The phrase "blessed isle," as applied to England, he employs three times in Liberty. Again, the stanza in which Rule Britannia is written is the stanza in which the majority of Thomson's minor lyrics are written, and the rhythm and cadence, not less than the tone, colour and sentiment, are exactly his.
Mallet was undoubtedly an accomplished man and a respectable poet, as his ballad William and Margaret, his Edwin and Emma, and his Birks of Invermay sufficiently prove, but he has written nothing tolerable in the vein of Rule Britannia. Neatness, and tenderness bordering on effeminacy, mark his characteristic lyrics, and, if we except a few lines in his Tyburn and the eight concluding lines in a poem entitled A Fragment, there is no virility in his poetry at all. Of the patriotism and ardent love of liberty which pervade Thomson's poems, and which glow so intensely in Rule Britannia, he has absolutely nothing. Nor are there any analogues or parallels in his poems to this lyric either in form—for if we are not mistaken, he has never employed the stanza in which it is written—or in imagery, or phraseology. Like Thomson, whom, in his narrative blank-verse poems, he servilely imitates, he is fond of the words "azure" and "aerial"; and the word "azure" is the only verbal coincidence linking the phraseology of his acknowledged poems with the lyric in question. It may be added, too, that a man who was capable of the jingling rubbish of such a masque as Britannia, and who had the execrable taste to substitute Bolingbroke's stanzas for the stanzas which they supersede, could hardly have been equal to the production of this lyric. We believe, then, that there can be no reasonable doubt that the honour of composing Rule Britannia belongs to Thomson the bard, and not to Mallet the fribble.
But to return to Mr. Tovey and the "mare's-nest" to which we have referred. This mare's-nest is the assumption that Pope assisted Thomson in revising The Seasons. Since Robert Bell's edition this has come to be received as an established fact, but we propose to show that it rests on a hypothesis demonstrably baseless.
There is, in the British Museum, an interleaved copy of the first volume of the London edition of Thomson's works, dated 1738, and the part of the volume which contains The Seasons is full of manuscript deletions, corrections, and additions. These are in two handwritings, the one being unmistakably the handwriting of Thomson, the other beyond all question the handwriting of some one else. Almost all these corrections were inserted in the edition prepared for the press in 1744, and now, consequently, form part of the present text. The corrections in the hand which is not the hand of Thomson are, in many cases, of extraordinary merit, showing a fineness of ear and delicacy of touch quite above the reach of Thomson himself. We will give two or three samples. Thomson had written in Autumn 290 seqq.:—
"With harvest shining all these fields are thine,
And if my rustics may presume so far,
Their master, too, who then indeed were blest
To make the daughter of Acasto so."
The unknown corrector substitutes the present reading:—
"The fields, the master, all, my fair, are thine;