author of "Labour and Genius," a poem, published separately in 1768, and of "Edge-Hill," a descriptive poem in blank verse. He died the

28th of May, 1781, and his poetry was soon after collected and published in an octavo volume by Mr. Hilton. The "Elegy on a Blackbird" is a beautiful and pathetic effusion, and the best of his productions.

PART III.

ESSAY III.

SKETCHES BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL OF THE OCCASIONAL CONTRIBUTORS TO THE RAMBLER, ADVENTURER, AND IDLER.

IT has been already related, that, in the second

edition of the IDLER, Dr. Johnson acknowledged the contribution of twelve papers. Of the authors of those essays whose names have been disclosed, we are now, therefore, to give some account. They are, in number, three; the Rev. Thomas Warton, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and Bennet Langton, Esq.

THOMAS WARTON, B. D. the son of the Rev. Thomas Warton, vicar of Basingstoke, Hampshire, and brother of Dr. Joseph Warton, was born at Basingstoke, in the year 1728. Until his sixteenth year he was educated solely by his father, and then, on the 16th of March, 1743, sent to Oxford, where he was admitted a commoner, and soon after elected a scholar, of Trinity College,

The bias of Mr. Warton's mind towards poetry and elegant literature was early shewn; in his ninth year, in a letter addressed to his sister, he sends her a translation from Martial; and it has been affirmed,* that in 1745, when only in his eighteenth year, he published "Five Pastoral Eclogues," the scenes of which are laid among the shepherds of Germany, ruined by the war of 1744. The authenticity of this production has, however, been much doubted by Mr. Mant, who says, "I do not learn that they ever had the name of Warton affixed to them, and can assert, on the authority of his sister, that he absolutely disclaimed them." + Yet it cannot be denied, that a vein of description runs through these Eclogues of a kind very similar to that which Mr. Warton was afterward accustomed to indulge: the following allusion, for instance, to the chivalric combat, in Eclogue the 3d, and the subsequent picture of the convent, in Eclogue the 4th, are of this cast.

The wood, whose shades the plaintive shepherd sought,
Was dark and pathless, and by neighbouring feet
Long time untrod: for there in ancient days
Two knights of bold emprize, and high renown,
Met in fierce combat, to dispute the prize

* Anderson's Poets, and Biographical Dictionary.
+ Mant's Life of Warton, p. 14.