that his distinctions of right and wrong were never confounded, and that his faults had nothing of malignity or design, but proceeded from some unexpected pressure or casual temptation." Johnson's brief memoir will ever be admired for its suggestiveness, and for a pathos too deep to be concealed by the writer's stateliness of diction. It records a friendship of rare sincerity and tenderConcerning his criticism on Collins's poetry much has been said by the poet's admirers. Some have been angry at its injustice, and others have wondered at the strange inconsistency of his love for the poet and the harshness of his strictures on his poems. The following passage upon Collins and his friends, by a recent writer, may here be appropriately quoted. ness. 6 "What anecdote could be more affecting or suggestive than that which Johnson has told us -that Collins, perceiving the clouds gathering on his intellects,' endeavoured to dispel them by travel, and departed with his terrible secret into France. What were his sufferings in that hopeless and solitary journey-what shadowy companions, haunting him wheresoever he fled, compelled him at length to yield and to return, no biographer can ever tell us! Johnson had not-could not have-much feeling for the peculiar beauties of Collins's poetry. Collins and the Wartons-his companions and friends from boyhood-belonged to a new movement in literature, which to Johnson, familiar only with the Latin poets and the writings of his immediate predecessors, was a heresy, a deviation in quest of mistaken beauties, an unworthy revival of the obsolete. Warton's three quarto volumes of his History of English Poetry,' in which he frequently refers to scarce copies of ancient poems which had belonged to Collins, did not bring him down even to the earliest name in the collection of poets identified with Johnson— a literary Pre-Raphaelism which not even his regard for Warton could induce him to forgive. Johnson's satire on Warton's poems is well known : All is strange, yet nothing new Phrase that time has flung away, Uncouth words in disarray, Tricked in antique ruff and bonnet, A whisper of this satire is said to have been the cause of their final estrangement; but it should never be forgotten that when Johnson read these lines in tête-à-tête with Mrs. Piozzi,.he prefaced them by saying, "remember that I love the fellow dearly, for all that I laugh at him." Herein we find a clue to that strange woof of tenderness and censure-his memoir of Collins; but it is not difficult to perceive that he remembered his friend's powers with a secret veneration. He would have no man think lightly of him, or believe that it was not immeasurably better to have his errors than to be without his genius. He dwells with pride upon his acquaintance with the learned tongues, with the Italian, French, and Spanish languages. With evident partiality he pictures to the reader his manly exterior, his extensive views, his elegant conversation, his cheerful disposition. In spite of his prejudices, and of his peculiar habit of neutralizing praise as soon as he has ventured to bestow it, it is evident that the irresolute idler, the associate of chance companions, the harassed fugitive from duns and bailiffs, was to him an object of wonder and admiration, a seer of genii and fairies, a dweller in palaces of enchantment, a wanderer by waterfalls in Elysian gardens.' Above all, he is sure that in spite of habits of dissipation, of long-continued poverty and its evil influences, the moral character of his friend was always pure, and his principles never shaken."* * Athenæum, Jan. 5, 1856. The names of succeeding writers who have recorded their admiration of Collins would form an illustrious roll; but he cannot be said to be a popular poet. His lofty imagery, his love of allegory, and splendid visions, conspicuous in the "Ode to the Passions," the " Ode on the Poetical Character," and the Ode to Liberty," are not poetry of that kind, which, touching all humanity, is remembered and stored up by all. We may except the "Ode on the Death of Thomson," which is generally admired for its meditative tenderness and repose. His "Ode to Evening" is, perhaps, the most original of his odes. The fine tone of tranquil musing that pervades it is felt by every poetic reader. A subdued and peaceful spirit breathes through it, as in the solitude and stillness of a twilight country. The absence of rhyme leaving the even flow of the verse unbroken, and the change at the end of each stanza into shorter lines, as if the voice of the reader dropped into a lower key, contribute to the effect. To those who feel its spirit the living world is far away, and even the objects in the surrounding landscape, by which the picture is completed, are seen only in their reflections in the poet's mind. The bat and the beetle which are abroad in the dusky air; the brown hamlets and dim-discovered spires; the springs that have a solemn murmur, and the dying gales, are but images of that rapt and peaceful mood. It must, however, be acknowledged that some obscurity in the invocation arises from the long inversion of the sense, by which that which in logical order is the first sentence in the poem is carried over to the last two lines of the fourth stanza. The Horatian unrhymed metre in which it is composed has been often imitated in English, and, it is said, that Collins contemplated writing other poems in the same stanza; but the experiment has rarely been successful. Milton's translation of the 5th Ode of Horace, Book I., is, perhaps, the earliest specimen of the unryhmed ode in English. T. Warton mentions an "elegant Ode," by Capt. Thomas of Christ Church, Oxford, in this measure; but appears to have forgotten that his own father had also adopted it for a poem published in his works. J. Warton's poems, published at the same time as Collins's, contain also an unrhymed " Ode to Content," which is interesting from their early association in poetical studies. The following two stanzas may serve as a specimen of this poem : Meek virgin, wilt thou deign with me to sit, The loud world's distant din? |