Of men who, like Collins, have led a life of adversity, it is proper to judge with indulgence. Many whose lot has been smooth and easy, like tempers which have never been tried, enjoy a favour and reputation which, in harsher circumstances, they would soon have forfeited ; and he whose aberrations of conduct were few, when his virtue could produce no temporal advantage, may obtain credit for the superior rectitude he would have exhibited, had he been encouraged by a prospect of its usual re wards. Collins in his better days, does not seem to have exceeded the dissipation of his lettered associates ; and the attic orgies, which were graced by the wisdom, and guarded by the virtue, of a Johnson, could be no matter of serious reproach. If the horrors of mind in which he was afterwards plunged, drove him to indulgences of a less venial description, the anguish of the disease may plead some pardon for the desperate remedy, by which he solicited its momentary abatement ; and it is no slen der praise, that for his practical errors he never sought theoretical apologies, but preserved the soundness of his principles, under the: strongest temptations to quiet self reproof by relaxing them.
The genius of Collins may be classed among those of the higher order. Like Gray, lie has left few produt lions, yet by these we may calculate the powers from which they proceeded, as by a small segment we can measure the dimensions of the whole circle. In the effusions of Collins we find every thing surveyed with the eye, and touched by the hand of a poet. He does not, like most of the polished versifiers who immediately pre ceded him, present elegant imitations of nature, under those aspects, in which she must appear to all observers. lie views her through the prism of a glowing imagina tion, and transfers to her the colours which that faculty supplies. A common artist may be abundantly dextrous in his portrait of visible forms, but it is only a master, like Lorraine, who can enrich his landscape with hues which are drawn from his own ideal stores of beauty, which are characteristic of himself alone, and which stamp on his works the impression of original genius. Collins appears entitled to similar praise. Even in his Oriental Eclogues, though juvenile productions, which his maturer taste is said to have despised, the warmth of scenery which they display, and the tropical lassitude which they seem to breathe, shew the early vivacity of his conceptions ; while his Odes excel in a peculiar richness of personification, and in the creations of a generative fancy, which impregnates all its objects with life and in tellect. It must be acknowledged, indeed, that he some
times carries his favourite style to excess, and continues to crowd the scene with visionary beings, or, in his own words, " with all the shadowy tribes of mind," till, by losing their distinctness, they lose their interest. His ideas, too, are occasionally so remote from that ordinary train of thought, to which the resources of ordinary lan guage are, in some measure, limited, that while straining to express them, by means unequal to the end, he be comes, at times, unmusical and incorrect, and more fre quently obscure. The best of his works are not entirely free from these faults. In the Ode to the Passions, which is perhaps the most popular of them all, we find the fol lowing offensive change from the singular pronoun to the plural, in its singular use.
" Why, goddess, why, to us denied, Lay'st thou thy antien1 lyre aside ? As in that 'wed Athenian bower You learn'd an all-commanding power, Thy mimic soul, 0 nymph endear'd," &c.
Our praise of Collins may, perhaps, appear extrava gant, especially to those who adopt the fastidiousness of Johnson ; but we appeal from this opinion to the judg ment of the public, already pronounced. A lofty place, in the temple of genius, can scarcely be denied to him, whose " gifted mind" had the power of producing com positions, so often read, rehearsed, and sung, as the Odes to Evening ; to the l'assions ; and to the Memory of those who died in 1745. Nor should we forget the Dirge in Cymbeline, and the Verses on the Death of Thomson, which breathe the genuine spirit of sweetness, pathos, and simplicity. If a short fragment can preserve for Sappho a station among the higher rank of poets, we may offer these Odes as a standard to which the poetical energy of Collins was qualified to rise, notwithstanding his occasional inequality in its exertion. (w)