Alarm” (1770). Scott had been making occasional visits to London since 1760 and there made the acquaintance of John Hoole, who introduced him to Dr Johnson. Though they disagreed politically, Johnson remarked that “he loved Mr Scott” and meant to write his life, although death intervened before he could do so. Scott himself died of a fever caught during a visit to London in 1783. After his death his Critical essays on several English poets was published in 1785, together with a life of him written by John Hoole. These had originated from Scott's dissatisfaction with some of the essays in Johnson’s recent Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets and was meant to supply a corrective view. Poetry Scott’s preferred method of composing poetry was described by Hoole as taking place after the rest of the family were in bed, when "it was frequently his custom to sit in a dark room, and when he had composed a number of lines, he would go into another room where a candle was burning, in order to commit them to paper.” His earliest published works outside of magazines were the “Four Elegies descriptive and moral” (1760). In the fashion of Gray's Elegy, these record the passing of the seasons rather than an individual and were written in cross-rhymed quatrains. Such writing was not to the taste of Dr Johnson who, when Boswell urged that Scott was “a very middle-rate poet, who pleased many readers”, argued that only excellence was admirable. Afterwards it was not until 1776 that Scott published “Amwell, a descriptive poem” in blank verse that takes the almost Wordsworthian stance that the countryside with which he became acquainted “in early youth… gave rapture to my soul; and often still on life’s calm moments sheds serener joy.” It was after this poem that he became known as Scott of Amwell in the 18th century. Later he published his “Moral Eclogues” (1778), followed soon after by his collected Poetical Works (1782), which was to be reprinted in 1786 and 1795 and later included in omnibus volumes in 1808 and 1822. The portrait prefixed to his works is not a correct likeness and caused Scott dissatisfaction. Among several other illustrations in the body of the book were two vignettes and two oval plates by the young William Blake.Particular itemisation is one facet of Scott's style, avoiding the generalised Augustan diction of earlier