f
Indolence_. A cold caught upon the river led to a fever, which ended
fatally on August 27th, 1748. He had for some years been in love with a
Miss Young, the 'Amanda' of his very feeble love lyrics, and her
marriage is said to have hastened his death. Men, however, do not die
for love at the mature age of forty-nine, and as Thomson was 'more fat
than bard beseems,' and was not always temperate in his habits,
constitutional causes are more likely to have led to the poet's death
than Amanda's cruelty.

Dr. Johnson says somewhere that the further authors keep apart from each
other the better, and the literary squabbles of the last century
afforded him good ground for the remark. It is to Thomson's credit that,
like Goldsmith twenty-six years later, he died, leaving behind him many
friends and not a single enemy. His fame rests upon two poems, _The
Seasons_ and _The Castle of Indolence_, and on a song which has gained a
national reputation. Apart from _Rule Britannia_, which appeared
originally in the _Masque of Alfred_ and is spirited rather than
poetical, his attempts to write lyrical poetry resulted in failure; but
from his own niche in the Temple of Fame time is not likely to dislodge
Thomson.

FOOTNOTES:

[25] See _Martialis Epigrammata_, book v. lii.

[26] Fenelon was Archbishop of Cambray.

[27] _The Poetical Works of Gay_, edited, with Life and Notes, by John
Underhill, 2 vols.

[28]

'I'll swim through seas; I'll ride upon the clouds;
I'll dig the earth; I'll blow out every fire;
I'll rave; I'll rant; I'll rise; I'll rush; I'll war;
Fierce as the man whom smiling dolphins bore
From the prosaic to poetic shore.
I'll tear the scoundrel into twenty pieces.'

'The reader,' Fielding adds in a note, 'may see all the beauties of this
speech in a late ode called a _Naval Lyric_.'

[29] Written but not published. The earlier books of the _Night
Thoughts_ appeared in 1742, the _Grave_ in 1743, but in a letter dated
Feb. 25th, 1741-2, Blair in transmitting the MS. of the poem to a friend
states that the greater portion of it was composed several years before
his ordination ten years previously. Southey states that Blair's _Grave_
is the only poem he could call to mind composed in imitation of the
_Night Thoughts_, but the style as well as the date contradicts this
judgment.

[30] The tradition is founded on a volume in the British Museum
containing MS. corrections supposed to be in Pop