in years, and seldom mixed with his subjects; and the act which precluded the granting of honors to foreigners prevented many German gentlemen from visiting England. There was no queen in England, and the ladies who accompanied his Majesty were neither by birth, propriety of conduct, age, nor beauty, qualified to make any impression on prevailing modes. The peace with France caused more intercourse between the two countries than had subsisted for many years; and a slight difference was introduced in the shape of the clothing, but so little as to be scarcely worth notice. Dr. John Harris published, in 1715, an elaborate "Treatise upon the Modes, or a Farewell to French Kicks," 8vo.; and on the particular recommendation of John, Duke of Argyle, the reverend reprobater of French fashions was made bishop of Landaff. This clergyman endeavoured to dissuade his countrymen from applying to foreigners in matters of dress, because we have " right, and power, and genius," to supply ourselves. The French tailors, he observed, invented new modes of dress, and dedicated them to great men, as authors do books; as was the case with the roquelaure cloak, which at that time displaced the surtout; and which was called the roquelaure from being dedicated to the Duke of Roquelaure, whose cloak and title spread by this means throughout France and Britain. Dr. Harris says, the coat was not the invention of the French, but its present modifications and adjuncts, the pockets and pocket flaps, as well as the magnitude of the plaits, which differ from time to time in number, but always agree in the mystical efficacy of an unequal number, were entirely derived from France.

a

Yet the ladies reduced their shapes, as if to represent insects, which seem to have the two ends held together only by a slender union. The consequence of this partial excision of the body was deformity and ill health. In vain did the Venus de Medicis prove that there is a due proportion observed by nature in vain was it allowed that amongst unclothed Africans a crooked woman was as great a rarity as a straight European lady. Mademoiselle Pantine, a mistress of Marshal Saxe, infested us with that

stiffened case which injured and destroyed the fine natural symmetry of the female form. The reproach of the poet was little understood, and as little regarded

Farewell Aruna! Still," in Fancy's ear,
As in the evening wind, thy murmers swell,
Th' enthusiast of the lyre, who wander'd here,
Seems yet to strike his visionary shell,
Of power to call forth Pity's tenderest tear,
Or wake wild Frenzy from her hideous cell!
Charlotte Smith. - 1

On the 12th of June, 1759, died, in his thirty-seventh year, William Collins, one of the most unhappy of our most gifted poets.

A contributor to memorials of Collins says his father was a hatter at Chichester. "He lived in a genteel style, and I think filled the office of mayor more than once; he was pompous in his manners, but at his death left his affairs rather embarrassed. Colonel Martyn, his wife's brother, greatly assisted his family; and supported Mr. William Collins at the university, where he stood for a fellowlost, and which was his reason for quitting ship, which, to his great mortification, he that place; at least, that was his pretext. But he had other reasons. He was in arrears to his bookseller, his tailor, and other tradesmen; but, I believe, a desire to partake of the gaiety and dissipation of London was his principal motive. Coregiment; and Mr. Payne, a near relalonel Martyn was at this time with his

tion, had the management of the Collins's affairs, and had, likewise, a commission to supply the Collins's with small sums

*Noble.

use.

of money. The Colonel was the more sparing in this order, having suffered considerably by Alderman Collins, who had formerly been his agent, and, forgetting that his wife's brother's cash was not his own, had applied it to his own When Mr. William Collins came from the university, he called on his cousin Payne, gaily dressed, and with a feather in his hat; at which his relation expressed surprise, and told him his appearance was by no means that of a young man who had not a single guinea to call his own. This gave him great offence; but, remembering his sole dependence for subsistence was in the power of Mr. Payne, he concealed his resentment; yet could not refrain speaking freely behind his back, and saying he thought him a dull fellow; though this indeed was an epithet he was pleased to bestow on every one who did not think as he would have them. His frequent demands for a supply obliged Mr. Payne to tell him he must pursue some other line of life, for he was sure Colonel Martyn would be displeased with him for having done so much. This resource being stopped, forced him to set about some work, of which his History of the Revival of Learning was the first, and for which he printed proposals (one of which I have), and took the first subscription money from many of his particular friends. The book was begun, but soon stood still. From the freedom subsisting between us, we took the liberty of saying any thing to each other: I one day reproached him with idleness; when, to convince me that my censure was unjust, he showed me many sheets of his translation of Aristotle, which he said he had fully employed himself about, to prevent him from calling on any of his friends so frequently as he used to do. Soon after this, he engaged with Mr. Manby, a bookseller on Ludgate Hill, to furnish him with some lives for the Biographia Britannica, which Manby was then publishing. He showed me some of the lives in embryo, but I do not recollect that any of them came to maturity. To raise a present subsistence, he set about writing his Odes; and, having a general invitation to my home, he frequently passed whole days there, which he employed in writing them, and as frequently burning what he had written, after reading them to ine. Many of them which pleased me I struggled to preserve, but

without effect; for, pretending he would alter them, he got them from me and thrust them into the fire. He was an acceptable companion every where; and, among the gentlemen who loved him for his genius, I may reckon Drs. Armstrong, Barrowby, and Hill; and Messrs. Quin, Garrack, and Foote, who frequently took his opinion on their pieces, before they were seen by the public. He was particularly noticed by the geniuses who frequented the Bedford and Slaughter's coffee-houses. From his knowledge of Garrick, he had the liberty of the scenes and green-room, where he made diverting observations on the vanity and false consequence of that class of people; and his manner of relating them to his particular friends was extremely entertaining. In this manner he lived with and upon his friends until the death of Colonel Martyn, who left what fortune he died possessed of to him and his two sisters. I fear I cannot be certain as to dates, but believe he left the university in 1743. Some circumstances I recollect make me almost certain he was in London that year; but I will not be so positive of the time he died, which I did not hear of until long after it happened. When his health and faculties began to decline, he went to France, and afterwards to Bath, in hopes his health might be restored. but without success. I never saw him after his sister had removed him from M'Donald's mad-house, at Chelsea, to Chichester, where he soon sunk into a deplorable state of idiotism,"

This brief outline might suffice for ordinary readers; and higher minds might "imagine all the rest," in the life of him, "who more than any other of our martyrs to the lyre, has thrown over all his images and his thoughts a tenderness of mind, and breathed a freshness over the pictures of poetry, which the mighty Milton has not exceeded, and the laborious Gray has not attained." A few other passages, however, may be useful as warnings to some of less ability and like temperament. The incidents most interesting in the life of Collins would be those events which elude the vulgar biographer; that invisible train of emotions which were gradually passing in his mind; those passions which moulded his genius, and which broke it! Who could record the vacillations of a poetic temper; its early hope, and its late

despair; its wild gaiety, and its settled phrenzy; but the poet himself? Yet Collins has left behind no memorial of the wanderings of his alienated mind, but the errors of his life.-At college he published his "Persian Eclogues," as they were first called, to which, when he thought they were not distinctly Persian, he gave the more general title of "Oriental:" yet the passage of Hassan, in the desert, is more correct in its scenery, than perhaps the poet himself was aware. The publication was attended with no success; but the first misfortune a poet meets will rarely deter him from incurring more. He suddenly quitted the University, and has been censured for not having consulted his friends when he rashly resolved to live by the pen. But he had no friends! Alive to the name of Author and Poet, the ardent and simple youth imagined that a nobler field of action opened on him in the metropolis, than was presented by the flat uniformity of a collegiate life. To whatever spot the youthful poet flies, that spot seems Parnassus, as civility seems patronage. He wrote his odes for a present supply they were purchased by Millar, and form but a slight pamphlet; yet all the interest of that great bookseller could never introduce them into notice. Not even an idle compliment is recorded to have been sent to the poet. When we now consider that among these odes was one of the most popular in the language, with some of the most exquisitely poetical, two reflections will occur; the difficulty of a young writer, without connections, obtaining the public ear; and the languor of the poetical connoisseurs, which some. times suffers poems, that have not yet grown up to authority, to be buried on the shelf. What the outraged feelings of the poet were, appeared when some time afterwards he became rich enough to express them. Having obtained some fortune by the death of his uncle, he made good to the publisher the deficiency of the unsold odes, and, in his haughty resentment of the public taste, consigned the impression to the flames !-It cannot be doubted, and the recorded facts will demonstrate it, that the poetical disappointments of Collins were secretly preying on his spirit, and repressing his firmest exertions. His mind richly stored with literature, and his soul alive to taste, were ever leaning to the impulse of Nature and study-and thus he projected a "History of the Revival of Learning," and a trans

lation of" Aristotle's Poetics," to be illustrated by a large commentary.-But “his great fault," says Johnson, was his irresolution; or the frequent calls of immediate necessity broke his schemes, and suffered him to pursue no settled purpose." Collins was, however, not idle, though without application; for, when reproached with idleness by a friend, he showed instantly several sheets of his version of Aristotle, and many embryos of some lives he had engaged to compose for the Biographia Britannica; he never brought either to perfection! What then was this irresolution, but the vacillations of a mind broken and confounded? He had exercised too constantly the highest faculties of fiction, and he had precipitated himself into the dreariness of real life. None but a poet can conceive, for none but a poet can experience, the secret wounds inflicted on a mind made up of romantic fancy and tenderness of emotion, who has staked his happiness on his imagination; and who feels neglect, as ordinary men might the sensation of being let down into a sepulchre, and being buried alive. The mind of Tasso, a brother in fancy to Collins, became disordered by the opposition of the critics, but their perpetual neglect had not injured it less. The elegant Hope of the ancients was represented holding some flowers, the promise of the spring, or some spikes of corn, indicative of approaching harvest-but the Hope of Collins had scattered its seed, and they remained buried in the earth.-To our poor Bard, the oblivion which covered his works appeared to him eternal, as

those works now seem to us immortal. He had created Hope, with deep and enthusiastic feeling!

With eyes so fair

Whispering promised pleasure, And bade the lovely scenes at distance hail; And Hope, enchanted, smil'd, and wav'd her golden hair!

What was the true life of Collins, separated from its adventitious circumstances? It was a life of Want, never chequered by Hope, that was striving to elude its own observation by hurrying into some temporary dissipation. But the hours of melancholy and solitude were sure to return; these were marked on the dial of his life, and, when they struck, the gay and lively Collins, like one of his own enchanted beings, as surely relapsed into his natural shape. To the perpetual re

collections of his poetical disappointments are we to attribute this unsettled state of his mind, and the perplexity of his studies. To these he was perpetually reverting, as after a lapse of several years he showed, in burning his ill-fated odes. And what was the result of his literary life? It is known that he returned to his native city of Chichester in a state almost of nakedness, destitute, diseased, and wild in despair, to hide himself in the arms of a sister.-The cloud had long been gathering over his convulsed intellect; and the fortune he acquired on the death of his uncle served only for personal indulgences which rather accelerated his disorder. There were, at times, some awful pauses, in, the alienation of his mind-but he had withdrawn it from study. It was in one of these intervals that Thomas Warton told Johnson that when he met Collins travelling, he took up a book the poet carried with him, from curiosity, to see what companion a man of letters had chosen-it was an English Testament. "I have but one book," said Collins, "but that is the best." This circumstance is thus recorded on his tomb.

"He join'd pure faith to strong poetic powers,
And, in reviving Reason's lucid hours,
Sought on one book his troubled mind to rest,
And rightly deem'd the Book of God the best."

Dr. Warton says-" During his last malady he was a great reader of the Bible, I am favored with the following anecdote from the Rev. Mr. Shenton, vicar of St Andrews, at Chichester, by whom Collins was buried. 'Walking in my vicarial garden one Sunday evening, during Collins' last illness, I heard a female (the servant I suppose) reading the Bible in his chamber. Mr. Collins had been accustomed to rave much, and make great moanings; but while she was reading, or rather attempting to read, he was not only silent but attentive likewise, correcting her mistakes, which indeed were very frequent, through the whole of the twentyseventh chapter of Genesis.'

There is another touching feature of Collins's distracted mind-"At Chichester tradition has preserved some striking and affecting occurrences of his last days; he would haunt the aisles and cloisters of the cathedral, roving days and nights together, loving their

Dim religious light.

And, when the choristers chaunted their

anthem, the listening and bewildered poet, carried out of himself by the solemn strains, and his own too susceptible imagination, moaned and shrieked, and awoke a sadness and a terror most affecting in so solemn a place; their friend, their kinsman, and their poet, was before them, an awful image of human misery and ruined genius!"*

The worthy historian of "English Poetry,' 'further relates, that in 1754, Collins was at Oxford, "for change of air and amusement," and staid a month. "I saw him frequently, but he was so weak and low, that he could not bear conversation. Once he walked from his lodgings opposite Christ-church, to Trinitycollege, but supported by his servant. The same year, in September, I and my brother visited him at Chichester, where he lived in the cathedral cloisters, with his sister. The first day he was in high spirits at intervals, but exerted himself so much that he could not see us the second. Here he showed us an Ode to Mr. John Home, on his leaving England for Scotland, in the octave stanza, very long and beginning

Home, thou return'st from Thames!

I remember there was a beautiful description of the spectre of a man drowned in the night, or in the language of the old Scotch superstitions-seized by the angry spirit of the waters, appearing to his wife with pale blue cheeks, &c. Mr. Home has no copy of it. He also showed us another ode, of two or three four-lined stanzas, called the Bell of Arragon; on a tradition that, anciently, just before a king of Spain died, the great bell of the cathedral of Sarragossa, in Arragon, tolled spontaneously. It began thus:

The bell of Arragon, they say, Spontaneous speaks the fatal day, &c. Soon afterwards were these lines :

Whatever dark aërial power, Commission'd, haunts the gloomy tower. The last stanza consisted of a moral transition to his own death and knell, which he called 'some simpler bell.'"

Dr. Drake observes, "Of this exquisite poet, who, in his genius, and in his per

Calamities of Authors.

sonal fate bears a strong resemblance to the celebrated Tasso, it is greatly to be regretted that the reliques are so few. I must particularly lament the loss of the ode, entitled 'The Bell of Arragon,' which from the four lines preserved in this paper seems to have been written with the poet's wonted power of imagination, and to have closed in a manner strikingly moral and pathetic. I rather wonder that Mr. Warton, who partook much of the romantic bias of Collins, was not induced to fill up the impressive outline."*

The imagined resemblance of Collins to Tasso suggests insertion, in this place, of a poem by Mrs. Hemans.-There is an Italian saying, that "Tasso with his sword and pen was superior to all men."

TASSO AND HIS SISTER.

She sat where, on each wind that sighed,
The citron's breath went by,
While the deep gold of eventide

Burn'd in th' Italian sky.

Her bower was one where day-light's close
Full oft sweet laughter found,

As thence the voice of childhood rose
To the high vineyards round.

But still and thoughtful at her knee,

Her children stood that hour-
Their bursts of song, and dancing glee,
Hush'd as by words of power.

With bright, fix'd, wondering eye, that gaz'd
Up to their mother's face,

With brows through parting ringlets rais'd,
They stood in silent grace.

While she-yet something o'er her look
Of mournfulness was spread-
Forth from a poet's magic book

The glorious numbers read:

The proud undying lay which pour'd
Its light on evil years;
His of the gifted pen and sword,
The triumph-and the tears.
She read of fair Erminia's flight,
Which Venice once might hear
Sung on her glittering seas, at night,
By many a gondolier;

Of Him she read, who broke the charm
That wrapt the myrtle grove,
Of Godfrey's deeds-of Tancred's arm,
That slew his Paynim-love.

Young cheeks around that bright page glow'd;
Young holy hearts were stirr'd,

And the meek tears of woman flow'd
Fast o'er each burning word;

*Dr. Drake's Gleaner.

"Am I so chang'd ?-and yet we two
Oft hand in hand have play'd;
This brow hath been all bath'd in dew,

From wreaths which thou hast made! We have knelt down, and said one prayer, And sang one vesper strain;

My thoughts are dim with clouds of careTell me those words again?

"Life hath been heavy on my head;

I come, a stricken deer,

Bearing the heart, 'midst crowds that bled, To bleed in stillness here!"

She gaz'd-till thoughts that long had slept Shook all her thrilling frame,

She fell upon his neck, and wept,

And breath'd her Brother's name.

Her Brother's name !-and who was He, The weary one, th' unknown, the bitter world to flee,

That came,

A stranger to his own?

He was the Bard of gifts divine
To sway the hearts of men:
He of the song for Salem's shrine,
He of the sword and pen.