of uncertainty, when he was living with and on his numerous friends, as one of them expressed it, Collins had made the acquaintance of the Doctor, and a friendship sprang up between them, the sincerity of which is doubly apparent in Johnson's memoir of the poet; he speaks so tenderly of him as a man, so strangely of him as a poet. The new movement in literature which Collins started was entirely alien to all Johnson's standards, and the author of Rasselas was grudging in his appreciation of 'oriental fictions and allegorical imagery'.

The financial situation became critical when Mr. Payne refused to continue his disbursements, and Collins was forced to set about some work. His head was full of schemes and he did not lack friends to help him. He issued proposals for his History of the Revival of Learning, and received some subscriptions. He meditated a translation of Aristotle; he undertook to write some Lives for Manby's Biographia Britannica; he even talked of writing a play for one of his theatrical friends. But these plans came to nothing, or at most to a few desultory sheets of manuscript. He tried to work, and for a while gave up his frequent visits to friends. But he lacked concentration, he could not apply himself even to congenial work for long. There is nothing astonishing in this failure; success would have been far more astonishing. He could not resist the temptation of company: warm in his friendships, visionary in his pursuits.' He was not a Bohemian, but he lived in

Bohemian circles. Johnson found him one day 'immured by a bailiff, that was prowling in the street'. Though there was no Vicar of Wakefield in manuscript with which to raise a loan, the booksellers 'on the credit of a translation of Aristotle's Poetics, advanced as much money as enabled him to escape into the country'. He showed me the guineas safe in his

hand', adds the Doctor with satisfaction.

Another anecdote, probably of an earlier date, must be mentioned. Joseph Warton met Collins at Guildford races, and took him home to Milford. 'I wrote out for him my odes,' Warton wrote to his young brother Tom, 'and he likewise communicated some of his to me; and being both in very high spirits we took courage, and resolved to join forces, and to publish them immediately. Collins is not to publish the odes unless he gets ten guineas for them.' This scheme fell through, and in 1746, a few months later, Dodsley published in his Museum Collins's Ode on the Death of Colonel Ross and 'How sleep the brave.' At the end of the year Millar published his Odes on several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects, and at the same time Dodsley published Warton's Odes. The result justified Dodsley's caution in refusing the combined forces: Warton's Odes reached a second edition, while only a few of Collins's thousand copies went out into the world. It is interesting to see what impression, at first glance, they made upon Thomas Gray, who wrote to Dr. Wharton from Cambridge on Dec. 27

(the previous day was his thirtieth birthday): 'Have you seen the Works of two young Authors, a Mr Warton & a Mr Collins, both Writers of Odes? It is odd enough, but each is the half of a considerable Man, & one the counterpart of the other. The first has but little Invention, very poetical choice of Expression, & a good Ear; the second, a fine fancy, model'd upon the Antique, a bad Ear, great Variety of Words, & Images with no Choice at all. They both deserve to last some years, but will not.'

The Odes must have been published just before Collins's twenty-fifth birthday, and they fell like lead upon a leaden world. It is not hard to imagine the irritation which, in later years, caused him to buy up all the remaining copies and to burn them. It must have been a severe blow, emphasized by the success which attended the two Wartons in all their ventures. Dr. Langhorne, in his memoir, said: 'It is observable that none of his poems bears the marks of an amorous disposition, and he is one of those few poets, who have sailed to Delphi without touching at Cythera.' If Thomas Warton is to be trusted, the lady on whom Collins set his affections was a Miss Elizabeth Goddard, who lived or stayed at Harting, near Chichester. Her heart, however, was given to Colonel Ross, and Collins had the melancholy satisfaction of writing an ode on the death of her lover, killed in the action of Fontenoy. She was a day older than Collins, and he said once that he came into the world a day after the fair'.

His uncle, Lieutenant-Colonel Martin, who had been in command of his regiment since 1745, was wounded at the battle of Val in Flanders on July 1, 1747, and came home to live at Chichester with his nieces. The elder, Elizabeth, was still unmarried: but Anne Collins may have been married to Captain Hugh Sempill at this date. No doubt Collins paid many visits to his invalid uncle, may indeed have collected his interesting library at Chichester during these years. But there can be no doubt that after the failure of his Odes he endured the extremities of anxiety and want in London. Such troubles as that recorded by Johnson and the obligation to fulfil promises made to booksellers threw the sensitive poet into fits of acute depression; the shadows deepened, and the death of Thomson, in August, 1748, removed his closest friend.

In the following June Collins published his Ode on the death of Thomson. But before this, on April 26, Lieutenant-Colonel Martin had died at Chichester; a tablet to his memory is in St. Andrew's Church. By his will, proved on May 30, William Collins inherited a sum amounting to about two thousand pounds. One of his first acts was to free himself from the necessity of translating Aristotle's Poetics by repaying the loan to the publishers; another was to buy up all unsold copies of his Odes and to burn them. this year too he stayed for a week at Winchester with Mr. Thomas Barrow, and there met Mr. John Home, to whom he addressed his famous Ode on the

In

Superstitions of the Highlands, and probably Mr. Blackstone, who told him that Dr. Hayes of Oxford had set his Ode on the Passions to music. In 1751 he wrote to Dr. Hayes from Chichester the only letter which has been preserved, desiring a copy of the score, for which I will readily answer the expence', and mentioning an Ode on the Music of the Grecian Theatre, which, if it was ever written, has been lost. In the meanwhile he had been in London busily engaged in his schemes, one for a History of the Revival of Learning, another for a review to be called the Clarendon Review and to be printed at the Oxford University Press. His elder sister Elizabeth married Lieut. Nathaniel Tanner in October, 1750, and no doubt Collins often went to Chichester to stay with Mrs. Sempill, who had removed to a house in the Cloisters, now belonging to Dr. Read. It is a fine proof of his character that the release from pecuniary anxieties should have been accompanied not by a period of indolence and dissipation, but by an access of energy which prompted him to undertake the most voluminous work that he ever contemplated. Whether he would ever have accomplished his History may be doubted; but in the spring of 1751, not long after he had written to Dr. Hayes in terms of enthusiasm and cheerfulness, he fell seriously ill in London, thought he was dying, and sent for Thomas Warton, then a young tutor at Trinity College, Oxford, to take his last leave of him. However, he recovered from his malady and went to