The personal life of Thomson is not of much interest.  From his first residence in London, he supported, with his slender means, a brother, who died young of consumption, and aided two maiden sisters, who kept a small milliner-shop in Edinburgh.  This is greatly to his praise, as he was at one time so poor that he was arrested for debt and committed to prison.  As his reputation increased, his fortunes were ameliorated.  In 1745 his play Tancred and Sigismunda was performed.  It was founded upon a story universally popular,—­the same which appears in the episode of The Fatal Marriage in Gil Bias, and in one of the stories of Boccaccio.  He enjoyed for a short time a pension from the Prince of Wales, of which, however, he was deprived without apparent cause; but he received the office of Surveyor-General of the Leeward Islands, the duties of which he could perform by deputy; after that he lived a lazy life at his cottage near Richmond, which, if otherwise reprehensible, at least gave him the power to write his most beautiful poem, The Castle of Indolence.  It appeared in 1748, and was universally admired; it has a rhetorical harmony similar and quite equal to that of the Lotos Eaters of Tennyson.  The poet, who had become quite plethoric, was heated by a walk from London, and, from a check of perspiration, was thrown into a high fever, a relapse of which caused his death on the 27th of August, 1748.  His friend Lord Lyttleton wrote the prologue to his play of Coriolanus, which was acted after the poet’s death, in which he says: 

“—­His chaste Muse employed her heaven-taught lyre None but the noblest missions to inspire, Not one immoral, one corrupted thought, One line which, dying, he could wish to blot.”

The praise accorded him in this much-quoted line is justly his due:  it is greater praise that he was opening a new pathway in English Literature, and supplying better food than the preceding age had given.  His Seasons supplied a want of the age:  it was a series of beautiful pastorals.  The descriptions of nature will always be read and quoted with pleasure; the little episodes, if they affect the unity, relieve the monotony of the subject, and, like figures introduced by the painter into his landscape, take away the sense of loneliness, and give us a standard at once of judgment, of measurement, and of sympathetic enjoyment; they display, too, at once the workings of his own mind in his production, and the manners and sentiments of the age in which he wrote.  It was fitting that he who had portrayed for us such beautiful gardens of English nature, should people them instead of leaving them solitary.

THE CASTLE OF INDOLENCE.—­This is an allegory, written after the manner of Spenser, and in the Spenserian stanza.  He also employs archaic words, as Spenser did, to give it greater resemblance to Spenser’s poem.  The allegorical characters are well described, and the sumptuous adornings and lazy luxuries of the castle are set forth con amore.  The spell that enchants the castle is broken by the stalwart knight Industry; but the glamour of the poem remains, and makes the reader in love with Indolence.