For nearly a hundred years poetry had dealt with manners and the life of towns—­the gay, prosaic life of Congreve or of Pope.  The sole concession to the life of nature was the old pastoral, which, in the hands of cockneys like Pope and Ambrose Philips, who merely repeated stock descriptions at second or third hand, became even more artificial than a Beggars Opera or a Rape of the Lock.  These at least were true to their environment, and were natural just because they were artificial.  But the Seasons of James Thomson, published in installments from 1726-1730, had opened a new field.  Their theme was the English landscape, as varied by the changes of the year, and they were written by a true lover and observer of nature.  Mark Akenside’s Pleasures of Imagination, 1744, published the year of Pope’s death, was written, like the Seasons, in blank verse; and although its language had the formal, didactic cast of the Queen Anne poets, it pointed unmistakably in the new direction.  Thomson had painted the soft beauties of a highly cultivated land—­lawns, gardens, forest-preserves, orchards, and sheep-walks.  But now a fresh note was struck in the literature, not of England alone, but of Germany and France—­romanticism, the chief element in which was a love of the wild.  Poets turned from the tameness of modern existence to savage nature and the heroic simplicity of life among primitive tribes.  In France, Rousseau introduced the idea of the natural man, following his instincts in disregard of social conventions.  In Germany Bodmer published, in 1753, the first edition of the old German epic, the Nibelungen Lied.  Works of a similar tendency in England were the odes of William Collins and Thomas Gray, published between 1747 and 1757; especially Collins’s Ode on the Superstitions of the Highlands, and Gray’s Bard, a Pindaric in which the last survivor of the Welsh bards invokes vengeance on Edward I., the destroyer of his guild.  Gray and Mason, his friend and editor, made translations from the ancient Welsh and Norse poetry.  Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, 1765, aroused the taste for old ballads.  Richard Kurd’s Letters on Chivalry and Romance, Thomas Warton’s History of English Poetry. 1774-1778, Tyrwhitt’s critical edition of Chaucer, and Horace Walpole’s Gothic romance, the Castle of Otranto, 1765, stimulated this awakened interest in the picturesque aspects of feudal life, and contributed to the fondness for supernatural and mediaeval subjects.  James Beattie’s Minstrel, 1771, described the educating influence of Scottish mountain scenery upon the genius of a young poet.  But the most remarkable instances of this passion for wild nature and the romantic past were the Poems of Ossian and Thomas Chatterton’s literary forgeries.