Duncan Crookes Tovey

“ But if Thomson sometimes lacks the true vision for things human, he retains it always for things mute and material, and whilst the critical estimate of his powers and influence will vary from age to age, all who have read him will concur in the colloquial judgment which only candour could have extorted from the prejudice of Dr Johnson—“Thomson had as much of the poet about him as most writers. ”

“ Yet it is difficult to believe that he was not the better for that training in refinement of style which he partly owed to Pope, who almost unquestionably contributed some passages to The Seasons. And, except in The Castle of Indolence, there is much that is conventional, much that is even vicious or vulgar in taste when Thomson’s muse deals with that human life which must be the background of descriptive as of all other poetry ”

“ These Pope, if the handwriting be his, made in an interleaved edition of The Seasons dated 1738, and they were for the most part adopted by Thomson in the edition of 1744. The writer seldom makes more than verbal changes in passages of pure description, but sometimes strikingly enhances the scenes in which human character comes into lay, adding, for example, the comparison, in Autumn, of the fair Lavinia to a myrtle in the Apennines, of which the first suggestion can be found in The Rape of the Lock. ”