wrote "Rule Britannia"--was of Thomson's age.

The other writers of whose lives Johnson here gives his note were
men born in the beginning of the eighteenth century: Gilbert West,
the translator of Pindar, in 1706; George Lyttelton, in 1709.
William Shenstone, whose sense of Nature, although true, was mixed
with the conventions of his time, and who once asked a noble friend
to open a waterfall in the garden upon which the poet spent his
little patrimony, was born in 1714; Thomas Gray, in 1716; William
Collins, in 1720; and Mark Akenside, in 1721. In Collins, while he
lived with loss of reason, Johnson, who had fears for himself, took
pathetic interest. Akenside could not interest him much. Akenside
made his mark when young with "The Pleasures of Imagination," a good
poem, according to the fashion of the time, when read with due
consideration as a young man's first venture for fame. He spent
much of the rest of his life in overloading it with valueless
additions. The writer who begins well should let well alone, and,
instead of tinkering at bygone work, follow the course of his own
ripening thought. He should seek new ways of doing worthy service
in the years of labour left to him.

H. M.



KING.



William King was born in London in 1663; the son of Ezekiel King, a