yield to his
malady, and returned. He was, for some time, confined in a house
of lunaticks, and afterwards retired to the care of his sister
in Chichester, where death, in 1756, came to his relief[178].

"After his return from France, the writer of this character paid
him a visit at Islington, where he was waiting for his sister,
whom he had directed to meet him: there was then nothing of
disorder discernible in his mind by any but himself; but he had
withdrawn from study, and travelled with no other book than an
English testament, such as children carry to the school: when
his friend took it into his hand, out of curiosity, to see what
companion a man of letters had chosen, 'I have but one book,'
said Collins, 'but that is the best.'"

Such was the fate of Collins, with whom I once delighted to converse,
and whom I yet remember with tenderness.

He was visited at Chichester, in his last illness, by his learned
friends, Dr. Warton and his brother; to whom he spoke with
disapprobation of his Oriental Eclogues, as not sufficiently expressive
of Asiatick manners, and called them his Irish Eclogues. He showed them,
at the same time, an ode inscribed to Mr. John Hume, on the
superstitions of the Highlands; which they thought superiour to his
other works, but which no search has yet found[179].

His disorder was not alienation of mind, but general laxity and
feebleness, a deficiency rather of his vital than intellectual powers.
What he spoke wanted neither judgment nor spirit; but a few minutes
exhausted him, so that he was forced to rest upon the couch, till a
short cessation restored his powers, and he was again able to talk with
his former vigour.

The approaches of this dreadful malady he began to feel soon after his
uncle's death; and, with the usual weakness of men so diseased, eagerly
snatched that temporary relief, with which the table and the bottle
flatter and seduce.

But his health continually declined, and he grew more and more
burdensome to himself.

To what I have formerly said of his writings may be added, that his
diction was often harsh, unskilfully laboured, and injudiciously
selected. He affected the obsolete when it was not worthy of revival;
and he puts his words out of the common order, seeming to think, with
some later candidates for fame, that not to write prose is certainly to
write poetry. His lines commonly are of slow motion, clogged and imp