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  at Oxford, and was presented with a gold medal by Maximilian of Bavaria. Upon Wilson's death in 1860 Thomson became a candidate for the librarianship at the India office, but he was accidentally drowned at Tenby on 26 May 1860. He had recently been appointed a member of the Asiatic Society of Paris, and of the Antiquarian Society of Normandy. Apart from his work in Sanskrit he was, under the pseudonym of Philip Wharton, joint author with his mother of ‘Queens of Society’ (1860) and ‘Wits and Beaux of Society’ (1860), two anecdotal volumes which were well received by the public.



THOMSON, JAMES (1700–1748), poet, was born in the pastoral village of Ednam in Roxburghshire in September 1700. The village retains, as outhouse of a farmsteading, the former manse (and later village school) in which the poet was born. He was baptised on 15 Sept., and the fact that the rite was usually administered by the Scottish church eight days after birth would refer his birth to the 7th, though an early biographer (Murdoch) gives the 11th. The poet's father, Thomas (1666–1716), also a native of Ednam, and the son of Andrew Thomson, a gardener, fulfilled the ambition of his parents by graduating M.A. at Edinburgh University in 1686, and obtaining five years later the license of a preacher in the kirk, being called to Ednam on 12 July 1692 (, Fasti, vol. i. pt. ii. 460). The minister married, on 6 Oct. 1693, Beatrix, daughter of Alexander Trotter of Fogo. Trotter's wife was Margaret, daughter of William Home or Hume, the progenitor of the Homes of Bassendean, and the brother of Sir James Home [see under, third ; and letter of Dr. John Mair, minister of Southdean, in ‘Times,’ 26 March 1894].

James was the fourth child. Of two elder brothers, Andrew and Alexander, little is heard, but there is evidence in his letters of the poet's solicitude for a younger brother, John, who died in 1735. Of the poet's sisters, one was married to Mr. Bell, minister of Strathaven; another (Mary) to William Craig, father of [q. v.], the architect of the New Town, Edinburgh, and another to Mr. Thomson, master of Lanark grammar school. Two months after the poet's birth, his father moved to Southdean, where the manse nestled at the foot of Southdean Law, and some of the scenes of Teviotdale and the valley of the ‘sylvan Jed’ were afterwards introduced by him into his poems (especially in ‘Winter;’ a Thomson window has recently been erected in Southdean church). After picking up the rudiments in the parish school he was sent to Jedburgh, where the classes, by which he benefited little, were held in the abbey (cf., Jedburgh Abbey, 1894, p. 93 n.). The boy attracted a good deal of attention from one of his father's friends, [q. v.] Riccaltoun introduced him to several of the neighbouring gentry, including Sir Gilbert Elliot of Minto, James Haliburton of New Mains, Dryburgh, where on the banks of the Tweed his ‘Doric reed’ was first exercised (Autumn, v. 890), and Sir William Bennet, bart. (d. 1729), of Grubit. From Jedburgh he passed in the summer of 1715 to Edinburgh University. There he was in mental revolt against the outworn classical curriculum. At this period, as Aikin notes, the Scots had lost their pre-eminence in Latin, and had not learned English; and the circumstance renders the more remarkable the purity of Thomson's style and its freedom from any admixture of provincial idiom. At home Thomson had written and burned a quantity of verse. At Edinburgh he joined a literary club, ‘The Grotesques,’ who were very critical of his performances; some three of his pieces, nevertheless, appeared in the ‘Edinburgh Miscellany’ of 1720. During these years he studied assiduously Spenser and Milton, and his first extant letter (to his friend William Cranstoun), dated 11 Dec. 1720, contains a reference to ‘As you like it.’ On 2 Nov. 1720 Thomson received a bursary from the presbytery of Jedburgh, and this was renewed on 1 Jan. 1724 for one year; but he took no steps to enter the ministry after, it is said, an unfavourable verdict had been passed by William Hamilton, the professor of theology, upon an exercise in the form of a prose dissertation on the tenth section of the 119th Psalm. He resolved to seek a literary career in London.

With letters of introduction to some of the powerful connections of his mother in the south, and with the nucleus of a great poem in his pocket, Thomson set sail from Leith in February 1725. His mother had a foreboding that she would never see her favourite son again (she died within a few weeks of his departure); nor did the poet ever revisit the scenes of his youth. According to Dr. Johnson, the lad was relieved of