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he became familiar in his childhood prepared him for the position which he ultimately filled as the first of Scottish—and not the least of British—descriptive poets. Educated at Edinburgh University, he was "intended" for the ministry of the Church of Scotland. But he drifted up to London, possibly—though not probably—with a view to taking "orders" in the Church of England. There, at all events, he settled. In the first instance, he was tutor to a young Scotch Peer. But he got into the company of literary men, wrote "The Seasons" and "Liberty," which, with all its obvious rhetorical faults, is one of the earliest realisations in poetry of the "Greater England" idea, and the immortal (for one reason) " Sophonisba." He lived happily at Richmond Hill in the enjoyment of a sinecure which was equivalent to a pension of £300 a year, and of the society of men like Pope, Collins, Lyttelton, Mallet, and Quin. There he wrote " The Castle of Indolence." He died prematurely in his forty-ninth year of the results of a chill. Mr. Bayne tells Thomson's story clearly, carefully, and with sufficient fullness. His criticism of his hero's work and position in British literature, if marked less by originality than by conventionality—the com- parison between Wordsworth and Thomson is not quite suc- cessful—is judicious, though it errs somewhat on the side of over-praise. Occasionally Mr. Bayne sinks into what only can be accounted banality as when, summing up the controversy as to whether Thomson or Mallet wrote " Rule, Britannia," he says : "No more fitting lyrist than he who sang so admirably and so unremittingly of Nature and of man, and the social and indus. trial glory of his country, could have composed the unchallenged wan of the nation's greatness." On the whole, however, this is one of the compactest and best written volumes of the useful series of biographies to which it belongs.
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