Chapter VIII™

The German editor of these Scholia, instead of πρακτικῃ which is the true reading in this place, and which he found in the manuscript, absurdly substitutes for it πυκτικῃ , as if Hercules was a pugilist. See my translation of the Dissertation at Maximus Tyrius, on the Practic and Theoretic Life. 163 . Vid. Olympiodor. in Aristot. Meteor. BOOKS PUBLISHED BY BERTRAM DOBELL In Two Volumes. Post 8vo. Price 12s. 6d. THE POETICAL WORKS OF JAMES THOMSON (“BYSSHE VANOLIS”) Edited by BERTRAM DOBELL With a Memoir and Portraits of the Author “‘The City of Dreadful Night’ ranks with Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat as a lyrical expression of despair, and it strikes a deeper note.”— Daily News. “Thomson’s work ... has intensity, it has grip, it has that power of imaginative realism which gives to conceptions, embodied in words, the arresting quality of objects present to sense.... He was a creator and a singer, and in his creation and in his song his powers were finely co-ordinated to imaginative ends. Even his most repellently pessimistic verse has the fascination of gloomy grandeur, and when, as in such poems as ‘The Happy Poet’ and ‘Sunday up the River,’ he rises into an ampler ether, a diviner air, his verse has not only the impressiveness of power, but the witchery of delight.”— Westminster Gazette. “Messrs. Reeves & Turner and Mr. Dobell have published in two volumes the collected works of James Thomson, the poet of that ‘melancholia which transcends all wit,’ as he terms it himself. The sad story of his life is told with sympathy and fairness in a memoir by Mr. Bertram Dobell, who has edited the work. The pessimistic and heterodox utterances of the author of ‘The City of Dreadful Night’ were never likely to be very popular, but this excellent edition will be very welcome to many who know the strength and true poetry of many of his writings.”— Daily Telegraph. Crown 8vo, pp. 334. Price 7s. 6d. THE LIFE OF JAMES THOMSON By HENRY S. SALT WITH A PORTRAIT “Such is the story which Mr. Salt tells, and tells simply and sympathetically. He ‘had not the advantage of personal acquaintance with James Thomson,’ but he writes as if he had. There is a brighter side to the picture, and to this also the biographer does justice. He throws into relief the brighter qualities of this unhappy man; his social gifts, his brilliant talk, his capacity of friendship, receptivity and humour, and above all, his popularity. We are treated to plenty of his letters, and these really are a treat.... But whatever the demerits of Mr. Salt’s criticism, this seems certain: that the perusal of his ‘Life of James Thomson’ will prove in most cases a prelude to the perusal of James Thomson’s works.”— Scots Observer. Crown 8vo, pp. 282. Price 6s. POEMS, ESSAYS, AND FRAGMENTS By JAMES THOMSON (“B.V.”) “Of the essays in this volume, the principal are those on Emerson, Burns, Shelley, Blake, and Walt Whitman. All these contain solid, though unequal work,—the first named, for instance, reproducing Emerson’s peculiar staccato style too closely to be pleasant. Those on Blake and Walt Whitman are, we think, his best, though we are not sure that we agree with Mr.