at the same time, wrote verse instinct with a fresh sense of
outward Nature which was hardly to be found in other writers of
that day. David Mallet, Thomson's college-friend and friend of
after-years--who shares with Thomson the curiosity of critics who would
decide which of them wrote "Rule Britannia"--was of Thomson's age.

The other writers of whose lives Johnson here gives his note were men
born in the beginning of the eighteenth century: Gilbert West, the
translator of Pindar, in 1706; George Lyttelton, in 1709. William
Shenstone, whose sense of Nature, although true, was mixed with the
conventions of his time, and who once asked a noble friend to open a
waterfall in the garden upon which the poet spent his little patrimony,
was born in 1714; Thomas Gray, in 1716; William Collins, in 1720; and
Mark Akenside, in 1721. In Collins, while he lived with loss of reason,
Johnson, who had fears for himself, took pathetic interest. Akenside
could not interest him much. Akenside made his mark when young with "The
Pleasures of Imagination," a good poem, according to the fashion of the
time, when read with due consideration as a young man's first venture
for fame. He spent much of the rest of his life in overloading it with
valueless additions. The writer who begins well should let well alone,
and, instead of tinkering at bygone work, follow the course of his own
ripening thought. He should seek new ways of doing worthy service in the
years of labour left to him.

H. M.

KING.

William King was born in London in 1663; the son of Ezekiel King, a
gentleman. He was allied to the family of Clarendon.

From Westminster School, where he was a scholar on the foundation under
the care of Dr. Busby, he was at eighteen elected to Christ Church
in 1681; where he is said to have prosecuted his studies with so much
intenseness and activity, that before he was eight years' standing he
had read over, and made remarks upon, twenty-two thousand odd hundred
books and manuscripts. The books were certainly not very long, the
manuscripts not very difficult, nor the remarks very large; for the
calculator will find that he despatched seven a day for every day of
his eight years; with a remnant that more than satisfies most other
students. He took his degree in the most expensive manner, as a GRAND
COMPOUNDER; whence it is inferred that he inherited a considerable
fortune.

In 1688, the same year in which he was made Master of Arts, he