John Arthos merely mentions Henry Brooke's Universal Beauty(1778) as illustrating how, throughout the entire Georgic tradition, “the description of nature is chiefly governed by didactic purposes.” “Ambitious and rhapsodical to the point of becoming often incoherent,” as well as “tedious,” Brooke's poem has some merit for William Powell Jones because of “the numerous scientific examples used.” Marjorie Hope Nicolson offers a lengthy overview of the same text, establishing its initial publication “in parts from 1734 to 1736” or roughly at the midpoint of Thomson's work on his much revised Seasons:

Elsewhere, Nicolson implies that she regards Brooke as a lesser Thomson. Whereas “Brooke […] for all his scientific terminology and even more scientific footnotes had his occasional poetic moments,” no such caveat applies to her claim that “Thomson was as scientific in his description of mountains as any poet except Henry Brooke.” But the two poets diverged in a number of ways, not least through Brooke's profoundly disingenuous response to the scientists of his time, whom he conspicuously did not salute as (fellow) aristoi, even as he drew on their work.

Sharing the vision that Arthos denies Thomson— of “the universe” as “a vast distilling apparatus, or limbec” — Brooke's Universal Beauty describes many of the same phenomena in much the same language: explaining the workings of “the alternate heart,” he observes of circulating blood that “Its wanton floods the tubal system lave”;