O Hertford, fitted or to shine in courts
    With unaffected grace, or walk the plain,
    With innocence and meditation joined
    In soft assemblage, listen to my song,
    Which thy own season paints; when nature all
    Is blooming and benevolent like thee.

Thomson had no objection to strike off a brief compliment in verse, but he was too indolent to keep up in propria persona an incessant fire of compliments, like the bon bons at a Carnival.  It was easier to write her praises than listen to her verses.  Shenstone seems to have been more pliable.  He was personally obsequious, lent her recitations an attentive ear, and was ever ready with the expected commendation.  It is not likely that her ladyship found much, difficulty in collecting around her a crowd of critics more docile than Thomson and quite as complaisant as Shenstone.  Let but a Countess

            Once own the happy lines,
    How the wit brightens, how the style refines!

Though Thomson’s first want on his arrival in London from the North was a pair of shoes, and he lived for a time in great indigence, he was comfortable enough at last.  Lord Lyttleton introduced him to the Prince of Wales (who professed himself the patron of literature) and when his Highness questioned him about the state of his affairs, Thomson assured him that they “were in a more poetical posture than formerly.”  The prince bestowed upon the poet a pension of a hundred pounds a year, and when his friend Lord Lyttleton was in power his Lordship obtained for him the office of Surveyor General of the Leeward Islands.  He sent a deputy there who was more trustworthy than Thomas Moore’s at Bermuda.  Thomson’s deputy after deducting his own salary remitted his principal three hundred pounds per annum, so that the bard ’more fat than bard beseems’ was not in a condition to grow thinner, and could afford to make his cottage a Castle of Indolence.  Leigh Hunt has versified an anecdote illustrative of Thomson’s luxurious idleness.  He who could describe “Indolence” so well, and so often appeared in the part himself,

            Slippered, and with hands,
    Each in a waistcoat pocket, (so that all
    Might yet repose that could) was seen one morn
    Eating a wondering peach from off the tree.

A little summer-house at Richmond which Thomson made his study is still preserved, and even some articles of furniture, just as he left them.[025] Over the entrance is erected a tablet on which is the following inscription: 

HERE
THOMSON SANG
THE SEASONS
AND THEIR CHANGE.

Thomson was buried in Richmond Church.  Collins’s lines to his memory, beginning

    In yonder grave a Druid lies,

are familiar to all readers of English poetry.

Richmond Hill has always been the delight not of poets only but of painters.  Sir Joshua Reynolds built a house there, and one of the only three landscapes which seem to have survived him, is a view from the window of his drawing-room.  Gainsborough was also a resident in Richmond.  Richmond gardens laid out or rather altered by Brown, are now united with those of Kew.