he had made the acquaintance of Charles Bradlaugh, then a soldier stationed at Ballincollig, and it was under his auspices (as editor of the London Investigator) that Thomson first appealed to the public as an author, though actually his earliest publication was in Tait's Edinburgh Magazine for July 1858, under the signature 'Crepusculus." In 1860 was established the paper with which Bradlaugh was so long identified, the National Reformer, and it was here, among other productions by James Thomson, that appeared (1863) the powerful and sonorous verses "To our Ladies of Death," and (1874) his chief work, the sombre and imaginative City of Dreadful Night. In October 1862 Thomson was dismissed the army, in company with other teachers, for some slight breach of discipline. Through Bradlaugh, with whom for some subsequent years he lived, he gained employment as a solicitor's clerk. From 1866 to the end of his life, except for two short absences from England, Thomson lived in a single room, first in Pimlico and then in Bloomsbury. He contracted habits of intemperance, aggravated by his pessimistic turn of mind to dipsomania, which made a successful career impossible for him. In 1869 he enjoyed what has been described as his "only reputable appearance in respectable literary society," in the acceptance of his long poem, Sunday up the River," for Fraser's Magazine, on the advice, it is said, of Charles Kingsley.