“The winds and seas are Britain’s wide domain; And not a sail but by permission spreads.” The couplet “All thine shall be the subject main, And every shore it circles thine” is simply the echo of a couplet in the fifth part of _Liberty_-- “All ocean is her own, and every land To whom her ruling thunder ocean bears.” The phrase “blessed isle,” as applied to England, he employs three times in _Liberty_. Again, the stanza in which _Rule Britannia_ is written is the stanza in which the majority of Thomson’s minor lyrics are written, and the rhythm and cadence, not less than the tone, colour and sentiment, are exactly his. Mallet was undoubtedly an accomplished man and a respectable poet, as his ballad _William and Margaret_, his _Edwin and Emma_, and his _Birks of Invermay_ sufficiently prove, but he has written nothing tolerable in the vein of _Rule Britannia_. Neatness, and tenderness bordering on effeminacy, mark his characteristic lyrics, and, if we except a few lines in his _Tyburn_ and the eight concluding lines in a poem entitled _A Fragment_, there is no virility in his poetry at all. Of the patriotism and ardent love of liberty which pervade Thomson’s poems, and which glow so intensely in _Rule Britannia_, he has absolutely nothing. Nor are there any analogues or parallels in his poems to this lyric either in form--for if we are not mistaken, he has never employed the stanza in which it is written--or in imagery, or phraseology. Like Thomson, whom, in his narrative blank-verse poems, he servilely imitates, he is fond of the words “azure” and “aerial”; and the word “azure” is the only verbal coincidence linking the phraseology of his acknowledged poems with the lyric in question. It may be added, too, that a man who was capable of the jingling rubbish of such a masque as _Britannia_, and who had the execrable taste to substitute Bolingbroke’s stanzas for the stanzas which they supersede, could hardly have been equal to the production of this lyric. We believe, then, that there can be no reasonable doubt that the honour of composing _Rule Britannia_ belongs to Thomson the bard, and not to Mallet the fribble. But to return to Mr. Tovey and the “mare’s-nest” to which we have referred. This mare’s-nest is the assumption that Pope assisted Thomson in revising _The Seasons_. Since Robert Bell’s edition this has come to be received as an established fact, but we propose to show that it rests on a hypothesis demonstrably baseless.