In 1730 he Had been successful with the moral tragedy of "Sophonisba": though in opposition to the Court party, Thomson had obtained several noble patrons, and they did their best for his drama. A long poem on Liberty was not a triumph: but the Prince of Wales gave the author a pension of £100 yearly. His tragedy of "Tancred and Sigismunda" was popular (1745), and a patent place brought to the poet £300 a year, which he did not long enjoy, dying on 27 August, 1748. Thomson was notoriously indolent, and his last, perhaps his best, work is "The Castle of Indolence" in the Spenserian stanza.
"The Seasons" are in blank verse, a welcome change from the eternal rhyming couplets, and prove that Thomson, unlike his contemporaries, wrote "with his eye on the object". He had been bred in "the wide places of the shepherds," among the lonely Border moors and hills; he had not always been a man of towns. In the sunless winter day
scarce
The bittern knows his time, with bill ingulpht
To shake the sounding marsh; or from the shore
The plovers when to scatter o'er the heath,
And sing their wild notes to the listening waste.
This was a new voice. Being a Borderer, Thomson was an angler, and describes fly-fishing well, though not better than Gay.
In that old theme of the Middle Ages "the symphony of spring," the songs of birds, he shows knowledge of their ways, and if he makes the hen nightingale the singer, so does Homer, following the myth. In "Summer," Thomson describes, with wonderful tact, sultry climes in which he never breathed, and adds the little idyll of Musidora.
"Autumn" includes a picture of fox-hunting, a sport which James probably did not indulge in, and celebrates the Argyll of Malplaquet and Duncan Forbes of Culloden, and the water of Tweed,
Whose pastoral banks first heard my Doric reed.
Despite his power of rendering nature, the artificiality of his age is still strong with Thomson, and it cannot be said that "The Seasons" are very attractive to modern readers.
"The Castle of Indolence," by virtue of the poet's return to the measure of an author in his day despised, Spenser, yields a welcome change from the eternal rhymed couplets.
A pleasant land of drowsyhead it was.