ot be totally denied. He is allowed by sportsmen
to write with great intelligence of his subject, which is the first
requisite to excellence; and though it is impossible to interest the
common readers of verse in the dangers or pleasures of the chase, he has
done all that transition and variety could easily effect; and has with
great propriety enlarged his plan by the modes of hunting used in other
countries.

With still less judgment did he choose blank verse as the vehicle of
"Rural Sports." If blank verse be not tumid and gorgeous, it is
crippled prose; and familiar images in laboured language have nothing
to recommend them but absurd novelty, which, wanting the attractions of
nature, cannot please long. One excellence of the "Splendid Shilling"
is, that it is short. Disguise can gratify no longer than it deceives.

THOMSON.

James Thomson, the son of a minister well esteemed for his piety
and diligence, was born September 7, 1700, at Ednam, in the shire of
Roxburgh, of which his father was pastor. His mother, whose name was
Hume, inherited as co-heiress a portion of a small estate. The revenue
of a parish in Scotland is seldom large; and it was probably in
commiseration of the difficulty with which Mr. Thomson supported
his family, having nine children, that Mr. Riccarton, a neighbouring
minister, discovering in James uncommon promises of future excellence,
undertook to superintend his education, and provide him books. He was
taught the common rudiments of learning at the school of Jedburgh, a
place which he delights to recollect in his poem of "Autumn;" but was
not considered by his master as superior to common boys, though in
those early days he amused his patron and his friends with poetical
compositions; with which, however, he so little pleased himself that on
every New Year's Day he threw into the fire all the productions of the
foregoing year.

From the school he was removed to Edinburgh, where he had not resided
two years when his father died, and left all his children to the care
of their mother, who raised upon her little estate what money a mortgage
could afford; and, removing with her family to Edinburgh, lived to see
her son rising into eminence.

The design of Thomson's friends was to breed him a minister. He lived at
Edinburgh, at a school, without distinction or expectation, till at the
usual time he performed a probationary exercise by explaining a psalm.
His diction was so poetically