good-natured, well-bred man.' The play had the benefit of a prologue and epilogue from Garrick; it was repeated twenty times in the same season that produced Goldsmith's Good-Natur'd Man, and a printed edition of ten thousand copies was sold within the year, so that Kelly netted £700 by his lucky stroke. French, German, and Portuguese translations made his name known on the Continental stage. His other comedies, A Word to the Wise, A School for Wives, and The Man of Reason, and a tragedy, Clementina, had little or no success. Kelly had withdrawn from stage work in 1774, and became an unsuccessful barrister. An edition of his works, with a Life, by Hugh Hamilton, was published the year after his death. Robert Bage (1728-1801) had as a novelist many points in common with Holcroft; like him he had adopted the principles of the French Revolution, which he inculcated in a series of works. Bage was born of Quaker parentage at Darley, Derbyshire, and became, like his father, a papermaker. His manufactory was at Elford near Tamworth, and there he realised a decent competence. During the last eight years of his life he lived in Tamworth. His works are Mount Kenneth (1781), Barham Downs (1784), The Fair Syrian (1787), James Wallace (1788), Man as He is (1792), and Hermsprong, or Man as He is Not (1796). Bage's novels are distinctly inferior to those of Holcroft, and it can only surprise us that Sir Walter Scott should have admitted them into his British Novelists when he was excluding so many better stories. Barham Downs and Hermsprong, upon the whole the most interesting, contain good satirical portraits, though the plots of both are crude and defective.

Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802), born at Elston Hall, Newark, was educated at Chesterfield and St John's College, Cambridge, and then studied medicine at Edinburgh. After trying a practice for two months in Nottingham, he removed (November 1756) to Lichfield, where he long remained a successful and distinguished physician. After his first wife's death (1770) he devoted himself largely to botanical and literary pursuits, though at first afraid that the reputation of poet would injure him in his profession. At this time he lived in a pretty villa in the neighbourhood of Lichfield, with a grotto and fountain, and here he began to arrange a botanic garden in a spot he described as 'adapted to love-scenes, and as being thence a proper residence for the modern goddess of botany.' His Botanic Garden, a poem in polished heroic verse, was designed to describe, glorify, and allegorise the Linnæan system of botany. The Rosicrucian doctrine of gnomes, sylphs, nymphs, and salamanders seemed to afford a proper machinery for a botanic poem, as it is probable they were originally the names of hieroglyphic figures representing the elements.' In 1778 the poet was called to attend the children of Colonel

Chandos Pole of Radbourne Hall, Derby; and a year after the colonel's death (1786) Dr Darwin married the widow, who possessed a jointure of £600 per annum. He was now released from all prudential fears and restraints about his poetical ambitions. In 1789 appeared the second part of his poem, The Loves of the Plants; the first part, the Economy of Vegetation, did not appear till 1792. Oddly enough, he incorporated at the beginning of this part, without acknowledgment, some fifty already published verses by Miss Seward, which had suggested to him the idea of the poem. This he did, he said, in compliment to the lady, who, however, in her memoir of Darwin complained gently of his not acknowledging the authorship in some way, as Mr Edgeworth said he was the last man who in this department needed to beg, borrow, or steal from any person on earth.'

Ovid having by poetic art transmuted men, women, and even gods and goddesses into trees and flowers, Darwin explained that in the Loves of the Plants he had 'undertaken, by similar art, to restore some of them to their original animality, after having remained prisoners so long in their vegetable mansions :'

From giant oaks, that wave their branches dark,
To the dwarf moss that clings upon their bark,
What beaux and beauties crowd the gaudy groves,
And woo and win their vegetable loves.
How snowdrops cold, and blue-eyed harebells, blend
Their tender tears, as o'er the streams they bend;
The love sick violet, and the primrose pale,
Bow their sweet heads, and whisper to the gale;
With secret sighs the virgin lily droops,
And jealous cowslips hang their tawny cups.
How the young rose, in beauty's damask pride,
Drinks the warm blushes of his bashful bride;
With honeyed lips enamoured woodbines meet,
Clasp with fond arms, and mix their kisses sweet.
Stay thy soft murmuring waters, gentle rill;
Hush, whispering winds; ye rustling leaves, be still;
Rest, silver butterflies, your quivering wings;
Alight, ye beetles, from your airy rings;
Ye painted moths, your gold-eyed plumage furl,
Blow your wide horns, your spiral trunks uncurl;
Glitter, ye glow-worms, on your mossy
beds;
Descend, ye spiders, on your lengthened threads;
Slide here, ye horned snails, with varnished shells;
Ye bee-nymphs, listen in your waxen cells!

(From the opening of Canto iv.)

To such ingenious fancies in neat couplets, some passages add lofty thoughts in dignified verse:

Roll on, ye stars! exult in youthful prime,
Mark with bright curves the printless steps of time;
Near and more near your beamy cars approach,
And lessening orbs on lessening orbs encroach;
Flowers of the sky! ye too to age must yield,
Frail as your silken sisters of the field!
Star after star from heaven's high arch shall rush,
Suns sink on suns, and systems systems crush,
Headlong, extinct, to one dark centre fall,
And death, and night, and chaos mingle all!

Till o'er the wreck, emerging from the storm,
Immortal nature lifts her changeful form,
Mounts from her funeral pyre on wings of flame,
And soars and shines, another and the same!

(From the Economy of Vegetation, Canto iv.) A description of the cassia plant, 'cinctured with gold,' committing its 'infant loves,' or seeds, to be borne by Ontario's floods and sea-currents to the coasts of Norway, naturally suggests Moses in his Nile cradle, as that does African slavery.

Moses on the Nile and Slavery.

So the sad mother at the noon of night,
From bloody Memphis stole her silent flight;
Wrapped her dear babe beneath her folded vest,
And clasped the treasure to her throbbing breast;
With soothing whispers hushed its feeble cry,
Pressed the soft kiss, and breathed the secret sigh.
With dauntless step she seeks the winding shore,
Hears unappalled the glimmering torrents roar ;
With paper-flags a floating cradle weaves,
And hides the smiling boy in lotus leaves;

Gives her white bosom to his eager lips,

The salt tears mingling with the milk he sips;

Waits on the reed-crowned brink with pious guile,
And trusts the scaly monsters of the Nile.

Erewhile majestic from his lone abode,

Embassador of heaven, the Prophet trod ;

Wrenched the red scourge from proud oppression's hands,
And broke, curst slavery, thy iron bands.
Hark! heard ye not that piercing cry,
Which shook the waves and rent the sky?
E'en now, e'en now, on yonder western shores
Weeps pale despair, and writhing anguish roars;
E'en now in Afric's groves, with hideous yell,
Fierce slavery stalks, and slips the dogs of hell;
From vale to vale the gathering cries rebound,
And sable nations tremble at the sound!
Ye band of senators! whose suffrage sways
Britannia's realms, whom either Ind obeys;
Who right the injured and reward the brave,
Stretch your strong arm, for ye have power to save!
Throned in the vaulted heart, his dread resort,
Inexorable conscience holds his court;
With still small voice the plots of guilt alarms,
Bares his masked brow, his lifted hand disarms;
But wrapped in night with terrors all his own,
He speaks in thunder when the deed is done.
Hear him, ye senates! hear this truth sublime,
'He who allows oppression, shares the crime!'

(From The Loves of the Plants, Canto iii.)

The two halves of the poem have no very close connection; Part II. only justifies the general and special title of the book, and in Part I. the section of Canto iv. addressed to the sylphs; the first three cantos of Part I. (addressed to fire-spirits, gnomes or earth-spirits, and water-nymphs respectively) deal with the forces of nature in general, and specially with the formation of the world. The plan of the book thus allows Darwin to bring in any subject he likes--'Lock-lomond by Moonlight,' Montgolfier's balloon, the pictures of Wright of Derby, compliments to Wedgwood and Brindley the canal-maker, and a really eloquent tribute to

John Howard, the prisoners' friend. The following passage on the power of the steam-engine (written about 1780 in an invocation to the nymphs of fire, who are responsible for many chemical, electrical, and industrial inventions) goes beyond the achievements of M. Santos-Dumont and almost rivals in brief the visions of Mr H. G. Wells:

Nymphs! you erewhile on simmering cauldrons play'd,
And call'd delighted Savery to your aid;
Bade round the youth explosive Steam aspire,
In gathering clouds, and wing'd the wave with fire;
Bade with cold streams the quick expansion stop,
And sunk the immense of vapour to a drop.-
Press'd by the ponderous air the Piston falls
Resistless, sliding through its iron walls;
Quick moves the balanced beam, of giant birth,
Wields his large limbs, and nodding shakes the earth....

Soon shall thy arm, Unconquered Steam! afar
Drag the slow barge, or drive the rapid car;
Or on wide-waving wings expanded bear
The flying-chariot through the fields of air.
-Fair crews triumphant, leaning from above,
Shall wave their fluttering kerchiefs as they move;
Or warrior bands alarm the gaping crowd,
And armies shrink beneath the shadowy cloud.

Darwin's parallels are sometimes both extravagant and gross; there is a constant throng of startling metaphors; and the descriptions are worked out with tiresome minuteness. A third part of the Botanic Garden was added in 1792; for the copyright of the whole he received £900. Darwin next published Zoonomia, or the Laws of Organic Life (1794-96), partly written long before, a curious and original physiological prose treatise. Sympathising with his aim here to establish the

physiological basis of mental phenomena, G. H. Lewes credits him with a profounder insight into psychology than any of his contemporaries and the majority of his successors.' Johannes Müller quotes and corrects him; and the Zoonomia directly influenced medical science by insisting on the (only recently recognised) importance of stimulants in fever, and on the rational treatment of the insane. In 1801 Darwin issued another philosophical disquisition, Phytologia, or the Philosophy of Agriculture and Gardening. He also wrote a short treatise on Female Education, intended for the instruction and assistance of part of his own family. He praised, practised, and preached teetotalism, and died of gout in his seventy-first year. Shortly after his death was published a poem, The Temple of Nature, which is even more didactic than the Botanic Garden, and more inverted in style and diction.

The poetical reputation of Darwin was as bright and transient as the blooming of his plants and flowers. Cowper said his verse was as 'strong' as it was 'learned and sweet.' He really exercised an influence which may be traced in the Pleasures of Hope and other poems of the closing century. His command of poetic diction, elaborate metaphors, and sonorous versification was well seconded by his curious and multifarious knowledge; but the effect of the whole was artificial. The Rosicrucian machinery of Pope gave scope for wit and satire in the delineation of human passions and pursuits; but who can sympathise with the loves and metamorphoses of the plants? Multitudinous metaphors are less trying to faith and patience than long-drawn-out and fantastic allegory such as this. But it seems generally admitted that it was an external accident that mainly blasted Darwin's fair fame. The personification of the plants and their 'pledging their nuptial vows' (not uncomplicated by polygamy and polyandry) gave a fatal opportunity to a parodist, and in the 'Loves of the Triangles' in George Canning's Anti-Jacobin (1799– 1801) was too obviously and mercilessly burlesqued. Friends and critics, from Miss Seward to Charles Darwin, agree that the sudden collapse of Darwin's poetic credit was due to the ingenuity and prodigious popularity of the burlesque.

Horace Walpole in his letters repeatedly alludes with admiration to Dr Darwin's poetry, and writes thus in a letter of May 14, 1792:

The Triumph of Flora,' beginning at the fifty-ninth line, is most beautifully and enchantingly imagined; and the twelve verses that by miracle describe and comprehend the creation of the universe out of chaos, are in my opinion the most sublime passages in any author, or in any of the few languages with which I am acquainted. There are a thousand other verses most charming, or indeed all are so, crowded with most poetic imagery, gorgeous epithets and style and yet these four cantos do not please me equally with the Loves of the Plants.

The Triumph of Flora' begins with the line 'She comes the goddess!' in the passage quoted

below; the other twelve verses commended are last in the same extract, from 'Let there be light' on.

Invocation to the Goddess of Botany.
'Winds of the north! restrain your icy gales,
Nor chill the bosom of these happy vales!
Hence in dark heaps, ye gathering clouds, revolve !
Disperse, ye lightnings, and ye mists, dissolve!
Hither, emerging from yon orient skies,
Botanic goddess, bend thy radiant eyes;
O'er these soft scenes assume thy gentle reign,
Pomona, Ceres, Flora in thy train;
O'er the still dawn thy placid smile effuse,
And with thy silver sandals print the dews;
In noon's bright blaze thy vermeil vest unfold,
And wave thy emerald banner starred with gold.'
Thus spoke the genius as he stept along,
And bade these lawns to peace and truth belong;
Down the steep slopes he led with modest skill
The willing pathway and the truant rill,
Stretched o'er the marshy vale yon willowy mound,
Where shines the lake amid the tufted ground;
Raised the young woodland, smoothed the wavy green,
And gave to beauty all the quiet scene.

She comes! the goddess! through the whispering air,
Bright as the morn descends her blushing car;
Each circling wheel a wreath of flowers entwines,
And, gemmed with flowers, the silken harness shines;
The golden bits with flowery studs are decked,
And knots of flowers the crimson reins connect.
And now on earth the silver axle rings,
And the shell sinks upon its slender springs;
Light from her airy seat the goddess bounds,
And steps celestial press the pansied grounds.
Fair Spring advancing calls her feathered quire,
And tunes to softer notes her laughing lyre;
Bids her gay hours on purple pinions move,
And arms her zephyrs with the shafts of love.
Pleased gnomes, ascending from their earthly beds,
Play round her graceful footsteps as she treads;
Gay sylphs attendant beat the fragrant air
On winnowing wings, and waft her golden hair;
Blue nymphs emerging leave their sparkling streams,
And fiery forms alight from orient beams;
Musk'd in the rose's lap fresh dews they shed,
Or breathe celestial lustres round her head.
First the fine forms, her dulcet voice requires,
Which bathe or bask in elemental fires;
From each bright gem of day's refulgent car,
From the pale sphere of every twinkling star,
From each nice pore of ocean, earth, and air,
With eye of flame the sparkling hosts repair,
Mix their gay hues, in changeful circles play,
Like motes, that tenant the meridian May-
So the clear lens collects with magic power
The countless glories of the midnight hour;
Stars after stars with quivering lustre fall,
And twinkling glide along the whitened wall-
Pleased as they pass, she counts the glittering bands,
And stills their murmur with her waving hands;
Each listening tribe with fond expectance burns,
And now to these, and now to those, she turns.
'Nymphs of primeval fire! your vestal train
Hung with gold-tresses o'er the vast inane,
Pierced with your silver shafts the throne of night,
And charmed young Nature's opening eyes with light;

When love divine, with brooding wings unfurled,
Called from the rude abyss the living world.
'Let there be light!' proclaimed the Almighty Lord,
Astonished Chaos heard the potent word;
Through all his realms the kindling ether runs,
And the mass starts into a million suns;

Earths round each sun with quick explosions burst,
And second planets issue from the first;
Bend, as they journey with projectile force,
In bright ellipses their reluctant course;
Orbs wheel in orbs, round centres centres roll,
And form, self-balanced, one reluctant whole;
Onward they move amid their bright abode,
Space without bound, the bosom of their God.

(From exordium of the Economy of Vegetation.)

The thirty-eight lines that immediately precede this passage are almost verbatim Miss Seward's; and in this extract the eight lines from 'Thus spoke' are also hers. The rest is Darwin's.

Destruction of Senacherib's Army by a
Pestilential Wind.

From Ashur's vales when proud Senacherib trod,
Poured his swoln heart, defied the living God,
Urged with incessant shouts his glittering powers,
And Judah shook through all her massy towers;
Round her sad altars press the prostrate crowd,
Hosts beat their breasts, and suppliant chieftains bowed;
Loud shrieks of matrons thrilled the troubled air,
And trembling virgins rent their scattered hair;
High in the midst the kneeling king adored,
Spread the blaspheming scroll before the Lord,
Raised his pale hands, and breathed his pausing sighs,
And fixed on heaven his dim imploring eyes.
'O mighty God, amidst thy seraph throng
Who sit'st sublime, the judge of right and wrong;
Thine the wide earth, bright sun, and starry zone,
That twinkling journey round thy golden throne;
Thine is the crystal source of life and light,
And thine the realms of death's eternal night.
O bend thine ear, the gracious eye incline,
Lo! Ashur's king blasphemes thy holy shrine,
Insults our offerings, and derides our vows.
O strike the diadem from his impious brows,
Tear from his murderous hand the bloody rod,
And teach the trembling nations "Thou art God!"
Sylphs in what dread array with pennons broad,
Onward ye floated o'er the ethereal road;
Called each dank steam the reeking marsh exhales,
Contagious vapours and volcanic gales;

Gave the soft south with poisonous breath to blow,
And rolled the dreadful whirlwind on the foe!
Hark! o'er the camp the venomed tempest sings,
Man falls on man, on buckler buckler rings;
Groan answers groan, to anguish anguish yields,
And death's loud accents shake the tented fields !
High rears the fiend his grinning jaws, and wide
Spans the pale nations with colossal stride,
Waves his broad falchion with uplifted hand,
And his vast shadow darkens all the land.

(From the Economy of Vegetation, Canto iv.)
Eliza at the Battle of Minden.
So stood Eliza on the wood-crowned height,
O'er Minden's plain, spectatress of the fight;
Sought with bold eye amid the bloody strife
Her dearer self, the partner of her life;
From hill to hill the rushing host pursued,
And viewed his banner, or believed she viewed.

Pleased with the distant roar, with quicker tread
Fast by his hand one lisping boy she led ;
And one fair girl amid the loud alarm
Slept on her kerchief, cradled by her arm;
While round her brows bright beams of Honour dart,
And Love's warm eddies circle round her heart.
Near and more near the intrepid beauty pressed,
Saw through the driving smoke his dancing crest;
Saw on his helm her virgin hands inwove
Bright stars of gold, and mystic knots of love;
Heard the exulting shout, They run! they run!'
'Great God!' she cried, 'he 's safe! the battle's won!'
A ball now hisses through the airy tides,
(Some fury winged it, and some demon guides!)
Parts the fine locks her graceful head that deck,
Wounds her fair ear, and sinks into her neck;
The red stream, issuing from her azure veins,
Dyes her white veil, her ivory bosom stains.

Ah me!' she cried, and sinking on the ground,
Kissed her dear babes, regardless of the wound;
'Oh cease not yet to beat, thou vital urn!
Wait, gushing life, oh wait my love's return!
Hoarse barks the wolf, the vulture screams from far!
The angel Pity shuns the walks of war!

Oh spare, ye war-hounds, spare their tender age;
On me, on me,' she cried, 'exhaust your rage!'
Then with weak arms her weeping babes caressed,
And, sighing, hid them in her blood-stained vest.
From tent to tent the impatient warrior flies,
Fear in his heart, and frenzy in his eyes;
Eliza's name along the camp he calls,
'Eliza' echoes through the canvas walls;

Quick through the murmuring gloom his footsteps tread,
O'er groaning heaps, the dying and the dead,
Vault o'er the plain, and in the tangled wood,
Lo! dead Eliza weltering in her blood!
Soon hears his listening son the welcome sounds,
With open arms and sparkling eye he bounds:
'Speak low,' he cries, and gives his little hand,
'Eliza sleeps upon the dew-cold sand ;'
Poor weeping babe with bloody fingers pressed
And tried with pouting lips her milkless breast;
'Alas! we both with cold and hunger quake-
Why do you weep ?-Mama will soon awake.'
'She'll wake no more!' the hapless mourner cried,
Upturned his eyes, and clasped his hands and sighed ;
Stretched on the ground, a while entranced he lay,
And pressed warm kisses on the lifeless clay;
And then upsprung with wild convulsive start,
And all the father kindled in his heart;

'O heavens!' he cried, my first rash vow forgive;
These bind to earth, for these I pray to live!'
Round his chill babes he wrapped his crimson vest,
And clasped them sobbing to his aching breast.
(From The Loves of the Plants, Canto iii.)

Song to May.

Born in yon blaze of orient sky,
Sweet May, thy radiant form unfold;
Unclose thy blue voluptuous eye,
And wave thy shadowy locks of gold.

For thee the fragrant zephyrs blow,
For thee descends the sunny shower;
The rills in softer murmurs flow,
And brighter blossoms gem the bower.