house young men attending the University, and was himself received into the genial society of the place. He got a good and tender wife notwithstanding his blindness, and a great deal of that respect mingled with compassion, which a man, so heavily burdened in the way of life, almost invariably inspires, but which perhaps is always a half-humiliating sympathy. Poems with such titles as "Ode to Aurora on Melusa's Birthday," " Ode to a Young Gentleman bound for Guinea," etc., sufficiently indicate the character of his verses. In the short memoir which we have of him, written by Mackenzie, there are a great many special quotations made, and lines selected, to show that, notwithstanding his blindness, he was capable of describing nature. This, of course, must have been simply in imitation of the lavish colours, the purple evenings and rosy mornings of the poets: but there is a pathetic correctness in his enumeration of the yellow crocuses and purple hyacinths, which touches the heart. He was a good man, and, considering his infirmity, prosperous and fortunate. But the consciousness of this disability appears to have kept him somewhat sad, and his later life seems to have been touched with melancholy from a very natural cause. "Some of his later poems express a chagrin, though not of an ungentle sort, at the supposed failure of his imaginative powers; or," "the Man of Feeling" adds, "at the fastidiousness of modern times, which he despaired to please." Poor gentle poet!-his "Muse," his gift of "Song," had been the sole ground upon which he had risen into local reputation; and there are few more moving occasions for at least a sentimental sympathy. We feel with him, even if we smile at the hot but weak indignation with which he stigmatises the new standards-standards, alas! which he could never come up to, and which settled his fate. "Such were his efforts, such his cold reward, Whom once thy partial tongue pronounced a bard He rov'd, while favour imp'd his timid wing, But mourns abortive hopes and faded fires. The short-lived wreath, which once his temples graced, Again we say poor poet! He had as much right to call the new influences which condemned his old-fashioned rigid verse, a squeamish taste," as they had to break up the foundations and scatter the waning honours of that lingering, feeble superstructure, which had been elongated like a house of cards upon the system of Pope. He showed his insight above any of the other tuneful brethren by recognising that his day was over, and his laurels incapable of supporting that "sickly breath." These discontented verses are the swansong of the ending age. "The Man of Feeling" was conscious, for his own. part, of no such failure. At the same time there existed in Old Edinburgh, in the very region where flourished the Mirror and the Lounger, and all their far-fetched conventionalisms, a true and generous little concert of songs rising from various quarters, which handed on a better tradition, from Allan Ramsay, whose pastoral strain, if not without affectation, had rung true and clear, down to Burns. They were chiefly women, ladies of the best blood and breeding, who performed this genial office, with little parade, and more enjoyment than fame. "The grand old ballad of Sir Patrick Spens," as Coleridge calls it, was, all authorities are now agreed in saying, an innocent forgery, and written by Lady Wardlaw, who was the author of several other mock-antique ballads, which, however, were not mock poetry, but worthy the place they attained. Miss Jean Elliot produced one of the versions of the "Flowers of the Forest," Mrs. Cockburn another while Lady Anne Lindsay gave us the exquisite and pathetic little romance of "Auld Robin Gray," a ballad so true to the soil, so pure and tender in sentiment, that its genuine truth and nature make all the artificial features of the surrounding literature look more false than ever "Oh, lady nursed in pomp and pleasure, How was it that art, so true yet so simple, could exist in so many obscure corners, while the false and bedizened artifice which took her place sat in the high places, and was constituted the judge of everything? This is one of the curious circumstances in literary history which it is difficult to explain, except from the fact that the frost stiffens with a kind of desperation the moment before the south winds begin to blow, and the ice chains to melt away. Behind backs, out of the reach of the critics, Edinburgh no doubt laughed in her sleeve at the "Man of Feeling." But Scotland has always cherished such songs as these in her heart. They breathed about the country far and wide, and were known and sung long before they were printed, the national genius for song having survived everything; and it was appropriate that through this homely channel the revival should come. What does Mr. Carlyle say: "The smallest cranny through which a great soul ever shone"? But when he said this, he forgot what we do not doubt he very well knows,1 all that song has been to Scotland since that speech was made about the making of laws and the making of ballads. Song, or rather Songs: the word in the plural 1 These words were written before the loss of Scotland's last great writer, which we have now to lament. 1 has perhaps a somewhat different meaning, not that of a melody only, which might please the hearers almost as much if Do-re-mi were the syllables employed to give it utterance, but an art which was poetry, at least as much as music, and into which thousands entered with enjoyment for the sake chiefly of the beautiful " words." This distinction is perhaps worth the consideration of the student. Ballads like "Auld Robin Gray," songs like the "Flowers of the Forest," were a great deal more than music; the simple old tune "set" to each was little more than the breath which carried the poetry into many a melting heart. This mingled faculty, half one art, half the other, was never extinguished, and always independent of the verse-maker's elaborate rules. It was the breath of life in old Scotland. When the "Man of Feeling" reigned in artificial and tottering state, these collections of songs, unnoted messengers, flew about the country to which they were indigenous, keeping up in it a soul of fresh and natural sentiment when there was little else to do so a fact which made it more appropriate than any one has cared to acknowledge that the new power in literature in the north, the new poet, should take by nature to this national medium, the art his country has always loved. HENRY MACKENZIE, the Man of Feeling, born 1745; died 1831; published his chief work 1771. THOMAS BLACKLOCK, born 1721; died 1791; published volume of poems 1746. CHAPTER IV. GEORGE CRABBE. Ar the very time when the two unconscious revolutionaries who have occupied our time so long were loosing the bands and opening the prison gates of poetry, and, with her, of literature in general, there was happening at the same moment one of those curious returns upon old customs, which so often give a whimsical variety to a great movement. It would be amiss to say that Crabbe had no part in the new revolution. He whose themes are so severely chosen from annals unknown to the Graces, and whose stern submission to fact deepened and strengthened what we may call the imaginative realism of his great contemporaries, had his full part in the destruction of those attenuated canons of literary art, which were no longer capable of restraining the impulse of the new life; but nothing could be more entirely in accordance with all the conventional laws of a poet's struggle, and final acceptance by the world, than the early facts of his history. All that was ever written of Grub Street comes true in his tale of misery and aspiration. He is at his outset the very poet of Hogarth, the philosophical vagabond of Goldsmith, the poor author whose image it is so hard to dissociate even from the hard-working and well-to-do literature of to-day. While Cowper was roaming gently and legitimately, yet, so far |