Edmund William Gosse

“ No English poet so great as Collins has left behind him so small a bulk of writings. Not more than 1500 lines of his have been handed down to us, but among these not one is slovenly, and few are poor. His odes are the most sculpturesque and faultless in the language. They lack fire, but in charm and precision of diction, exquisite propriety of form, and lofty poetic suggestion they stand unrivalled. The ode named The Passions is the most popular; that To Evening is the classical example of perfect unrhymed verse. ”

“ He had hardly begun to taste the sweets of a life devoted to literature and quiet, before the weakness of his will began to develop in the direction of insanity, and he hurried abroad to attempt to dispel the gathering gloom by travel. ”

“ Fired by his poetic fellows to further feats in verse, Collins produced, in his seventeenth year, those Persian Eclogues which were the only writings of his that were valued by the world during his own lifetime. They were not printed for some years, and meanwhile Collins sent, in January and October 1739, some verses to the Gentleman’s Magazine, which attracted the notice and admiration of Johnson, then still young and uninfluential. In March 1740 he was admitted a commoner of Queen’s College, Oxford, but did not go up to Oxford until July 1741, when he obtained a demyship at Magdalen College. ”