bachelor of arts, and a few days after
taking his degree published his second work, _Verses humbly addressed to
Sir Thomas Hanmer_. This poem, written in heroic couplets, shows a great
advance in individuality, and resembles, in its habit of personifying
qualities of the mind, the riper lyrics of its author. For the rest, it
is an enthusiastic review of poetry, culminating in a laudation of
Shakespeare. It is supposed that he left Oxford abruptly in the summer
of 1744 to attend his mother's death-bed, and did not return. He is said
to have now visited an uncle in Flanders. His indolence, which had been
no less marked at the university than his genius, combined with a fatal
irresolution to make it extremely difficult to choose for him a path in
life. The army and the church were successively suggested and rejected;
and he finally arrived in London, bent on enjoying a small property as
an independent man about town. He made the acquaintance of Johnson and
others, and was urged by those friends to undertake various important
writings--a _History of the Revival of Learning_, several tragedies, and
a version of Aristotle's _Poetics_, among others--all of which he began
but lacked force of will to continue. He soon squandered his means,
plunged, with most disastrous effects, into profligate excesses, and
sowed the seed of his untimely misfortune.

It was at this time, however, that he composed his matchless
_Odes_--twelve in number--which appeared on the 12th of December 1746,
dated 1747. The original project was to have combined them with the odes
of Joseph Warton, but the latter proved at that time to be the more
marketable article. Collins's little volume fell dead from the press,
but it won him the admiration and friendship of the poet Thomson, with
whom, until the death of the latter in 1748, he lived on terms of
affectionate intimacy. In 1749 Collins was raised beyond the fear of
poverty by the death of his uncle, Colonel Martyn, who left him about
L2000, and he left London to settle in his native city. He had hardly
begun to taste the sweets of a life devoted to literature and quiet,
before the weakness of his will began to develop in the direction of
insanity, and he hurried abroad to attempt to dispel the gathering gloom
by travel. In the interval he had published two short pieces of
consummate grace and beauty--the _Elegy on Thomson_, in 1749, and the
_Dirge in Cymbeline_, later in the same year. In the beginning of