Jockey and Sawney to their labours rose ;

In comedy, his natural road to fame,
Soon clad I ween, where nature needs no clothes ; Nor let me call it by a meaner name,
Where from their youth inured to winter skies, Where a beginning, middle, and an end
Dress and her vain refinements they despise.

Are aptly joined ; where parts on parts depend,
Jockey, whose manly high cheek bones to crown, Each made for each, as bodies for their soul,
With freckles spotted flamed the golden down, So as to form one true and perfect whole,
With meikle art could on the bagpipes play,

Where a plain story to the eye is told,
Even from the rising to the setting day;

Which we conceive the moment we behold, Sawney as long without remorse could bawl

Hogarth unrivalled stands, and shall engage
Home's madrigals, and ditties from Fingal :

Unrivalled praise to the most distant age.
Oft at his strains, all natural though rude,
The Highland lass forgot her want of food,

In ‘Night,' Churchill thus gaily addressed his friend And, whilst she scratched her lover into rest,

Lloyd on the proverbial poverty of poets :Sunk pleased, though hungry, on her Sawney's breast. What is't to us, if taxes rise or fall?

Far as the eye could reach no tree was seen, Thanks to our fortune, we pay none at all. Earth, clad in russet, scorned the lively green : Let muckworms, who in dirty acres deal, The plague of locusts they secure defy,

Lament those hardships which we cannot feel. For in three hours a grasshopper must die:

His Grace, who smarts, may bellow if he please, No living thing, whate'er its food, feasts there, But must I bellow too, who sit at ease ? But the chameleon who can feast on air.

By custom safe, the poet's numbers flow No birds, except as birds of passage flew;

Free as the light and air some years ago. No bee was known to hum, no dove to coo :

No statesman e'er will find it worth his pains No streams, as amber smooth, as amber clear,

To tax our labours and excise our brains. Were seen to glide, or heard to warble here:

Burthens like these, vile earthly buildings bear; Rebellion's spring, which through the country ran, No tribute's laid on castles in the air! Furnished with bitter draughts the steady clan : No flowers embalmed the air, but one white rose,

The reputation of Churchill was also an aërial strucWhich, on the tenth of June, * by instinct blows;

ture. “No English poet,' says Southey, ‘had ever By instinct blows at morn, and, when the shades

enjoyed so excessive and so short-lived a popularity; Of drizzly eve prevail, by instinct fades.

and indeed no one seems more thoroughly to have

understood his own powers ; there is no indication In the same poem Churchill thus alludes to himself: in any of his pieces that he could have done any Me, whom no muse of heavenly birth inspires, thing better than the thing he did. To Wilkes he No judgment tempers, when rash genius fires ; said, that nothing came out till he began to be pleased Who boast no merit but mere knack of rhyme, with it himself; but, to the public, he boasted of the Short gleams of sense and satire out of time;

haste and carelessness with which his verses were Who cannot follow where trim fancy leads

poured forth. By prattling streams, o'er flower-impurpled meads ; Who often, but without success, have prayed

Had I the power, I could not have the time, For apt Alliteration's artful aid ;

While spirits flow, and life is in her prime, Who would, but cannot, with a master's skill,

Without a sin 'gainst pleasure, to design Coin fine new epithets which mean no ill:

A plan, to methodise each thought, each line, Me, thus uncouth, thus every way unfit

Highly to finish, and make every grace For pacing poesy, and ambling wit,

In itself charming, take new charms from place. Taste with contempt beholds, nor deigns to place

Nothing of books, and little known of men,

When the mad fit comes on I seize the pen; Amongst the lowest of her favoured race.

Rough as they run, the rapid thoughts set down, The characters of Garrick, &c., in the Rosciad, have

Rough as they run, discharge them on the town. now ceased to interest; but some of these rough pen-and-ink sketches of Churchill are happily exe- Popularity which is easily gained, is lost as easily; cuted. Smollett, who he believed had attacked him such reputations resembling the lives of insects, in the Critical Review, he alludes to with mingled whose shortness of existence is compensated by its approbation and ridicule

proportion of enjoyment. He perhaps imagined

that his genius would preserve his subjects, as spices Whence could arise this mighty critic spleen,

preserve a mummy, and that the individuals whom The muse a trifler, and her theme so mean?

he had eulogised or stigmatised would go down to What had I done that angry heaven should send

posterity in his verse, as an old admiral comes home The bitterest foe where most I wished a friend ?

from the West Indies in a puncheon of rum : he did Oft hath my tongue been wanton at thy name, not consider that the rum is rendered loathsome, and And hailed the honours of thy matchless fame.

that the spices with which the Pharaohs and PotiFor me let hoary Fielding bite the ground,

phars were embalmed, wasted their sweetness in the So nobler Pickle stands superbly bound ;

catacombs. But, in this part of his conduct, there From Livy's temples tear the historic crown,

was no want of worldly prudence: he was enriching Which with more justice blooms upon thine own.

himself by hasty writings, for which the immediate Compared with thee, be all life-writers dumb,

sale was in proportion to the bitterness and persoBut he who wrote the Life of Tommy Thumb.

nality of the satire.'
Whoever read the Regicide but swore
The author wrote as man ne'er wrote before !

MICHAEL BRUCE.
Others for plots and under plots may call,
Here's the right method-have no plot at all !

MICHAEL BRUCE—a young and lamented Scottish Of Hogarth

poet of rich promise—was born at Kinnesswool,

parish of Portmoak, county of Kinross, on the 27th In walks of humour, in that cast of style,

of March 1746. His father was a humble tradesWhich, probing to the quick, yet makes us smile;

man, a weaver, who was burdened with a family of * The birth-day of the old Chevalier. It used to be a great eight children, of whom the poet was the fifth. The object with the gardener of a Scottish Jacobite family of those dreariest poverty and obscurity hung over the poet's days to have the Stuart emblem in blow by the tenth of June. | infancy, but the elder Bruce was a good and pious

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 £il 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

[A Rural Picture.] consumption. With death full in his view, he wrote his Ode to Spring, the finest of all his productions.

Now sober Industry, illustrious power ! He was pious and cheerful to the last, and died on Hath raised the peaceful cottage, calm abode the 5th of July 1767, aged twenty-one years and of innocence and joy: now, sweating, guides three months. His Bible was found upon his pillow, The shining ploughshare; tames the stubborn soil; marked down at Jer. xxii. 10, * Weep ye not for Leads the long drain along the unfertile marsh; the dead, neither bemoan him.' So blameless a life Bids the bleak hill with vernal verdure bloom, could not indeed be contemplated without pleasure, The haunt of flocks; and clothes the barren heath but its premature termination must have been a

With waving harvests and the golden grain. heavy blow to his aged parents, who had struggled in rural pride, 'mong intermingled trees !

Fair from his hand behold the village rise, in their poverty to nurture his youthful genius.

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;
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.
Bruce's Monument in Portmoak Churchyard.

Fat on the plain, and mountain's sunny side,

Large droves of oxen, and the fleecy flocks, The poems of Bruce were first given to the world Feed undisturbed ; and fill the echoing air by his college friend John Logan, in 1770, who with music, grateful to the master's ear. warmly eulogised the character and talents of his The traveller stops, and gazes round and round brother poet. They were reprinted in 1784, and O'er all the scenes, that animate his heart

roar.

With mirth and music. Even the mendicant,
Bowbent with age, that on the old gray stone,

Elegy Written in Spring.
Sole sitting, suns him in the public way,

'Tis past: the iron North has spent his rage; Feels his heart leap, and to himself he sings.

Stern Winter now resigns the lengthening day; The conclusion of the poem gives us another picture The stormy howlings of the winds assuage, of rural life, with a pathetic glance at the poet's own

And warm o'er ether western breezes play. condition :

Of genial heat and cheerful light the source, [Virtue and Happiness in the Country.]

From southern climes, beneath another sky,

The sun, returning, wheels his golden course :
How blest the man who, in these peaceful plains, Before his beams all noxious vapours fly.
Ploughs his paternal field; far from the noise,

Far to the north grim Winter draws his train,
The care, and bustle of a busy world!
All in the sacred, sweet, sequestered vale

To his own clime, to Zembla's frozen shore;
Of solitude, the secret primrose-path

Where, throned on ice, he holds eternal reign;

Where whirlwinds madden, and where tempests 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.

Loosed from the bands of frost, the verdant ground Such is Agricola, the wise, the good;

Again puts on her robe of cheerful green,
By nature formed for the calm retreat,

Again puts forth her flowers; and all around
The silent path of life. Learned, but not fraught Smiling, the cheerful face of spring is seen.
With self-importance, as the starched fool,
Who challenges respect by solemn face,

Behold! the trees new deck their withered boughs ; By studied accent, and high-sounding phrase.

Their ample leaves, the hospitable plane, Enamoured of the shade, but not morose,

The taper elm, and lofty ash disclose; Politeness, raised in courts by frigid rules,

The blooming hawthorn variegates the scene. With him spontaneous grows. Not books alone,

The lily of the vale, of flowers the queen, But man his study, and the better part;

Puts on the robe she neither sewed nor spun; To tread the ways of virtue, and to act

The birds on ground, or on the branches green,
The various scenes of life with God's applause.

Hop to and fro, and glitter in the sun.
Deep in the bottom of the flowery vale,
With blooming sallows and the leafy twine

Soon as o'er eastern hills the morning peers,
Of verdant alders fenced, his dwelling stands

From her low nest the tufted lark upsprings; Complete in rural elegance. The door,

And, cheerful singing, up the air she steers; By which the poor or pilgrim never passed,

Still high she mounts, still loud and sweet she sings. Still open, speaks the master's bounteous heart. There, o how sweet! amid the fragrant shrubs,

On the green furze, clothed o'er with golden blooms At evening cool to sit; while, on their boughs,

That fill the air with fragrance all around, The nested songsters twitter o'er their young;

The linnet sits, and tricks his glossy plumes, And the hoarse low of folded cattle breaks

While o'er the wild his broken notes resound. The silence, wafted o'er the sleeping lake,

While the sun journeys down the western sky, Whose waters glow beneath the purple tinge

Along the green sward, marked with Roman mound, Of western cloud ; while converse sweet deceives Beneath the blithsome shepherd's watchful eye, The stealing foot of time! Or where the ground, The cheerful lambkins dance and frisk around. Mounded irregular, points out the graves Of our forefathers, and the hallowed fane,

Now is the time for those who wisdom love, Where swains assembling worship, let us walk,'

Who love to walk in Virtue's flowery road, In softly-soothing melancholy thought,

Along the lovely paths of spring to rove,
As night's seraphic bard, immortal Young,

And follow Nature up to Nature's God.
Or sweet-complaining Gray; there see the goal Thus Zoroaster studied Nature's laws;
Of human life, where drooping, faint, and tired, Thus Socrates, the wisest of mankind;
Oft missed the prize, the weary racer rests.

Thus heaven-taught Plato traced the Almighty cause, Thus sung the youth, amid unfertile wilds

And left the wondering multitude behind.
And nameless deserts, unpoetic ground!
Far from his friends he strayed, recording thus

Thus Ashley gathered academic bays;
The dear remembrance of his native fields,

Thus gentle Thomson, as the seasons roll, To cheer the tedious night; while slow disease

Taught them to sing the great Creator's praise, Preyed on his pining vitals, and the blasts

And bear their poet's name from pole to pole. Of dark December shook his humble cot.

Thus have I walked along the dewy lawn; The Last Day is another poem by Bruce in blank Before the lark I've sung the beauteous dawn,

My frequent foot the blooming wild hath worn; verse, but is inferior to 'Lochleven.' The want of originality is more felt on a subject exhausted by

And gathered health from all the gales of morn, Milton, Young, and Blair ; but even in this, as in his And, even when winter chilled the aged year, other works, the warmth of feeling and graceful I wandered lonely o'er the hoary plain : freedom of expression which characterise Bruce are Though frosty Boreas warned me to forbear, seen and felt. In poetical beauty and energy, as in Boreas, with all his tempests, warned in vain. biographical interest, his latest effort, the Elegy, must ever rank the first in his productions. With Then, sleep my nights, and quiet blessed my days; some weak lines and borrowed ideas, this poem has No anxious wishes e'er disturbed my ease ;

I feared no loss, my mind was all my store; an air of strength and ripened maturity that powerfully impresses the reader, and leaves him to

Heaven gave content and health-I asked no more. wonder at the fortitude of the youth, who, in strains Now, Spring returns: but not to me returns of such sensibility and genius, could describe the The vernal joy my better years have known; cheerful appearances of nature, and the certainty of Dim in my breast life's dying taper burns, his own speedy dissolution.

And all the joys of life with health are flown.

JOHN LOGAN.

Starting and shivering in the inconstant wind, and passionate, full of piety and fervour, and must Meagre and pale, the ghost of what I was,

have been highly impressive when delivered. Beneath some blasted tree I lie reclined,

One act in the literary life of Logan we have And count the silent moments as they pass : already adverted to—his publication of the poems

of Michael Bruce. His conduct as an editor cannot The wingëd moments, whose unstaying speed be justified. He left out several pieces by Bruce, No art can stop, or in their course arrest;

and, as he states in his preface, 'to make up a misWhose flight shall shortly count me with the dead,

cellany,' poems by different authors were inserted. And lay me down in peace with them at rest.

The best of these he claimed, and published afterOft morning dreams presage approaching fate;

wards as his own. The friends of Bruce, indignant And morning dreams, as poets tell, are true.

at his conduct, have since endeavoured to snatch Led by pale ghosts, I enter Death's dark gate,

this laurel from his brows, and considerable uncerAnd bid the realms of light and life adieu.

tainty hangs over the question. With respect to

the most valuable piece in the collection, the Ode I hear the helpless wail, the shriek of wo;

to the Cuckoo—magical stanzas,' says D'Israeli, I see the muddy wave, the dreary shore,

and all will echo the praise, 'of picture, melody, The sluggish streams that slowly creep below, and sentiment,' and which Burke admired so much, Which mortals visit, and return no more.

that on visiting Edinburgh, he sought out Logan

to compliment him—with respect to this beautiful Farewell, ye blooming fields! ye cheerful plains ! effusion of fancy and feeling, the evidence seems to

Enough for me the churchyard's lonely mound, be as follows:-In favour of Logan, there is the open Where melancholy with still silence reigns,

publication of the ode under his own name; the And the rank grass waves o’er the checrless ground. fact of his having shown it in manuscript to several

friends before its publication, and declared it to be There let me wander at the shut of eve,

huis composition ; and that, during the whole of his When sleep sits dewy on the labourer's eyes : life, his claim to be the author was not disputed. The world and all its busy follies leave,

On the other hand, in favour of Bruce, there is the And talk with Wisdom where my Daphnis lies.

oral testimony of his relations and friends, that they There let me sleep, forgotten in the clay,

always understood him to be the author; and the When death shall shut these weary aching eyes ;

written evidence of Dr Davidson, Professor of NaRest in the hopes of an eternal day,

tural and Civil History, Aberdeen, that he saw a copy Till the long night is gone, and the last morn arise. 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

will think I might have been better employed than Mr D'Israeli, in his Calamities of Authors,' has writing about a gouk —[Anglice, cuckoo.] It is 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. He throughout the whole affair was careless and unsahad undoubtedly formed to himself a high standard tisfactory. Bruce's friends also claim for him some of 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 none appeared in his works as published by Logan. happily exempt: though he died at the early age The truth here seems to be, that Bruce was the 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. He after- puted ode, the best of Logan's productions are his wards read a course of lectures on the Philosophy verses on a Visit to the Country in Autumn, his half 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

What tragic tears bedew the eye! to such an exercise of his talents, and unfortunately

What deaths we suffer ere we die ! Logan had lapsed into irregular and dissipated

Our broken friendships we deplore, habits. The consequence was, that he resigned his

And loves of youth that are no more ! charge on receiving a small annuity, and proceeded

No after-friendships e'er can raise to London, where he resided till his death in De

The endearments of our early days cember 1788. During his residence in London,

And ne'er the heart such fondness prove, Logan was a contributor to the English Review,

As when it first began to love. and wrote a pamphlet on the Charges Against Warren Hastings, which attracted some notice. Among

To the Cuckoo. his manuscripts were found several unfinished tragedies, thirty lectures on Roman history, portions Hail, beauteous stranger of the grove! of a periodical work, and a collection of sermons, Thou messenger of Spring! from which two volumes were selected and pub Now Heaven repairs thy rural seat, lished by his executors. The sermons are warm

And woods thy welcome sing.

97

49