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THOMSON, JAMES (r700-1748) , English poet, author of The Seasons, was born at Ednam, in Roxburghshire, on the I Ith of September 1700the third son and fourth child of Thomas Thomson, minister of that place. His mother, Beatrix, was the daughter of Mr Trotter of Fogo, whose wife, Margaret, was one of the Homes of Bassenden. About 1701 Thomas Thomson removed to Southdean near Jedburgh. Here James was educated at first by Robert Riccaltoun, to whose verses ou Winter he owed the suggestion of his own poem. In 1712 he attended a school at Jedburgh, held in the aisle of the parish church. He learnt there some Latin, but with difficulty, and the earliest recorded utterance of the future poet was " Confound the building of Babel." He began very soon to write verses, and we are told that every January he destroyed almost all the productions of the preceding year. And this was just as well, for the little that has escaped the fire contains no promise of his future powers. In 1715 he went to the university of Edinburgh. It is said that as soon as the servant who brought him thither had quitted him, he returned full speed to his father's house, declaring that he could read just as well at home; he went back, however, and had not been long at college before he lost his father, who died, according to one remarkable but highly improbable story, in the attempt to lay a ghost. The incident should have left more impression than we tan trace upon the mind of the poet, at this date nervous and afraid of the dark; but in his Winter he writes of all such stories with a quiet contempt for " superstitious horror." He made friends at the university with David Mallock, who afterwards called himself Mallet, and with Patrick Murdoch, his. future biographer. In 1719 he became a divinity student, and one of his exercises so enchanted a certain Auditor Benson, that he urged Thomson to go to London and there make himself a reputation as a preacher. It was partly with this object that Thomson left Edinburgh without a degree in March 1725. His mother saw him embark, and they never met again; she died on the loth of May of that year. There is sufficient evidence that on his arrival in London he was not in the extreme destitution which Dr Johnson attributes to him; and in July 1725 we find him engaged, as a make-shift, in teaching " Lord Binning's son to read." This son was the grandson of Lady Grizel Baillie, a somewhat distant connexion of Thomson's mother. She was the daughter of Sir Patrick Home, whom, after the defeat of Argyll, she fed in his concealment near his own castle; she was also, like other Scottish ladies, a writer of pretty ballads. This heroine and poetess is supposed to have encouraged Thomson to come to England, and it is certain that she procured him a temporary home. But he had other friends, especially Duncan Forbes of Culloden, by whom he was recommended to the duke of Argyll, the earl
Thomson's Winter appeared in March 1726. It was warmly praised by Aaron Hill, a man of various interests and projects, and in his day a sort of literary oracle. It was dedicated to Sir Spencer
Spring appeared in 1728, published by Andrew Millar, a man who, according to Johnson, dealt handsomely by authors and " raised the price of literature." It was dedicated to the countess of Hertford, afterwards duchess of Somerset, a lady devoted to letters and the patroness of the unhappy Savage. In 1729 Thomson produced Sophonisba, a tragedy now only remembered by the line " O Sophonisba, Sophonisba, 0," and the parody " O Jemmy Thomson, Jemmy Thomson, 0," which caused him to remodel the unhappy verse in the form, " O Sophonisba, I am wholly thine." A poem, anonymous but 'unquestionably Thomson's, to the memory of Congreve who had died in January 1729, appeared in that year. In 173o Autumn was first published in a collected editionof The Seasons. It wasdedicated to the Speaker, Onslow. In this year, at the suggestion of Rundle, bishop of Derry, one of his patrons, he accompanied the son of Sir Charles Talbot, solicitor-general, upon his travels. In the course of these he projected his Liberty as " a poetical landscape of countries, mixed with moral observations on their government and people." In December 1731 he returned with his pupil to London. He probably lived with his patrons the Talbots, leisurely meditating his new poem, the first part of which did not appear until the close of 1734 or the beginning of 1735. But meanwhile his pupil died, and in the opening lines of Liberty Thomson pays a tribute to his memory. Two months after his son's death Sir Charles Talbot became chancellor and gave Thomson a sinecure in the court of chancery. About this time the poet worked for the relief of Dennis, now old and in extreme poverty, and induced even Pope to give a half-contemptuous support to the bitter critic of the Rape of the Lock. Liberty was completed in five parts_ in 1736. The poem was a failure; its execution did not correspond with its design; in a sense indeed it is a survey of countries and might have anticipated Goldsmith's Traveller. It was not, however, the poem which readers were expecting from the author of The Seasons, who had taken them from the town to the country, and from social and political satire to the world of nature. It is in the main a set of wearisome declamations put in the mouth of the goddess, and Johnson rightly enough remarks that " an enumeration of examples to prove a position which nobody denied as it was from the beginning superfluous, must quickly grow disgusting." The truth is that Thomson's poetical gift was for many years perverted by the zeal of partisanship.He was established in May 1736 in a small house at Richmond, but his patron died in February 1737 and he lost his sinecure; he then " whips and spurs " to finish his tragedy Agamemnon, which appeared in April 1738, not before he had been arrested for a debt of 70, from which, according to a story which has been discredited on quite insufficient grounds, Quin relieved him in the most generous and tactful manner. Quin, it is said, visited him in the sponging-house and " balanced accounts with him " by insisting on his accepting a hundred pounds as a return for the pleasure which the actor had received from the poet's works. The incident took place probably a little before the production of Agamemnon, in which Quin played the leading part. The play is of course modelled upon Aeschylus and owes whatever of dignity it possesses to that fact; the part of Cassandra, for instance, retains something of its original force, pathos and terror. But most of the other characters exist only for the purpose of political innuendo. Agamemnon is too long absent at Troy, as George is too long absent in Germany; the arts of Aegisthus are the arts of Walpole; the declamations of Arcus are the declamations of Wyndham or Pulteney; Melisander, consoling himself with the muses on his island in Cyclades, is Bolingbroke in exile . Thomson about this time was introduced to Lyttelton, and by him to the prince of Wales, and to one or the other of these, when he was questioned as to the state of his affairs, he made answer that they were " in a more poetical posture than formerly." Agamemnon was put upon the stage soon after the passing of Walpole's bill for licensing plays, and its obvious bias fixed the attention of the censorship and caused Thomson's next venture, Edward and Eleanora, which has the same covert aim, to be proscribed. The fact has very generally escaped notice that, like its predecessor, it follows a Greek original, the Alcestis of Euripides. It has also, what Agamemnon has not, some little place in the history of literature, for it suggested something to Lessing for Nathan der Weise, and to Scott for the Talisman. The rejection of the play was defended by one of the ministry on the ground that Thomson had taken a Liberty which was not agreeable to Britannia in any Season. These circumstances sufficiently account for the poet's next experiment, a preface to Milton's Areopagitica. He joined Mallet in composing. the masque of Alfred, represented at Clieveden on the Thames before the prince of Wales, on the 1st of August 174o. There can be little question that " RuleBritannia," a song in this drama, was the production of Thomson. The music of the song, as of the whole masque, was composed by Arne. In 1744 Thomson was appointed surveyor-general of the Leeward Islands by Lyttelton with an income of Soo a year; but his patron fell into disfavour with the prince of Wales, and in consequence Thomson lost, at the close of 1747, the pension he received from that quarter. For a while, however, he was in flourishing circumstances, and whilst completing at his leisure The Castle of Indolence produced Tancred and Sigismunda at Drury Lane in 1745. The story is found in Gil Blas, and is ultimately to be traced to The Decameron. It owes much to Le Sage in language, plot and sentiment, and the conflict of emotion, in depicting which Thomson had some little skill, is here effectively exhibited. He was assisted herein by his own experience. The " Amanda " of The Seasons is a Miss Elizabeth Young, a lady of Scottish parentage, whose mother was ambitious for her and forbade her to marry the poet, anticipating that she would be reduced to singing his ballads in the streets. The last years of his life were saddened by this disappointment. The Castle of Indolence, after a gestation of fifteen years, appeared in May 1748. It is in the Spenserian stanza with the Spenserian archaism, and is the first and last long effort of Thomson in rhyme. It is not impossible that his general choice of blank verse was partly due to the fact that he had not the southron's ear and took many years to acquire it. The great and varied interest
burlesque which appears in Shen-stone's Schoolmistress, whilst the tone and diction of the poem harmonize with the hazy landscape, the pleasant land of drowsy-head, in which it is set. It is the last work by Thomson which appeared in his lifetime. In walking from London to his house at Richmond he became heated and took a boat at Hammer
" He loved his friendsforgive the gushing tear! Alas! I feel I am no actor here " were recited by Quin with no simulated emotion. It may be questioned whether Thomson himself ever quite realized the distinctive significance of his own achievement in The Seasons, or the place which criticism assigns him as the pioneer
movement
For the day of Thomson's birth see the Aldine edition of his poems. (1897). In the same volume (pp. 189 seq.) is discussed the question of Pope's contributions to The Seasons, These Pope, if the handwriting be his, made in an interleaved edition of The Seasons dated 1738, and they were for the most part adopted by Thomson in the edition of 1744. The writer seldom makes more than verbal changes in passages of pure description, but sometimes strikingly enhances the scenes in which human character comes into play, adding, for example, the comparison, in Autumn, of the fair Lavinia to a myrtle in the Apennines, of which the first suggestion can be found in The Rape of the Lock. But whereas many years ago the opinion of experts at the British Museum pronounced the handwriting of these notes to be Pope's beyond a doubt, their successors at the present day are equally positive that it is not. Some account should be taken of the cramping of the hand, due to writing on a curved surface, and of the letters at Blenheim (see Pall
The first collected editions of The Seasons bear dates 1730, 1738, 1744, 1746. Lyttelton tampered both with The Seasons and with Liberty in editions after his friend's death. Among the numerous lives of the poet may be mentioned those by his friend Patrick Murdoch, by Dr Johnson in Lives of the Poets, by Sir Harris Nicolas (Ald. ed., 1860), by M. Morel, James Thomson, .sa vie et ses oeuvres (Paris, 1895), and James Thomson, in the English Men of Letters Series, by G. C. Macaulay (1908). See also Dr G. Schmeding's Jacob Thomson, ein vergessener Dichter des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts; the life prefixed to the Aldine edition of his works in 1897 ; and an excellent edition of The Seasons in the Clarendon Press Series by J. Logie Robertson. (D. C. To.) End of Article: THOMSON, JAMES (r700-1748) If you wish, you can link directly to this article.
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