SAMUEL BISHOP (1731-1795) was an English clergyman, Master of Merchant Taylors' School, London, and author of some miscellaneous essays and poems. The best of his poetry was devoted to the praise of his wife; and few can read such lines as the following without believing that Bishop was an amiable and happy man : To Mrs Bishop, on the Anniversary of her Wedding-day, 'Thee, Mary, with this ring I wed'- If she, by merit since disclosed, annum. He was admitted of Pembroke Hall, Thus when a barber and a collier fight, Having written several pieces for periodicals published by Newbery, Smart became acquainted with the bookseller's family, and married his stepdaughter, Miss Carnan, in the year 1753. He now removed to London, and endeavoured to subsist by his pen. The notorious Sir John Hill-whose wars with the Royal Society, with Fielding, &c. are well known, and who closed his life by becoming a quack-doctor-having insidiously attacked Smart, the latter replied by a spirited satire, entitled The Hilliad. Among his various tasks was a metrical translation of the Fables of Phædrus. He also translated the psalms and parables into verse, but the version is destitute of talent. He had, however, in his better days, translated with success, and to Pope's satisfaction, the Ode on St Cecilia's Day. In 1756, Smart was one of the conductors of a monthly periodical called The Universal Visitor; and to assist him, Johnsonwho sincerely sympathised, as Boswell relates, with Smart's unhappy vacillation of mind-contributed a few essays. In 1763, we find the poor poet confined in a madhouse. He has partly as much exercise,' said Johnson, 'as he used to have, for he digs in the garden. Indeed, before his confinement, he used for exercise to walk to the alehouse; but he was carried back again. I did not think he ought to be shut up. His infirmities were not noxious to society. He insisted on people praying with him-also falling upon his knees and saying his prayers in the street, or in any other unusual place; and I'd as lief pray with Kit Smart as any one else. Another charge was, that he did not love clean linen; and I have no passion for it.' During his confinement, it is said, writing materials were denied him, and Smart used to indent his poetical thoughts with a key on the wainscot of his walls. A religious poem, the Song to David, written at this time in his saner intervals, CHRISTOPHER SMART, an unfortunate and possesses passages of considerable power, and irregular man of genius, was born in 1722 at Ship- must be considered one of the greatest curiosities bourne, in Kent. His father was steward to Lord of our literature. What the unfortunate poet did Barnard-afterwards Earl of Darlington-and not write down-and the whole could not possibly dying when his son was eleven years of age, the have been committed to the walls of his apartment patronage of Lord Barnard was generously con-must have been composed and retained from tinued to his family. Through the influence of this nobleman, Christopher procured from the Duchess of Cleveland an allowance of £40 per Here, then, to-day-with faith as sure, 692 And why? They shew me every hour CHRISTOPHER SMART. memory alone. Smart was afterwards released from his confinement; but his ill-fortune-following, we suppose, his intemperate habits—again the elder Warton is worthy being transcribed, for forms so rich a source of our early imaginative its strong family likeness: Written after seeing Windsor Castle. From beauteous Windsor's high and storied halls, The poetry-professor died in 1745, aged fifty-eight. His tastes, his love of poetry, and of the university, were continued by his son Thomas (1728-1790). At sixteen, Thomas Warton was entered of Trinity College. He began early to write verses, and his Pleasures of Melancholy, published when he was nineteen, gave a promise of excellence which his riper productions did not fulfil. Having taken his degree, Warton obtained a fellowship, and in 1757 was appointed Professor of Poetry. He was also curate of Woodstock, and rector of Kiddington, a small living near Oxford. The even tenor of his life was only varied by his occasional publications, one of which was an elaborate Essay on Spenser's Faery Queen. He also edited the minor poems of Milton, an edition which Leigh Hunt says is a wilderness of sweets, and is the only one in which a true lover of the original can pardon an exuberance of annotation. Some of the notes are highly poetical, while others display Warton's taste for antiquities, for architecture, superstition, and his intimate acquaintance with the old Elizabethan writers. A still more important work, the History of English Poetry (1774-1778) forms the basis of his reputation. In this history, Warton poured out the treasures of a full mind. His antiquarian lore, his love of antique manners, and his chivalrous feelings, found appropriate exercise in tracing the stream of our poetry from its first fountain-springs, down to the luxuriant reign of Elizabeth, which he justly styled 'the most poetical age of our annals.' Pope and Gray had planned schemes of a history of English poetry, in which the authors were to be arranged according to their style and merits. Warton adopted the chronological arrangement, as giving freer exertion for research, and as enabling him to exhibit, without transposition, the gradual improvement in our poetry, and the progression of our language. The untiring industry and learning of the poet-historian accumulated a mass of materials equally valuable and curious. His work is a vast storehouse of facts connected with our early literature; and if he sometimes wanders from his subject, or overlays it with extraneous details, it should be remembered, as his latest editor, Mr Price, remarks, that new matter was constantly arising, and that Warton' was the first adventurer in the extensive region through which he journeyed, and into which the usual pioneers of literature had scarcely penetrated.' It is to be regretted that Warton's plan excluded the drama, which literature; but this defect has been partly supplied by Mr Collier's Annals of the Stage. On the death of Whitehead in 1785, Warton was appointed poet-laureate. His learning gave dig. nity to an office usually held in small esteem, and which in our day has been wisely converted into a sinecure. The same year he was made Camden Professor of History. While pursuing his antiquarian and literary researches, Warton was attacked with gout, and his enfeebled health yielded to a stroke of paralysis in 1790. Notwithstanding the classic stiffness of his poetry, and his full-blown academical honours, Warton appears to have been an easy companionable man, who delighted to unbend in common society, and especially with boys. During his visits to his brother, Dr J. Warton-master of Winchester School-the reverend professor became an associate and confidant in all the sports of the schoolboys. When engaged with them in some culinary occupation, and when alarmed by the sudden approach of the master, he has been known to hide himself in a dark corner of the kitchen; and has been dragged from thence by the doctor, who had taken him for some great boy. He also used to help the boys in their exercises, generally putting in as many faults as would disguise the assistance.' * If there was little dignity in this, there was something better--a kindliness of disposition and freshness of feeling which all would wish to retain. The poetry of Warton is deficient in natural expression and general interest, but some of his longer pieces, by their martial spirit and Gothic fancy, are calculated to awaken a stirring and romantic enthusiasm. Hazlitt considered some of his sonnets the finest in the language, and they seem to have caught the fancy of Coleridge and Bowles. The following are picturesque and graceful: Written in a Blank Leaf of Dugdale's Monasticon. On Revisiting the River Loddon. Ah! what a weary race my feet have run * Campbell's Specimens of the British Peets. Yet still one joy remains, that not obscure Joseph, the elder brother of Thomas Warton, closely resembled him in character and attainments. He was born in 1722, and was the schoolfellow of Collins at Winchester. He was afterwards a commoner of Oriel College, Oxford, and ordained on his father's curacy at Basingstoke. He was also rector of Tamworth. In 1766 he was appointed head-master of Winchester School, to which were subsequently added a prebend of St Paul's and of Winchester. He survived his brother ten years, dying in 1800. Dr Joseph Warton early appeared as a poet, but is considered inferior to his brother in the graphic and romantic style of composition at which he aimed. His ode To Fancy seems, however, to be equal to all but a few pieces of Thomas Warton's. He published an Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope (vol. i. in 1756, vol. ii. 1782), and edited an edition of Pope's works (1797), which was the most complete then published. Warton was long intimate with Johnson, and a member of his literary club. From the Ode to Fancy. O parent of each lovely muse! Ne'er echoing with the woodman's stroke, Till suddenly awaked, I hear THOMAS BLACKLOCK. A blind descriptive poet seems such an anomaly in nature, that the case of DR BLACKLOCK (17211791) has engaged the attention of the learned and curious in no ordinary degree. We read all concerning him with strong interest, except his poetry, for this is generally tame, languid, and commonplace. He was an amiable and excellent man, son of a Cumberland bricklayer, who had settled in the town of Annan, Dumfriesshire. When a child about six months old, he was totally deprived of sight by the small-pox; but his worthy father, assisted by his neighbours, amused his solitary boyhood by reading to him; and before he had reached the age of twenty, he was familiar with Spenser, Milton, Pope, and Addison. He was enthusiastically fond of poetry, particularly of the works of Thomson and Allan Ramsay. From these he must, in a great degree, have derived his images and impressions of nature and natural objects; but in after-life the classic poets were added to his store of intellectual enjoyment. His father was accidentally killed when the poet was about the age of nineteen; but some of his attempts at verse having been seen by Dr Stevenson, Edinburgh, that benevolent gentleman took their blind author to the Scottish metropolis, where he was enrolled as a student of divinity. In 1746, he published a volume of his poems, which was reprinted with additions in 1754 and 1756. He was licensed in 1759, and through the patronage of the Earl of Selkirk, was appointed minister of Kirkcudbright. The parishioners, however, were opposed both to church patronage in the abstract, and to this exercise of it in favour of a blind man, and the poet relinquished the appointment on receiving in lieu of it a moderate annuity. He now resided in Edinburgh, and took boarders into his house. His family was a scene of peace and happiness. To his literary pursuits Blacklock added a taste for music, and played on the flute and flageolet. Latterly, he suffered from depression of spirits, and supposed that his imaginative powers were failing him; yet the generous ardour he evinced in 1786, in the case of Burns, shews no diminution of sensibility or taste. Besides his poems, Blacklock wrote some sermons and theological treatises, an article on Blindness for the Encyclopædia Britannica, and two dissertations, entitled Paraclesis; or Consolations deduced from Natural and Revealed Religion, one of them original, and the other translated from a work ascribed to Cicero. Apart from the circumstances under which they were produced, the poems of Blacklock offer little room for or temptation to criticism. He has no new imagery, no commanding power of sentiment, reflection, or imagination. Still, he was a fluent and correct versifier, and his familiarity with the visible objects of nature-with trees, streams, the rocks, and sky, and even with different orders of flowers and plants is a wonderful phenomenon in one blind from infancy. He could distinguish colours by touch; but this could only apply to objects at hand, not to the features of a landscape, or to the appearances of storm or sunshine, sunrise or sunset, or the variation in the seasons, all of which he has described. Images of this kind he had at will. Thus, he exclaims: Ye vales, which to the raptured eye Blushed with the morning's earliest ray. In a man to whom all external phenomena were, and had ever been, one 'universal blank,' this union of taste and memory was certainly remarkable. Poetical feeling he must have inherited from nature, which led him to take pleasure even from his infancy in descriptive poetry; and the language, expressions, and pictures thus imprinted on his mind by habitual acquaintance with the best authors, and in literary conversation, seem to have risen spontaneously in the moment of composition. ་ Terrors of a Guilty Conscience. Cursed with unnumbered groundless fears, By day he mingles with the crowd, Ode to Aurora on Melissa's Birthday. A compliment and tribute of affection to the tender assiduity of an excellent wife, which I have not anywhere seen more happily conceived or more elegantly expressed.'-Henry Mackenzie. Of time and nature eldest born, Emerge, thou rosy-fingered morn; Emerge, in purest dress arrayed, And chase from heaven night's envious shade, Of time and nature eldest born, So when, through life's protracted day, Though less conspicuous, not less dear, Blessed with her rays, though robbed of thine. JAMES BEATTIE. JAMES BEATTIE was the son of a small farmer and shopkeeper at Laurencekirk, county of Kincardine, where he was born October 25, 1735His father died while he was a child, but an elder brother, seeing signs of talent in the boy, assisted him in procuring a good education; and in his fourteenth year he obtained a bursary or exhibition (always indicating some proficiency in Latin) in Marischal College, Aberdeen. His habits and views were scholastic, and four years afterwards, Beattie was appointed schoolmaster of the parish of Fordoun. He was now situated amidst interesting and romantic scenery, which increased his passion for nature and poetry. The scenes which he afterwards delineated in his Minstrel were, as Southey has justly remarked, those in which he had grown up, and the feelings and aspirations therein expressed were those of his own boyhood and youth. In 1758, he was elected usher of the grammar-school of Aberdeen; and in 1760, professor of moral philosophy and logic in Marischal College. About the same time, he published in London a collection of his poems, with some translations. One piece, Retirement, displays poetical feeling and taste; but the collection, as a whole, gave little indication of the Minstrel. The poems, without the translations, were reprinted in 1766, and a copy of verses on the Death of Churchill were added. The latter are mean and reprehensible in spirit. Beattie was a sincere lover of truth and virtue, but his ardour led him at times into intolerance, and he was too fond of courting the notice and approbation of the great. In 1770 the poet appeared as a metaphysician, by his Essay on Truth, in which good principles were advanced, though with an unphilosophical spirit, and in language which suffered greatly from comparison with that of his illustrious opponent, David Hume. Next year, Beattie appeared in his true character as a poet. The first part of the Minstrel was published, and was received with universal approbation. Honours flowed in on the |