might be spared to the end; and they were preserved to him in perfect clearness to the last hour of his life. He spoke with earnest, thoughtful words to many of his friends who visited him. He asked his old friend Reynolds to read the Bible; he prayed with his doctor; and he wrote after the usual forms in making his will, "I offer up my soul to the great and merciful God; I offer it full of sin, but in full assurance that it will be cleansed in the blood of my Redeemer." His love for his friends was strong to the last. When three or four were once together with him at the same time, Burke said, "I am afraid that so many of us must be oppressive to you." "No, sir, it is not so," Johnson replied, “and I must be in a wretched state indeed when your company would not be a delight to me." Shortly before his death he said in Latin, "Jam moriturus" (now I am about to die), and, falling into a calm sleep, his soul passed away to God.

"Great souls," says Carlyle, speaking of Johnson, "are always loyally submissive, reverent to what is over them; only small mean souls are otherwise. I could not find a

better proof of what I said the other day: that the sincere man was by nature the obedient man, that only in a world of heroes was there loyal obedience to the heroic."

DURING the sway of the French influence, poetry was written chiefly for the pleasure of a circle of persons living an artificial life, and the subjects for verse were chosen from the ideas and objects most familiar to this class of readers. Nature was used principally for illustration and figures of speech; and minute observation, and personal acquaintance with Nature, were not necessary for this secondary employment of its surface features. The town-bred critics, moreover, were not able to discover any departure from accurate truth, even in this general, broad use of Nature, for their impressions were only derived from second-hand, conventional descriptions. But as readers of poetry were found more and more among the people, many of whom lived in the midst of Nature itself, and had a close acquaintance with it, the demand for correctness in descriptions of Nature became increasingly greater; and we find two poets of the eighteenth century rising to fame by their fresh and careful painting of the real beauty of Nature.

He was born

The chief of these was James Thomson. in 1700, in a little Scotch village in Roxburghshire, and he spent his youth on the slopes of the Cheviot Hills, far away from the life of cities. Here, before he began to call himself a poet, he would notice with the poet's eye for beauty the changing effects of the seasons, the sunrise and sunset,

the passing of clouds and storms over the hills, the habits and songs of the birds, the minute beauty of the flowers and insects; and all these impressions, derived from Nature itself, dwelt in his mind, and are truthfully described in his poetry. Here, too, he was familiar with the simpler modes of life, in which every one expressed truthfully his own thoughts and feelings without restraint, and he could see the real sources of life's gladness and sorrow. This personal acquaintance with the works of God in their sublimity and minute beauty, and this knowledge of man as man, made him a true poet of Nature, full of reverent love for her, calling on the world to admire her beauty, instead of using it merely to adorn his feelings and fancies.

In 1720 Thomson was a student of divinity at Edinburgh, where he wrote an essay on "A Country Life" for the Edinburgh Miscellany. Five years after this he came up to London, and by the aid of a college friend obtained a situation as tutor to the little son of Lord Binning. He now began to write a poem on "Winter," which was published in 1726, and to this he afterwards added "Spring, Summer, and Autumn." The four poems were a description of Nature throughout the changes of the year, and were called "The Seasons." The freshness and truth of the descriptions were new at that time, and brought into the artificial life of the town the scent of fields and flowers, the murmur of brooks and summer breezes, and gleams of the glory of sunrise and sunset. But the Seasons were not only pictures of the silent beauty of Nature; human life is present everywhere throughout the poem. Thomson gives to man his true place in the midst of Nature. He shows him in his simple dignity as lord of the material world, which is the sphere of his intelligence and work; and again in his high office as Nature's priest, giving expression to the universal song of praise and worship for ever ascending to God, the Maker and Almighty Father of all creation.

In later years Thomson wrote some plays, and, in connection with his friend Mallet, The Masque of Alfred, in which there is the national song "Rule Britannia." He also wrote the "Castle of Indolence," after the manner of Spenser—a poem showing the slavery of indolence.

Of the same age as Thomson was John Dyer, and he too was born in a secluded village out of the life of the time. He was the son of a solicitor at Aberglaslyn, in Carmarthenshire. He wished to be a painter, and spent much time in wandering among the hills of Wales sketching and studying Nature. Here, like Thomson, he learned to look on Nature with a reverent love, and was satisfied to simply paint her beauty. Near his home was a hill-Grongar Hill-and he wrote a poem which is a faithful description of the surrounding landscape, as it unfolds itself in ascending Grongar Hill, seen with the eye of an artist and a poet.

"Grongar Hill was published the same year as Thomson's "Winter." In 1740 Dyer published "Ruins of Rome," a poem describing what he had seen in Rome. He afterwards entered the Church, and became Rector of Coningsby, in Lincolnshire. There he wrote a pastoral poem called "The Fleece," a history of wool, from its growth on the sheep, under the shepherd's care, to its spinning, weaving, and use among men.

The rural life of the peasantry was also made the subject of poetry by Allan Ramsay. He was a poor boy, born among the hills of Clydesdale and Annandale, and working in the lead mines; but he had a poet's delight in old songs and ballads, and his poet's mind told him there was as much pathos and beauty in the homely lives of the poor around him as in the adventures of the ballad heroes and heroines. After some smaller poems, he wrote a rural play, called The Gentle Shepherd, the characters and scenes of which were drawn from among the Scotch peasantry. It was

no artificial pastoral, but genuine rustic life, with a true vein of poetry running through it, and its place in literature is important as a return to the essential elements of true poetryNature itself, and the simple feelings which "make the whole world kin."

As we pass on towards the close of the eighteenth century we shall find this tendency to cast off the old, false forms increasing more and more. Under the influence of the ideas connected with the French Revolution a cry for simple truth arose; and a deep sympathy with man as man, quite unknown before, began to wake in human hearts. The enthusiasm for liberty and reform was for a liberty and reform in which all were to share; and those things which were held to be the highest blessings of life, and which most ennobled humanity, were seen to be, not the privilege of a class, but the right of every man. A new hopefulness, the fruit of faith and energy, began to take the place of the cold cynicism of the earlier time. The oneness of the new ideas with the very spirit and design of Christianity was at once recognised in England, and the practical results soon took shape in the Sunday-schools and other schemes of education for the poor, missions to the heathen, the anti-slavery movement, reform agitation, and various schemes for helping and raising all mankind.

The love of truth and simplicity, and the wider sympathies of the time, find expression in the poetry of William Cowper. Thomson and Dyer were born in the first year of the century; Cowper was born in 1731, and was seventeen when Thomson died, and twenty-seven when Dyer and Ramsay died. Following in the same path of faithfulness to Nature and human life, Cowper entered into the broader light which closed the eighteenth century, and passed away himself in the first year of the nineteenth century. His life is the touching story of a brave struggle for faith and hope in the midst of circumstances in themselves depressing, and