Truth, however, obliges me to add one little trait. A lady who did not know Thomson personally, but was enchanted with his "Seasons," said she could gather from his works three parts of his character,--that he was an amiable lover, an excellent swimmer, and extremely abstemious. Savage, who knew the poet, could not help laughing at this picture of a man who scarcely knew what love was; who shrunk from cold water like a cat; and whose habits were those of a good-natured bon vivant, who indulged himself in every possible luxury, which could be attained without trouble! He also died unmarried. Hammond, the favourite of our sentimental great-grandmothers, whose "Love Elegies" lay on the toilettes of the Harriet Byrons and Sophia Westerns of the last century, was an amiable youth, "very melancholy and gentlemanlike," who being appointed equerry to Prince Frederic, cast his eyes on Miss Dashwood, bed-chamber woman to the Princess, and she became his Delia. The lady was deaf to his pastoral strains; and though it has been said that she rejected him on account of the smallness of his fortune, I do not see the necessity of believing this assertion, or of sympathising in the dull invectives and monotonous lamentations of the slighted lover. Miss Dashwood never married, and was, I believe, one of the maids of honour to the late Queen. Thus the six poets, who, in the history of our literature, fill up the period which intervened between the death of Pope and the first publications of Burns and Cowper--all died old bachelors! CHAPTER XVIII. FRENCH POETS. VOLTAIRE AND MADAME DU CHATELET.