in 1781; and, in compliance with her inclinations, he removed from Lichfield to practice at Derby. He had a family by his second wife, and continued in high professional reputation till his death, in 1802, which was occasioned by angina pectoris, the result of a sudden cold.

Dr. Darwin was between forty and fifty before he began the principal poem by which he is known. Till then he had written only occasional verses, and of these he was not ostentatious, fearing that it might affect his medical reputation to be thought a poet. When his name as a physician had, however, been established, he ventured, in the year 1781, to publish the first part of his 'Botanic Garden.' Mrs. Anna Seward, in her 'Life of Darwin,' declares herself the authoress of the opening lines of the poem ; but as she had never courage to make this pretension during Dr. Darwin's life, her veracity on the subject is exposed to suspicion.* In 1789 and 1792 the second and third parts of his botanic poem appeared. In 1793 and 1796 he published the first and second parts of his Zoonomia, or the Laws of Organic Life.' In 1801 he published Phytologia, or the Philosophy of Agriculture and Gardening;' and, about the same time, a small treatise on female education, which attracted little notice. After his death appeared his poem 'The Temple of Nature,' a mere echo of The Botanic Garden.'

Darwin was a materialist in poetry no less than in philosophy. In the latter he attempts to build systems of vital sensibility on mere mechanical principles; and in the former he paints everything to the mind's eye, as if the soul had no pleasure beyond the vivid conception of form, colour, and motion. Nothing makes poetry more lifeless than description by abstract terms and general qualities; but Darwin runs to the opposite extreme of prominently glaring circumstantial description, without shade, relief, or perspective.

His celebrity rose and fell with unexampled rapidity. His poetry appeared at a time peculiarly favourable to innovation, and his attempt to wed poetry and science was a bold experiment, which had some apparent sanction from the triumphs of modern discovery. When Lucretius wrote, Science was in her cradle;

*["I was at Lichfield," writes R. L.'Edgeworth to Sir Walter Scott, "when the lines in question were written by Miss Seward."-Edgeworth's Memoirs, vol. ii. p. 267.]

but modern philosophy had revealed truths in nature more sublime than the marvels of fiction. The Rosicrucian machinery of his poem had, at the first glance, an imposing appearance, and the variety of his allusion was surprising. On a closer view it was observable that the Botanic goddess, and her Sylphs and Gnomes, were useless from their having no employment, and tiresome from being the mere pretexts for declamation. The variety of allusion is very whimsical. Dr. Franklin is compared to Cupid; whilst Hercules, Lady Melbourne, Emma Crewe, Brindley's canals, and sleeping cherubs, sweep on like images in a dream. Tribes and grasses are likened to angels, and the truffle is rehearsed as a subterranean empress. His laborious ingenuity in finding comparisons is frequently like that of Hervey in his 'Meditations,' or of Flavel in his Gardening Spiritualized.'

If Darwin, however, was not a good poet, it may be owned that he is frequently a bold personifier, and that some of his insulated passages are musical and picturesque. His 'Botanic Garden' once pleased many better judges than his affected biographer Anna Seward; it fascinated even the taste of Cowper, who says, in conjunction with Hayley,

"We, therefore pleased, extol thy song,
Though various yet complete,
Rich in embellishment, as strong
And learned as 'tis sweet;

And deem the bard, whoe'er he be,

And howsoever known,

That will not weave a wreath for thee,

Unworthy of his own."

JAMES BEATTI E.

[Born, 1735. Died, 1803.]

JAMES BEATTIE was born in the parish of Lawrence Kirk, in Kincardineshire, Scotland. His father, who rented a small farm in that parish, died when the poet was only seven years old; but the loss of a protector was happily supplied to him by his elder brother, who kept him at school till he obtained a bursary at the Marischal College, Aberdeen. At that university he took the degree of master of arts; and, at nineteen, he entered on the study of divinity, supporting himself in the mean time by teaching a school in the neighbouring parish. Whilst he was in this

obscure situation, some pieces of verse, which he transmitted to 'The Scottish Magazine,' gained him a little local celebrity. Mr. Garden, an eminent Scottish lawyer, afterwards Lord Gardenstone, and Lord Monboddo, encouraged him as an ingenious young man, and introduced him to the tables of the neighbouring gentry-an honour not usually extended to a parochial schoolmaster. In 1757 he stood candidate for the place of usher in the high-school of Aberdeen. He was foiled by a competitor who surpassed him in the minutiae of Latin grammar; but his character as a scholar suffered so little by the disappointment, that at the next vacancy he was called to the place without a trial. He had not been long at this school when, in 1761, he published a volume of original poems and translations, which (it speaks much for the critical clemency of the times) were favourably received, and highly commended in the English Reviews. So little satisfied was the author himself with those early effusions, that, excepting four, which he admitted to a subsequent edition of his works, he was anxious to have them consigned to oblivion ; and he destroyed every copy of the volume which he could proAbout the age of twenty-six he obtained the chair of Moral Philosophy in the Marischal College of Aberdeen, a promotion which he must have owed to his general reputation in literature: but it is singular that the friend who first proposed to solicit the High Constable of Scotland to obtain this appointment should have grounded the proposal on the merit of Beattie's poetry. In the volume already mentioned there can scarcely be said to be a budding promise of genius.

cure.

Upon his appointment to this professorship, which he held for forty years, he immediately prepared a course of lectures for the students; and gradually compiled materials for those prose works on which his name would rest with considerable reputation if he were not known as a poet. It is true that he is not a first-rate metaphysician; and the Scotch, in undervaluing his powers of abstract and close reasoning, have been disposed to give him less credit than he deserves as an elegant and amusing writer. But the English, who must be best able to judge of his style, admire it for an ease, familiarity, and an Anglicism that is not to be found even in the correct and polished diction of Blair. His mode of illustrating abstract questions is fanciful and interesting. In 1765 he published a poem entitled 'The Judgment of

Paris,' which his biographer, Sir William Forbes, did not think fit to rank among his works.* For more obvious reasons Sir William excluded his lines, written in the subsequent year, on the proposal for erecting a monument to Churchill in Westminster Abbey-lines which have no beauty or dignity to redeem their bitter expression of hatred. On particular subjects, Beattie's virtuous indignation was apt to be hysterical. Dr. Reid and Dr. Campbell hated the principles of David Hume as sincerely as the author of the Essay on Truth;' but they never betrayed more than philosophical hostility, while Beattie used to speak of the propriety of excluding Hume from civil society.

His reception of Gray, when that poet visited Scotland in 1765, shows the enthusiasm of his literary character in a finer 'light. Gray's mind was, not in poetry only, but in many other respects, peculiarly congenial with his own; and nothing could exceed the cordial and reverential welcome which Beattie gave to his illustrious visitant. In 1770 he published his Essay on Truth,' which had a rapid sale and extensive popularity; and, within a twelvemonth after, the first part of his 'Minstrel.' The poem appeared at first anonymously, but its beauties were immediately and justly appreciated. The second part was not published till 1774. When Gray criticised 'The Minstrel' he objected to its author, that, after many stanzas, the description went on and the narrative stopped.† Beattie very justly answered to this criticism, that he meant the poem for description, not for incident. But he seems to have forgotten this proper apology when he mentions, in one of his letters, his intention of producing Edwin, in some subsequent books, in the character of a warlike bard inspiring his countrymen to battle, and contributing to repel their invaders. This intention, if he ever seriously entertained it, might have produced some new

* It is to be found in 'The Scottish Magazine;' and, if I may judge from an obscure recollection of it, is at least as well worthy of revival as some of his minor pieces. [See it also in the Aldine edition of Beattie, p. 97.]

† Gray complained of a want of action. "As to description," he says, "I have always thought that it made the most graceful ornament of poetry, but never ought to make the subject."]

[This was no written intention, but one delivered orally in reply to a question from Sir William Forbes. An invasion, however, had been for long a settled point-some great service that the minstrel was to do his country; but his plan was never concerted.]

kind of poem, but would have formed an incongruous counterpart to the piece as it now stands, which, as a picture of still life, and a vehicle of contemplative morality, has a charm that is inconsistent with the bold evolutions of heroic narrative. After having portrayed his young enthusiast with such advantage in a state of visionary quiet, it would have been too violent a transitian to have begun in a new book to surround him with dates of time and names of places. The interest which we attach to Edwin's character would have been lost in a more ambitious effort to make him a greater or more important or more locallydefined being. It is the solitary growth of his genius, and his isolated and mystic abstraction from mankind, that fix our attention on the romantic features of that genius. The simplicity of his fate does not divert us from his mind to his circumstances. A more unworldly air is given to his character, that, instead of being tacked to the fate of kings, he was one "who envied not, who never thought of kings ;" and that, instead of mingling with the troubles which deface the creation, he only existed to make his thoughts the mirror of its beauty and magnificence. Another English critic✶ has blamed Edwin's vision of the fairies as too splendid and artificial for a simple youth; but there is nothing in the situation ascribed to Edwin, as he lived in minstrel days, that necessarily excluded such materials from his fancy. Had he beheld steam-engines or dockyards in his sleep, the vision might have been pronounced to be too artificial; but he might have heard of fairies and their dances, and even of tapers, gold, and gems, from the ballads of his native country. In the second book of the poem there are some fine stanzas; but he has taken Edwin out of the school of nature and placed him in his own— that of moral philosophy; and hence a degree of languor is experienced by the reader.

Soon after the publication of the Essay on Truth,' and of the first part of 'The Minstrel,' he paid his first visit to London. His reception in the highest literary and polite circles was distinguished and flattering. The University of Oxford conferred on him the degree of doctor of laws, and the sovereign himself, besides honouring him with a personal conference, bestowed on him a pension of 2001. a-year.

On his return to Scotland there was a proposal for transferring * Dr. Aikin.