"Ye who the merits of the dead revere, Who hold misfortune's sacred genius dear, Regard this tomb, where Collins, hapless name, Solicits kindness with a double claim. Though nature gave him, and though science taught The fire of fancy, and the reach of thought, Severely doom'd to penury's extreme, He pass'd in maddening pain life's feverish dream, While rays of genius only served to show The thickening horror, and exalt his woe. Ye walls that echo'd to his frantic moan, Guard the due records of this grateful stone; Strangers to him, enamour'd of his lays, This fond memorial to his talents raise. For this the ashes of a bard require, Who touch'd the tenderest notes of pity's lyre; Who join'd pure faith to strong poetic powers; Who, in reviving reason's lucid hours, Sought on one book his troubled mind to rest, And rightly deem'd the book of God the best." Collins's character has been portrayed by all his biographers in very agreeable colours. He was amiable and virtuous, and was as much courted for his popular manners as for the charms of his conversation. The associate of Johnson, Armstrong, Hill, Garrick, Quin, Foote, the two Wartons, and Thomson, and the friend of several of these eminent men, he must have possessed many of the qualities by which they were distinguished; for though an adviser may be chosen from a very different class of persons, genius will only herd with genius. Johnson has honoured him by saying, that "his morals were pure and his opinions pious;" and though he hints that his habits were sometimes at variance with these characteristics, he assigns the aberration to the temptations of want, and the society into which poverty sometimes drives the best disposed persons, adding, that he "preserved the sources of action unpolluted, that his principles were never shaken, that his distinctions of right and wrong were never confounded, and that his faults had nothing of malignity or design, but proceeded from some unexpected pressure or casual temptation." A higher eulogium, from so rigid a moralist, could not be pronounced on a man whose life was, for many years, unsettled and perplexed; and those only who have experienced the pressure of pecuniary necessities can be aware of the difficulty of resisting meanness, or avoiding vice, if not in the sense in which these terms are usually understood, at least in a sense to which they may as properly be applied--that of refusing to prostitute talents to purposes foreign to the conviction and taste of their possessor.