And Milton’s Paradise submit to mine.”
The Queen’s Grotto in Richmond Gardens inspired him with the line,—
“The sweetest Grotto and the wisest Queen.”
And yet the poor man said, and in a preface published in his lifetime, “I have not myself been so fond of writing, as might be imagined from seeing so many things of mine as are got together in this Book. Several of them are on Subjects that were given me by Persons, to whom I have such great Obligations, that I always thought their desires commands.”
Leaving school about his fourteenth year for “the several lowest employments of a country life,” and marrying before he was twenty, he had to work at top pressure in order to make time to read the Spectator, which he did “all over sweat and heat, without regarding his own health.” He “got English just as we get Latin.” He studied “Paradise Lost” as others study the classics, with the help of a dictionary. When he wrote about the life best known to him, it was usually as any of those gentlemen who helped him would have done. He made very little advance on Sir Philip Sidney.
Nevertheless, some things he did write which were true and were unlikely to have been written by any one else, as when he described the thresher’s labour,—
“When sooty Pease we thresh, you scarce can know
Our native Colour as from Work we go:
The Sweat, the Dust, and suffocating Smoke,
Make us so much like Ethiopians look.