WILLIAM COLLINS (1721-1759).  Collins, the friend and disciple of Thomson, was of a delicate, nervous temperament, like Cowper; and over him also brooded the awful shadow of insanity.  His first work, Oriental Eclogues (1742), is romantic in feeling, but is written in the prevailing mechanical couplets.  All his later work is romantic in both thought and expression.  His “Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands” (1750) is an interesting event in the romantic revival, for it introduced a new world, of witches, pygmies, fairies, and mediaeval kings, for the imagination to play in.  Collins’s best known poems are the odes “To Simplicity,” “To Fear,” “To the Passions,” the little unnamed lyric beginning “How sleep the brave,” and the exquisite “Ode to Evening.”  In reading the latter, one is scarcely aware that the lines are so delicately balanced that they have no need of rime to accentuate their melody.

GEORGE CRABBE (1754-1832).  Crabbe is an interesting combination of realism and romanticism, his work of depicting common life being, at times, vaguely suggestive of Fielding’s novels. The Village (1783), a poem without a rival as a picture of the workingmen of his age, is sometimes like Fielding in its coarse vigor, and again like Dryden in its precise versification.  The poem was not successful at first, and Crabbe abandoned his literary dreams.  For over twenty years he settled down as a clergyman in a country parish, observing keenly the common life about him.  Then he published more poems, exactly like The Village, which immediately brought him fame and money.  They brought him also the friendship of Walter Scott, who, like others, regarded Crabbe as one of the first poets of the age.  These later poems, The Parish Register (1807), The Borough (1810), Tales in Verse (1812), and Tales of the Hall (1819), are in the same strain.  They are written in couplets; they are reflections of nature and of country life; they contain much that is sordid and dull, but are nevertheless real pictures of real men and women, just as Crabbe saw them, and as such they are still interesting.  Goldsmith and Burns had idealized the poor, and we admire them for their sympathy and insight.  It remained for Crabbe to show that in wretched fishing villages, in the lives of hardworking men and women, children, laborers, smugglers, paupers,—­all sorts and conditions of common men,—­there is abundant romantic without exaggerating or idealizing their vices and virtues.

JAMES MACPHERSON (1736-1796).  In Macpherson we have an unusual figure, who catered to the new romantic interest in the old epic heroes, and won immense though momentary fame, by a series of literary forgeries.  Macpherson was a Scotch schoolmaster, an educated man, but evidently not over-tender of conscience, whose imagination had been stirred by certain old poems which he may have heard in Gaelic among the Highlanders.  In 1760 he published his Fragments of Ancient Poetry