him to a large circle of friends. He
died on the 28th of July 1876.

COLLINS, WILLIAM (1721-1759), English poet, was born on the 25th of
December 1721. He divides with Gray the glory of being the greatest
English lyrist of the 18th century. After some childish studies in
Chichester, of which his father, a rich hatter, was the mayor, he was
sent, in January 1733, to Winchester College, where Whitehead and Joseph
Warton were his school-fellows. When he had been nine months at the
school, Pope paid Winchester a visit and proposed a subject for a prize
poem; it is legitimate to suppose that the lofty forehead, the brisk
dark eyes and gracious oval of the childish face, as we know it in the
only portrait existing of Collins, did not escape the great man's
notice, then not a little occupied with the composition of the _Essay on
Man_.

In 1734 the young poet published his first verses, in a sixpenny
pamphlet on _The Royal Nuptials_, of which, however, no copy has come
down to us; another poem, probably satiric, called _The Battle of the
Schoolbooks_, was written about this time, and has also been lost. Fired
by his poetic fellows to further feats in verse, Collins produced, in
his seventeenth year, those _Persian Eclogues_ which were the only
writings of his that were valued by the world during his own lifetime.
They were not printed for some years, and meanwhile Collins sent, in
January and October 1739, some verses to the _Gentleman's Magazine_,
which attracted the notice and admiration of Johnson, then still young
and uninfluential. In March 1740 he was admitted a commoner of Queen's
College, Oxford, but did not go up to Oxford until July 1741, when he
obtained a demyship at Magdalen College. At Oxford he continued his
affectionate intimacy with the Wartons, and gained the friendship of
Gilbert White. Early in 1742 the _Persian Eclogues_ appeared in London.
They were four in number, and formed a modest pamphlet of not more than
300 lines in all. In a later edition, of 1759, the title was changed to
_Oriental Eclogues_. Those pieces may be compared with Victor Hugo's
_Les Orientales_, to which, of course, they are greatly inferior.
Considered with regard to the time at which they were produced, they are
more than meritorious, even brilliant, and one at least--the second--can
be read with enjoyment at the present day. The rest, perhaps, will be
found somewhat artificial and effete.

In November 1743 Collins was made