s the youth. The opening lines are very familiar:

Ah, who can tell how hard it is to climb
The steep where Fame's proud temple shines afar;

and the description of the morning landscape has no superior in the
language:

But who the melodies of morn can tell?
The wild brook babbling down the mountain side;
The lowing herd; the sheepfold's simple bell;
The pipe of early shepherd dim descried
In the lone valley.

Beattie wrote numerous prose dissertations and essays, one of which was in
answer to the infidel views of Hume--_Essay on the Nature and
Immutability of Truth, in Opposition to Sophistry and Scepticism_. Beattie
was of an excitable and sensitive nature, and his polemical papers are
valued rather for the beauty of their language, than for acuteness of
logic.

_William Falconer_, 1730-1769: first a sailor in the merchant service, he
afterwards entered the navy. He is chiefly known by his poem _The
Shipwreck_, and for its astonishing connection with his own fortunes and
fate. He was wrecked off Cape Colonna, on the coast of Greece, before he
was eighteen; and this misfortune is the subject of his poem. Again, in
1760, he was cast away in the Channel. In 1769, the Aurora frigate, of
which he was the purser, foundered in Mozambique Channels, and he, with
all others on board, went down with her. The excellence of his nautical
directions and the vigor of his descriptions establish the claims of his
poem; but it has the additional interest attaching to his curious
experience--it is his autobiography and his enduring monument. The picture
of the storm is very fine; but in the handling of his verse there is more
of the artificial than of the romantic school.

_William Shenstone_, 1714-1763: his principal work is _The
Schoolmistress_, a poem in the stanza of Spenser, which is pleasing from
its simple and sympathizing description of the village school, kept by a
dame; with the tricks and punishment of the children, and many little
traits of rural life and character. It is pitched in so low a key that it
commends itself to the world at large. Shenstone is equally known for his
mania in landscape gardening, upon which he spent all his means. His
place, _The Leasowes_ in Shropshire, has gained the greater notoriety
through the descriptions of Dodsley and Goldsmith. The natural simplicity
of _The Schoolmistress_ allies it strongly to the romantic school, which
was now about to appe