Meanwhile, our poet's chief care had been, in return for the public favour, to finish the plan which their wishes laid out for him; and the expectations which his Winter had raised, were fully satisfied by the successive publication of the other Seasons: of Summer, in the year 1727; of Spring, in the beginning of the following year; and of Autumn, in a quarto edition of his works, printed in 1730.
In that edition, the Seasons are placed in their natural order; and crowned with that inimitable Hymn, in which we view them in their beautiful succession, as one whole, the immediate effect of infinite Power and Goodness. In imitation of the hebrew Bard, all Nature is called forth to do homage to the Creator, and the reader is left enraptured in silent adoration and praise.
Besides these, and his tragedy of Sophonisba, written and acted with applause, in the year 1729. Mr. Thomson had, in 1727, published his poem to the memory of Sir Isaac Newton, then lately deceased; containing a deserved encomium of that incomparable Man, with an account of his chief discoveries; sublimely poetical; and yet so just, that an ingenious foreigner, the Count Algarotti, takes a line of it for the text of his philosophical dialogues, II Neutonianismo per le dame: this was in part owing to the aftiftance he had of his friend Mr. Gray, a gentleman well versed in the Newtonian Philosophy, who, on that occasion, gave him a very exact, though general, abstract of its principles.
That same year, the resentment of our merchants, for the interruption of their trade by the Spaniards in America,
