t, yet perhaps I may mend in that respect. Remember me
kindly to your husband, and believe me to be

"Your most affectionate Brother,
"James Thomson."
(Addressed) "To Mrs. Thomson in Lanark."

The benevolence of Thomson was fervid, but not active; he would give on
all occasions what assistance his purse would supply, but the offices
of intervention or solicitation he could not conquer his sluggishness
sufficiently to perform. The affairs of others, however, were not
more neglected than his own. He had often felt the inconveniences
of idleness, but he never cured it; and was so conscious of his own
character that he talked of writing an Eastern tale "Of the Man who
Loved to be in Distress." Among his peculiarities was a very unskilful
and inarticulate manner of pronouncing any lofty or solemn composition.
He was once reading to Dodington, who, being himself a reader eminently
elegant, was so much provoked by his odd utterance that he snatched the
paper from his hands and told him that he did not understand his own
verses.

The biographer of Thomson has remarked that an author's life is best
read in his works; his observation was not well timed. Savage, who lived
much with Thomson, once told me how he heard a lady remarking that she
could gather from his works three-parts of his character: that he was
"a great lover, a great swimmer, and rigorously abstinent;" "but," said
Savage, "he knows not any love but that of the sex; he was, perhaps,
never in cold water in his life; and he indulges himself in all the
luxury that comes within his reach." Yet Savage always spoke with the
most eager praise of his social qualities, his warmth and constancy
of friendship, and his adherence to his first acquaintance when the
advancement of his reputation had left them behind him.

As a writer, he is entitled to one praise of the highest kind: his mode
of thinking and of expressing his thoughts is original. His blank verse
is no more the blank verse of Milton, or of any other poet, than the
rhymes of Prior are the rhymes of Cowley. His numbers, his pauses,
his diction, are of his own growth, without transcription, without
imitation. He thinks in a peculiar train, and he thinks always as a
man of genius; he looks round on Nature and on Life with the eye which
Nature bestows only on a poet; the eye that distinguishes in everything
presented to its view whatever there is on which imagination can