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. In 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

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

Chichester in the summer: perhaps it was then that he wrote his only recorded humorous lines, on a quack doctor.

Seventh son of Doctor John,
Physician and Chirurgeon,

Who hath travelled wide and far,
Man-Midwife to a Man of War,

In Chichester hath ta'en a house,
Hippocrates, Hippocratous.

But Collins was left with a deep sense of his mental danger; he was paying the penalty for years of alternate privation and dissipation, and though his friends were totally unconscious of his precarious condition, he was preyed upon by the terrors of melancholia. To escape from the disease and to find relief in travel and change of scenery, he went to France and afterwards to Bath. The history of these three years is hidden. Collins seems to have fled from his old friends and the old life in a frantic attempt to bury his troubles and to regain his health in lively companies where he was a stranger. We know nothing of his acquaintances in France or at Bath, of his mental tortures, of the struggle against the serpent melancholy. Johnson saw him at Islington, where Mrs. Sempill met him on his return from France. "There was then nothing of disorder discernible in his mind by any but himself; but he had withdrawn from study, and travelled with no other book than an English Testament such as children