Somerville, “a country gentleman and a skillful and useful Justice of the Peace,” was a mighty hunter in his day, and found, in leisure hours, great pleasure in throwing into blank verse the accumulated wisdom of years in the field. “The Chace” he calls his “bold, instructive song,” and it so well carries out the second epithet as to be of interest only to his “brethren of the couples” to whose kindness he commends it. There is the most minute description of the kinds of hounds, the breeding of dogs, the care of whelps, their habits, their diseases and the best remedies, and the most desirable kennels. In “Field Sports” we have almost as close a description of hawking. Both poems are, however, destitute of any real love of Nature. The diction, except for a free use of canine technicalities, is extremely limited and commonplace; and we look in vain for the occasional happy touch, the felicitous epithet or line, that would indicate any original or appreciative knowledge of the external world. When this vigorous squire went out to hunt he had eyes but for the dogs and the game. His few descriptions are of the conventional type, as: Hail, gentle Dawn! mild, blushing goddess, hail! Rejoic’d I see thy purple mantle spread O’er half the skies, gems pave thy radiant way, And orient pearls from every shrub depend.[351] They are weak imitations, lifeless and vague. “Hobbinol” is a disagreeable poem. Its very ugly rural pictures might perhaps rank as realistic studies of English country life, but so far as any country atmosphere is concerned they are of no importance. The smock-race, the wrestling match, the drunken affray, might as well have taken place in any city slums. Somerville had a catholic taste in poetry. He greatly admired Homer, Virgil, Pope, Allan Ramsay, and Thomson. The last poet he not only admired, but imitated. The passage beginning, Justly supreme! let us thy power revere,[352] is a pretty clear echo from Thomson’s “Hymn,” and the closing twenty-five lines of “The Chace” must have been studied from the closing twenty-two lines of “Autumn.” Somerville is noteworthy in the present study only because he wrote on country themes, and imitated Thomson.