emon[13] in "Autumn"; while
ever and anon his eye extensive roamed over the phenomena of nature in
foreign climes, the arctic night, the tropic summer, etc. Wordsworth
asserts that these sentimental passages "are the parts of the work which
were probably most efficient in first recommending the author to general
notice."[14] They strike us now as insipid enough. But many coming
attitudes cast their shadows before across the page of "The Seasons."
Thomson's denunciation of the slave trade, and of cruelty to animals,
especially the caging of birds and the coursing of hares; his preference
of country to town; his rhapsodies on domestic love and the innocence of
the Golden Age; his contrast between the misery of the poor and the
heartless luxury of the rich; all these features of the poem foretoken
the sentimentalism of Sterne and Goldsmith, and the humanitarianism of
Cowper and Burns. They anticipate, in particular, that half affected
itch of simplicity which titillated the sensibilities of a corrupt and
artificial society in the writings of Rousseau and the idyllic pictures
of Bernardin de St. Pierre's "Paul and Virginia." Thomson went so far in
this vein as to decry the use of animal food in a passage which recalls
Goldsmith's stanza:[15]

"No flocks that range the valley free
To slaughter I condemn:
Taught by the power that pities me,
I learn to pity them."

This sort of thing was in the air. Pope was not a sentimental person,
yet even Pope had written

"The lamb thy riot dooms to bleed to-day,
Had he thy reason, would he skip and play?
Pleased to the last, he crops the flowery food.
And licks the hand just raised to shed his blood."[16]

It does not appear that Thomson was personally averse to a leg of mutton.
His denunciations of luxury, and his praise of early rising[17] and cold
bathing[18] sound rather hollow from the lips of a bard--"more fat than
bard beseems"-who used to lie abed till noon, and who, as Savage told
Johnson, "was perhaps never in cold water in his life." Johnson reports,
not without some spice of malice, that the Countess of Hertford, "whose
practice it was to invite every summer some poet into the country, to
hear her verses and assist her studies," extended this courtesy to
Thomson, "who took more delight in carousing with Lord Hertford and his
friends than assisting her ladyship's poetical operations, and therefore
never received another summons.