Jockey and Sawney to their labours rose ;

Soon clad I ween, where nature needs no clothes;
Where from their youth inured to winter skies,
Dress and her vain refinements they despise.

Jockey, whose manly high cheek bones to crown,
With freckles spotted flamed the golden down,
With meikle art could on the bagpipes play,
Even from the rising to the setting day;
Sawney as long without remorse could bawl
Home's madrigals, and ditties from Fingal :
Oft at his strains, all natural though rude,
The Highland lass forgot her want of food,
And, whilst she scratched her lover into rest,
Sunk pleased, though hungry, on her Sawney's breast.
Far as the eye could reach no tree was seen,
Earth, clad in russet, scorned the lively green :
The plague of locusts they secure defy,
For in three hours a grasshopper must die:
No living thing, whate'er its food, feasts there,
But the chameleon who can feast on air.
No birds, except as birds of passage flew;
No bee was known to hum, no dove to coo:
No streams, as amber smooth, as amber clear,
Were seen to glide, or heard to warble here:
Rebellion's spring, which through the country ran,
Furnished with bitter draughts the steady clan:
No flowers embalmed the air, but one white rose,
Which, on the tenth of June,* by instinct blows;
By instinct blows at morn, and, when the shades
Of drizzly eve prevail, by instinct fades.

In the same poem Churchill thus alludes to himself:
Me, whom no muse of heavenly birth inspires,
No judgment tempers, when rash genius fires;
Who boast no merit but mere knack of rhyme,
Short gleams of sense and satire out of time;
Who cannot follow where trim fancy leads
By prattling streams, o'er flower-impurpled meads;
Who often, but without success, have prayed
For apt Alliteration's artful aid;

Who would, but cannot, with a master's skill,
Coin fine new epithets which mean no ill:
Me, thus uncouth, thus every way unfit
For pacing poesy, and ambling wit,
Taste with contempt beholds, nor deigns to place
Amongst the lowest of her favoured race.

The characters of Garrick, &c., in the Rosciad, have

now ceased to interest; but some of these rough
pen-and-ink sketches of Churchill are happily exe-
cuted. Smollett, who he believed had attacked him
in the Critical Review, he alludes to with mingled
approbation and ridicule-

Whence could arise this mighty critic spleen,
The muse a trifler, and her theme so mean?
What had I done that angry heaven should send
The bitterest foe where most I wished a friend?
Oft hath my tongue been wanton at thy name,
And hailed the honours of thy matchless fame.
For me let hoary Fielding bite the ground,
So nobler Pickle stands superbly bound;
From Livy's temples tear the historic crown,
Which with more justice blooms upon thine own.
Compared with thee, be all life-writers dumb,
But he who wrote the Life of Tommy Thumb.
Whoever read the Regicide but swore
The author wrote as man ne'er wrote before?
Others for plots and under plots may call,
Here's the right method-have no plot at all!
Of Hogarth-

In walks of humour, in that cast of style,
Which, probing to the quick, yet makes us smile;
*The birth-day of the old Chevalier. It used to be a great
object with the gardener of a Scottish Jacobite family of those
days to have the Stuart emblem in blow by the tenth of June.

In comedy, his natural road to fame,
Nor let me call it by a meaner name,
Where a beginning, middle, and an end
Are aptly joined; where parts on parts depend,
Each made for each, as bodies for their soul,
So as to form one true and perfect whole,
Where a plain story to the eye is told,
Which we conceive the moment we behold,
Hogarth unrivalled stands, and shall engage
Unrivalled praise to the most distant age.

In 'Night,' Churchill thus gaily addressed his friend
Lloyd on the proverbial poverty of poets:-
What is't to us, if taxes rise or fall?
Thanks to our fortune, we pay none at all.
Let muckworms, who in dirty acres deal,
Lament those hardships which we cannot feel.
His Grace, who smarts, may bellow if he please,
But must I bellow too, who sit at ease?
By custom safe, the poet's numbers flow
Free as the light and air some years ago.
No statesman e'er will find it worth his pains
To tax our labours and excise our brains.
Burthens like these, vile earthly buildings bear;
No tribute's laid on castles in the air!

The reputation of Churchill was also an aërial structure. No English poet,' says Southey, had ever enjoyed so excessive and so short lived a popularity; and indeed no one seems more thoroughly to have in any of his pieces that he could have done any understood his own powers; there is no indication thing better than the thing he did. To Wilkes he said, that nothing came out till he began to be pleased with it himself; but, to the public, he boasted of the haste and carelessness with which his verses were poured forth.

Had I the power, I could not have the time,
While spirits flow, and life is in her prime,
Without a sin 'gainst pleasure, to design
A plan, to methodise each thought, each line,
Highly to finish, and make every grace
In itself charming, take new charms from place.
Nothing of books, and little known of men,
When the mad fit comes on I seize the pen ;
Rough as they run, the rapid thoughts set down,
Rough as they run, discharge them on the town,

Popularity which is easily gained, is lost as easily;
such reputations resembling the lives of insects,
whose shortness of existence is compensated by its
proportion of enjoyment. He perhaps imagined
that his genius would preserve his subjects, as spices
preserve a mummy, and that the individuals whom
he had eulogised or stigmatised would go down to
posterity in his verse, as an old admiral comes home
from the West Indies in a puncheon of rum: he did
not consider that the rum is rendered loathsome, and
that the spices with which the Pharaohs and Poti-
phars were embalmed, wasted their sweetness in the
catacombs. But, in this part of his conduct, there
was no want of worldly prudence: he was enriching
himself by hasty writings, for which the immediate
sale was in proportion to the bitterness and perso-
nality of the satire.'

MICHAEL BRUCE.

MICHAEL BRUCE-a young and lamented Scottish poet of rich promise-was born at Kinnesswood, parish of Portmoak, county of Kinross, on the 27th of March 1746. His father was a humble tradesman, a weaver, who was burdened with a family of eight children, of whom the poet was the fifth. The dreariest poverty and obscurity hung over the poet's infancy, but the elder Bruce was a good and pious

די

man, and trained all his children to a knowledge of afterwards included in Anderson's edition of the their letters, and a deep sense of religious duty. In poets. The late venerable and benevolent Principal the summer months Michael was put out to herd Baird, in 1807, published an edition by subscription cattle. His education was retarded by this employ- for the benefit of Bruce's mother, then a widow. In ment; but his training as a poet was benefited by 1837, a complete edition of the poems was brought solitary communion with nature, amidst scenery out, with a life of the author from original sources, that overlooked Lochleven and its fine old ruined by the Rev. William Mackelvie, Balgedie, Kinrosscastle. When he had arrived at his fifteenth year, shire. In this full and interesting memoir ample the poet was judged fit for college, and at this time reparation is made to the injured shade of Michael a relation of his father died, leaving him a legacy of Bruce for any neglect or injustice done to his poetical 200 merks Scots, or £11, 2s. 2d. sterling. This sum fame by his early friend Logan. Had Bruce lived, the old man piously devoted to the education of his it is probable he would have taken a high place favourite son, who proceeded with it to Edinburgh, among our national poets. He was gifted with the and was enrolled a student of the university. Michael requisite enthusiasm, fancy, and love of nature. was soon distinguished for his proficiency, and for There was a moral beauty in his life and character his taste for poetry. Having been three sessions at which would naturally have expanded itself in college, supported by his parents and some kind poetical composition. The pieces he has left have friends and neighbours, Bruce engaged to teach a all the marks of youth; a style only half-formed school at Gairney Bridge, where he received for his and immature, and resemblances to other poets, so labours about £11 per annum! He afterwards re- close and frequent, that the reader. is constantly moved to Forest Hill, near Alloa, where he taught stumbling on some familiar image or expression. for some time with no better success. His school-In Lochleven,' a descriptive poem in blank verse, he room was low-roofed and damp, and the poor youth, has taken Thomson as his model. The opening is confined for five or six hours a-day in this unwhole- a paraphrase of the commencement of Thomson's some atmosphere, depressed by poverty and disap- Spring, and epithets taken from the Seasons occur pointment, soon lost health and spirits. He wrote throughout the whole poem, with traces of Milton, his poem of Lochleven at Forest Hill, but was at Ossian &c. The following passage is the most orilength forced to return to his father's cottage, which ginal and pleasing in the poem :he never again left. A pulmonary complaint had settled on him, and he was in the last stage of consumption. With death full in his view, he wrote his Ode to Spring, the finest of all his productions. He was pious and cheerful to the last, and died on the 5th of July 1767, aged twenty-one years and three months. His Bible was found upon his pillow, marked down at Jer. xxii. 10, Weep ye not for the dead, neither bemoan him.' So blameless a life could not indeed be contemplated without pleasure, but its premature termination must have been a heavy blow to his aged parents, who had struggled in their poverty to nurture his youthful genius.

[A Rural Picture.]

Now sober Industry, illustrious power!
Hath raised the peaceful cottage, calm abode
Of innocence and joy: now, sweating, guides
The shining ploughshare; tames the stubborn so11;
Leads the long drain along the unfertile marsh;
Bids the bleak hill with vernal verdure bloom,
The haunt of flocks; and clothes the barren heath
With waving harvests and the golden grain."
In rural pride, 'mong intermingled trees!
Above whose aged tops the joyful swains,
At even-tide descending from the hill,
With eye enamoured, mark the many wreaths
Of pillared smoke, high curling to the clouds.
The streets resound with Labour's various voice,
Who whistles at his work. Gay on the green,
Young blooming boys, and girls with golden hair,
Trip, nimble-footed, wanton in their play,
The village hope. All in a reverend row,
Their gray-haired grandsires, sitting in the sun,
Before the gate, and leaning on the staff,
The well-remembered stories of their youth
Recount, and shake their aged locks with joy.
How fair a prospect rises to the eye,
Where Beauty vies in all her vernal forms,
For ever pleasant, and for ever new!
Swells the exulting thought, expands the soul,
Drowning each ruder care: a blooming train
Of bright ideas rushes on the mind,
Imagination rouses at the scene;

Fair from his hand behold the village rise,

And backward, through the gloom of ages past,
Beholds Arcadia, like a rural queen,

Encircled with her swains and rosy nymphs,
The mazy dance conducting on the green.
Nor yield to old Arcadia's blissful vales
Thine, gentle Leven! Green on either hand
Thy meadows spread, unbroken of the plough,
With beauty all their own. Thy fields rejoice
With all the riches of the golden year.
Fat on the plain, and mountain's sunny side,
Large droves of oxen, and the fleecy flocks,
Feed undisturbed; and fill the echoing air
With music, grateful to the master's ear.
The traveller stops, and gazes round and round
O'er all the scenes, that animate his heart

With mirth and music. Even the mendicant,
Bowbent with age, that on the old gray stone,
Sole sitting, suns him in the public way,
Feels his heart leap, and to himself he sings.
The conclusion of the poem gives us another picture
of rural life, with a pathetic glance at the poet's own
condition :-

[Virtue and Happiness in the Country.]

How blest the man who, in these peaceful plains,
Ploughs his paternal field; far from the noise,
The care, and bustle of a busy world!
All in the sacred, sweet, sequestered vale
Of solitude, the secret primrose-path

Of rural life, he dwells; and with him dwells
Peace and content, twins of the sylvan shade,
And all the graces of the golden age.
Such is Agricola, the wise, the good;
By nature formed for the calm retreat,

The silent path of life. Learned, but not fraught
With self-importance, as the starched fool,
Who challenges respect by solemn face,
By studied accent, and high-sounding phrase.
Enamoured of the shade, but not morose,
Politeness, raised in courts by frigid rules,
With him spontaneous grows. Not books alone,
But man his study, and the better part;
To tread the ways of virtue, and to act
The various scenes of life with God's applause.
Deep in the bottom of the flowery vale,
With blooming sallows and the leafy twine
Of verdant alders fenced, his dwelling stands
Complete in rural elegance. The door,
By which the poor or pilgrim never passed,
Still open, speaks the master's bounteous heart.
There, O how sweet! amid the fragrant shrubs,
At evening cool to sit; while, on their boughs,
The nested songsters twitter o'er their young;
And the hoarse low of folded cattle breaks
The silence, wafted o'er the sleeping lake,
Whose waters glow beneath the purple tinge
Of western cloud; while converse sweet deceives
The stealing foot of time! Or where the ground,
Mounded irregular, points out the graves
Of our forefathers, and the hallowed fane,
Where swains assembling worship, let us walk,
In softly-soothing melancholy thought,
As night's seraphic bard, immortal Young,
Or sweet-complaining Gray; there see the goal
Of human life, where drooping, faint, and tired,
Oft missed the prize, the weary racer rests.

Thus sung the youth, amid unfertile wilds
And nameless deserts, unpoetic ground!
Far from his friends he strayed, recording thus
The dear remembrance of his native fields,
To cheer the tedious night; while slow disease
Preyed on his pining vitals, and the blasts
Of dark December shook his humble cot.

The Last Day is another poem by Bruce in blank
The want of
verse, but is inferior to 'Lochleven.'
originality is more felt on a subject exhausted by
Milton, Young, and Blair; but even in this, as in his
other works, the warmth of feeling and graceful
freedom of expression which characterise Bruce are
seen and felt. In poetical beauty and energy, as in

biographical interest, his latest effort, the Elegy,
must ever rank the first in his productions. With
some weak lines and borrowed ideas, this poem has
an air of strength and ripened maturity that power-
fully impresses the reader, and leaves him to
wonder at the fortitude of the youth, who, in strains
of such sensibility and genius, could describe the
cheerful appearances of nature, and the certainty of
his own speedy dissolution.

:

Elegy Written in Spring.

'Tis past the iron North has spent his rage;
Stern Winter now resigns the lengthening day;
The stormy howlings of the winds assuage,
And warm o'er ether western breezes play.
Of genial heat and cheerful light the source,
From southern climes, beneath another sky,
The sun, returning, wheels his golden course:
Before his beams all noxious vapours fly.

Far to the north grim Winter draws his train,
To his own clime, to Zembla's frozen shore;
Where, throned on ice, he holds eternal reign;
Where whirlwinds madden, and where tempests

roar.

Loosed from the bands of frost, the verdant ground
Again puts on her robe of cheerful green,
Again puts forth her flowers; and all around
Smiling, the cheerful face of spring is seen.
Behold! the trees new deck their withered boughs;
Their ample leaves, the hospitable plane,
The taper elm, and lofty ash disclose;
The blooming hawthorn variegates the scene.

The lily of the vale, of flowers the queen,
Puts on the robe she neither sewed nor spun ;
The birds on ground, or on the branches green,
Hop to and fro, and glitter in the sun.

Soon as o'er eastern hills the morning peers,
From her low nest the tufted lark upsprings;
And, cheerful singing, up the air she steers;
Still high she mounts, still loud and sweet she sings
On the green furze, clothed o'er with golden blooms
That fill the air with fragrance all around,
The linnet sits, and tricks his glossy plumes,
While o'er the wild his broken notes resound.

While the sun journeys down the western sky,
Along the green sward, marked with Roman mound,
Beneath the blithsome shepherd's watchful eye,
The cheerful lambkins dance and frisk around.
Now is the time for those who wisdom love,
Who love to walk in Virtue's flowery road,
Along the lovely paths of spring to rove,

And follow Nature up to Nature's God.
Thus Zoroaster studied Nature's laws;
Thus Socrates, the wisest of mankind;
Thus heaven-taught Plato traced the Almighty cause,
And left the wondering multitude behind.
Thus Ashley gathered academic bays;

Thus gentle Thomson, as the seasons roll,
Taught them to sing the great Creator's praise,
And bear their poet's name from pole to pole.
Thus have I walked along the dewy lawn;

My frequent foot the blooming wild hath worn;
Before the lark I've sung the beauteous dawn,
And gathered health from all the gales of morn.
And, even when winter chilled the aged year,
I wandered lonely o'er the hoary plain:
Though frosty Boreas warned me to forbear,

Boreas, with all his tempests, warned in vain.
Then, sleep my nights, and quiet blessed my days;
I feared no loss, my mind was all my store;
No anxious wishes e'er disturbed my ease;
Heaven gave content and health-I asked no more.
Now, Spring returns: but not to me returns
The vernal joy my better years have known;
Dim in my breast life's dying taper burns,
And all the joys of life with health are flown.

96

Starting and shivering in the inconstant wind,
Meagre and pale, the ghost of what I was,
Beneath some blasted tree I lie reclined,
And count the silent moments as they pass:
The winged moments, whose unstaying speed
No art can stop, or in their course arrest;
Whose flight shall shortly count me with the dead,
And lay me down in peace with them at rest.

Oft morning dreams presage approaching fate;
And morning dreams, as poets tell, are true.
Led by pale ghosts, I enter Death's dark gate,
And bid the realms of light and life adieu.

I hear the helpless wail, the shriek of wo;

I see the muddy wave, the dreary shore,
The sluggish streams that slowly creep below,
Which mortals visit, and return no more.

Farewell, ye blooming fields! ye cheerful plains!
Enough for me the churchyard's lonely mound,
Where melancholy with still silence reigns,
And the rank grass waves o'er the cheerless ground.

There let me wander at the shut of eve,

When sleep sits dewy on the labourer's eyes: The world and all its busy follies leave,

And talk with Wisdom where my Daphnis lies.

There let me sleep, forgotten in the clay,

When death shall shut these weary aching eyes;
Rest in the hopes of an eternal day,
Till the long night is gone, and the last morn arise.

JOHN LOGAN.

JOHN LOGAN.

and passionate, full of piety and fervour, and must have been highly impressive when delivered.

One act in the literary life of Logan we have already adverted to-his publication of the poems of Michael Bruce. His conduct as an editor cannot be justified. He left out several pieces by Bruce, and, as he states in his preface, 'to make up a miscellany,' poems by different authors were inserted. The best of these he claimed, and published afterwards as his own. The friends of Bruce, indignant at his conduct, have since endeavoured to snatch this laurel from his brows, and considerable uncertainty hangs over the question. With respect to the most valuable piece in the collection, the Ode to the Cuckoo-magical stanzas,' says D'Israeli, and all will echo the praise, of picture, melody, and sentiment,' and which Burke admired so much, that on visiting Edinburgh, he sought out Logan to compliment him-with respect to this beautiful effusion of fancy and feeling, the evidence seems to be as follows:-In favour of Logan, there is the open fact of his having shown it in manuscript to several publication of the ode under his own name; the friends before its publication, and declared it to be his composition; and that, during the whole of his life, his claim to be the author was not disputed. On the other hand, in favour of Bruce, there is the oral testimony of his relations and friends, that they always understood him to be the author; and the written evidence of Dr Davidson, Professor of Natural and Civil History, Aberdeen, that he saw a copy of the ode in the possession of a friend of Bruce, Mr

Bickerton, who assured him it was in the handwriting of Bruce; that this copy was signed Michael Bruce,' and below it were written the words, 'You Mr D'Israeli, in his Calamities of Authors,' has writing about a gowk'-[Anglice, cuckoo.] It is will think I might have been better employed than included the name of JOHN LOGAN as one of those unfavourable to the case of Logan, that he retained unfortunate men of genius whose life has been some of the manuscripts of Bruce, and his conduct marked by disappointment and misfortune. had undoubtedly formed to himself a high standard tisfactory. Bruce's friends also claim for him some He throughout the whole affair was careless and unsaof literary excellence and ambition, to which he of the hymns published by Logan as his own, and never attained; but there is no evidence to warrant they show that the unfortunate young bard had the assertion that Logan died of a broken heart. applied himself to compositions of this kind, though From one source of depression and misery he was happily exempt: though he died at the early age The truth here seems to be, that Bruce was the none appeared in his works as published by Logan. of forty, he left behind him a sum of £600. Logan founder, and Logan the perfecter, of these exquisite was born at Soutra, in the parish of Fala, Mid- devotional strains: the former supplied stanzas Lothian, in 1748. His father, a small farmer, edu- which the latter extended into poems, imparting to cated him for the church, and, after he had obtained the whole a finished elegance and beauty of diction a license to preach, he distinguished himself so which certainly Bruce does not seem to have been much by his pulpit eloquence, that he was appointed capable of giving. Without adverting to the disone of the ministers of South Leith. wards read a course of lectures on the Philosophy verses on a Visit to the Country in Autumn, his half He after-puted ode, the best of Logan's productions are his of History in Edinburgh, the substance of which he dramatic poem of The Lovers, and his ballad stanzas published in 1781; and next year he gave to the on the Braes of Yarrow. A vein of tenderness and public one of his lectures entire on the Government moral sentiment runs through the whole, and his of Asia. The same year he published his poems, language is select and poetical. In some lines On which were well received; and in 1783 he produced the Death of a Young Lady, we have the following a tragedy called Runnimede, founded on the signing true and touching exclamation :of Magna Charta. His parishioners were opposed to such an exercise of his talents, and unfortunately Logan had lapsed into irregular and dissipated habits. The consequence was, that he resigned his charge on receiving a small annuity, and proceeded to London, where he resided till his death in December 1788. During his residence in London, Logan was a contributor to the English Review, and wrote a pamphlet on the Charges Against Warren Hastings, which attracted some notice. Among his manuscripts were found several unfinished tragedies, thirty lectures on Roman history, portions of a periodical work, and a collection of sermons, from which two volumes were selected and published by his executors. The sermons are warm

What tragic tears bedew the eye!
What deaths we suffer ere we die!
Our broken friendships we deplore,
And loves of youth that are no more!
No after-friendships e'er can raise
The endearments of our early days,
And ne'er the heart such fondness prove,
As when it first began to love.

To the Cuckoo.

Hail, beauteous stranger of the grove!
Thou messenger of Spring!
Now Heaven repairs thy rural seat,
And woods thy welcome sing.

49