son's Life is well known; but the praise of collecting every particular which industry and zeal could glean belongs to the Rev. Alexander Dyce, the result of whose inquiries may be found in his notes to Johnson's Memoir, prefixed to an edition of Collins's works which he lately edited. Those notices are now, for the first time, wove into a Memoir of Collins; and in leaving it to another to erect a fabric out of the materials which he has collected instead of being himself the architect, Mr. Dyce has evinced a degree of modesty which those who know him must greatly lament.

WILLIAM COLLINS was born at Chichester, on the 25th of December, 1721, and was baptized in the parish church of St. Peter the Great, alias Subdeanery in that city, on the first of the following January. He was the son of William Collins, who was then the Mayor of Chichester, where he exercised the trade of a hatter, and lived in a respectable manner. His mother was Elizabeth, the sister of a Colonel Martin, to whose bounty the poet was deeply indebted.

Being destined for the church, young Collins was admitted a scholar of Winchester College on the 23rd of February, 1733, where he was educated by Dr. Burton; and in 1740 he stood first on the list of scholars who were to be received at New Col

lege. No vacancy, however, occurred, and the circumstance is said by Johnson to have been the original misfortune of his life. He became a commoner of Queen's, whence, on the 29th of July, 1741, he was elected a demy of Magdalen College. During his stay at Queen's he was distinguished for genius and indolence, and the few exercises which he could be induced to write bear evident marks of both qualities. He continued at Oxford until he took his bachelor's degree, and then suddenly left the University, his motive, as he alleged, being that he missed a fellowship, for which he offered himself; but it has been assigned to his disgust at the dulness of a college life, and to his being involved in debts.

On arriving in London, which was either in 1743 or 1744, he became, says Johnson, "a literary adventurer, with many projects in his head and very little money in his pocket." Collins was not without some reputation as an author when he proposed to adopt the most uncertain and deplorable of all professions, that of literature, for a subsistence. Whilst at Winchester school he wrote his Eclogues, and had appeared before the public in some verses addressed to a lady weeping at her sister's marriage, which were printed in the Gentleman's Magazine, Oct. 1739, when Collins was in his eighteenth year. In January, 1742, he published his Eclogues,

under the title of "Persian Eclogues ;" and, in December, 1743, his "Verses to Sir Thomas Hanmer, on his Edition of Shakespeare," appeared. To neither did he affix his name, but the latter were said to be by "a Gentleman of Oxford."

From the time he settled in London, his mind was more occupied with literary projects than with steady application; nor had poesy, for which Nature peculiarly designed him, sufficient attractions to chain his wavering disposition. It is not certain whether his irresolution arose from the annoyance of importunate debtors, or from an original infirmity of mind, or from these causes united. A popular writer has defended Collins from the charge of irresolution, on the ground that it was but "the vacillations of a mind broken and confounded;" and he urges, that "he had exercised too constantly the highest faculties of fiction, and precipitated himself into the dreariness of real life." But this explanation does not account for the want of steadiness which prevented Collins from accomplishing the objects he meditated. His mind was neither "broken nor confounded," nor had he experienced the bitter pangs of neglect, when with the buoyancy of hope, and a full confidence in his extraordinary powers, he threw himself on the town, at the age of twenty-three, intending to live by the

* D'Israeli, in his " Calamities of Authors," vol. ii. p. 201.

exercise of his talents; but his indecision was then as apparent as at any subsequent period, so that, in truth, the effect preceded the cause to which it has been assigned.

Mankind are becoming too much accustomed to witness splendid talents and great firmness of mind united in the same person to partake the mistaken sympathy which so many writers evince for the follies or vices of genius; nor will it much longer tolerate the opinion, that the possession of the finest imagination, or the highest poetic capacity, must necessarily be accompanied by eccentricity. It may, indeed, be difficult to convert a poetical temperament into a merchant, or to make the man who is destined to delight or astonish mankind by his conceptions, sit quietly over a ledger; but the transition from poetry to the composition of such works as Collins planned is by no means unnatural, and the abandonment of his views respecting them must, in justice to his memory, be attributed to a different

cause.

The most probable reason is, that these works were mere speculations to raise money, and that the idea was not encouraged by the booksellers; but if, as Johnson, who knew Collins well, asserts, his character wanted decision and perseverance, these defects have been constitutional, and were, perhaps, the germs of the disease which too soon

may

ripened into the most frightful of human calamities.
Endued with a morbid sensibility, which was as ill
calculated to court popularity as to bear neglect;
and wanting that stoical indifference to the opinions
of the many, which ought to render those who are
conscious of the value of their productions satisfied
with the approbation of the few; Collins was too
impatient of applause, and too anxious to attain per-
fection to be a voluminous writer. To plan much
rather than to execute anything; to commence to-
day an ode, to-morrow a tragedy, and to turn on
the following morning to a different subject, was the
chief occupation of his life for several years, during
which time he destroyed the principal part of the
little that he wrote. To a man nearly pennyless,
such a life must be attended by privations and dan-
ger; and he was in the hands of bailiffs, possibly
not for the first time, very shortly before he became
independent by the death of his maternal uncle,
Colonel Martin. The result proved that his want
of firmness and perseverance was natural, and did
not arise from the uncertainty or narrowness of his
fortune; for being rescued from imprisonment, on
the credit of a translation of Aristotle's Poetics,
which he engaged to furnish a publisher, a work, it
may be presumed, peculiarly suited to his genius,
he no sooner found himself in the possession of
money by the death of his relative, than he repaid

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