Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 4.djvu/268

10 made no serious or permanent impression. His poems had an additional charm to his contemporaries, from being commonly addressed to his familiar friends of either sex, by name. There are few minds insensible to the soothing flattery of a poet's record."

These authorities in Hamilton's favour are high and powerful, and it might have been expected that, with his own merits, they might have obtained for him a greater share of popularity than has fallen to his lot: but notwithstanding these and other no less favourable testimonies, the attention of the public was never steadily fixed upon his works. And although they have been inserted in Johnson and Chalmers' edition of the English poets, there has been no demand for a separate edition; nor is Hamilton among those writers, whom we often hear quoted by the learned or the gay.

As a first adventurer in English literature, rejecting altogether the scholastic school of poetry, Mr Hamilton must be allowed to have obtained no ordinary success. In his language he shows nearly all the purity of a native; his diction is various and powerful, and his versification but rarely tainted with provincial errors. He delights indeed in a class of words, which though not rejected by the best English writers, have a certain insipidity which only a refined English ear, perhaps, can perceive; such as beauteous, dubious, duteous, and even melancholious! The same peculiarity may be remarked of most of the early Scottish writers in the English language. In Thomson it is particularly observable. We also sometimes meet in Hamilton with false quantities; but they seem oftener to proceed from making a Procrustian of a poetic license, than from ignorance or inadvertence, as in the following verse:

If he had made the "refractory" precede the "is," so as to have rendered the latter the penultimate in this line, the euphony and the rhythm would have been complete : but in his days, we believe, this word was accented on the first syllable.

Lord Woodhouselee calls Hamilton's poems the "easy and careless effusions of an elegant fancy, and a chastened taste." This does not quite agree with the "regular design," which. Richardson discovers in them; nor indeed with what his lordship himself tells us elsewhere, that "it appears from Hamilton's letters that he communicated his poems to his friends for their critical remarks, and was easily induced to alter or amend them by their advice. "Contemplation," for instance, he sent to Mr Home (lord Kames), with whom he lived in the closest habits of friendship, who suggested some alterations, which were thus acknowledged in a letter from Hamilton, dated July, 1739: "I have made the corrections on the moral part of 'Contemplation,' and in a post I will send it to Will Crawford, who has the rest." Mr Hamilton had evidently too passionate a devotion to the muses, to be careless of his attentions to them. The writing of poetry, indeed, seems to have formed the chief business of his life. Almost the whole of his poems are of an amatory cast; and even in his more serious pieces, a tone of love, like a thread of silver, runs through them. It would seem, however, that to him love, with all its pangs, was only a poet's dream. Perhaps the following is the best illustration of the caprice and inconstancy of his affection. In a letter to Mr Home, dated September, 1748, in answer to one from that gentleman regarding some remarks on Horace, of the same tenor, it would appear, as those which he afterwards published in his Elements of Criticism, Mr