THE Cameronians are a pastoral, a poetical, and an enthusiastic people; great lovers of mountain solitudes, and the fresh green gifts of country nature; admirers of the warm, familiar, and lofty, though unequal eloquence of the early Kirk of Scotland; and wholly unlike the vulgar and mechanical sectaries of the South, with whom they have been compared, and by many confounded. Nothing in nature can be more aloof from the thorough-paced and shopkeeping sectary, than the well-read and meditative Cameronian; the temperate enthusiasm, and manly, though severe devotion of the mountaineer, is the very poetry of religion; and the circumstance alone, of persevering to worship God on the mountain-tops, and associating the external beauty and bounty of nature with his worship, ought to have saved him from the disgrace of such comparison. The southern sectary is a being of yesterday, sprung from the ailments and unsalved sores of the Episcopalian Church, and wrapt up in the wrong-folded surplices of external devotion; but the Cameronian looks proudly down the vista of other years, as far as the firm and faithful struggles of the covenanted church against the ambitious hierarchy, and classes himself with the pure and lofty beings who perfected the Reformation. In the matter, as well as the manner of his worship, he differs from his city brethren; his faith in Providence is less exclusive, and more noble and poetical; more accordant with the simple purity of the gospel, and his practice is not spotted and defiled by those startling sallies of mistempered enthusiasm and moon-struck levity with which some numerous sects have been justly upbraided. It has been the custom to laugh at the simplicity and singularity of the Cameronians; and the laxer followers of the established kirk have sought opportunities to smile at the familiar, fervent, and protracted preachings of the professors. Their church discipline, like the creed of the virtuous Cowper, "is wholesome in the main," though savouring of harshness; and the nice and delicate distinctions in their distribu

tion of rebuke and admonition, would form no discreditable addition to the established church discipline of the kingdom. To the mimickries of the graceless and the profane, the poets have added their sarcasm and their ridicule; and William Meston, a man of much wit, but of little feeling for the gentle, and pathetic, and lofty beauties of poetry, has seized upon some of the common infirmities of human nature, and made them the reproach of this respectable race. Having little sympathy in the poetical part of their character, he has sought to darken the almost cloudless day of their history, with specks which would not detract much from the fixed splendours of the established kirk, but which hang black and ominous amid the purity of Cameronian faith and practice. The poet certainly had some reason for disliking the Cameronians; he encountered their resistance and their valour in the attempt to rethrone the princes of the house of Stuart; and while suffering the calamities which constantly followed every effort of that ancient and illfated house, he composed his "Adventures of Sir John Presbyter," in which he holds up our patriotic mountaineers to hatred and contempt. The failings of Mr David Dick, the preacher, have been maliciously commented upon, and too extensively applied; the disaster of the saint is decorously veiled in the famous ballad of Dainty Davie, but the more morose Meston reserved all his chivalry for the thankless Stuarts, and could afford none for the hapless Cameronian; he has therefore signalized his adventure in the bedchamber with the malice of unmitigating envy. Lately, too, the MIGHTY WARLOCK of Caledonia, has shed a natural and supernatural light round the founders of the Cameronian dynasty; and as his business was to grapple with the ruder and fiercer portion of their character, the gentler graces of their nature were not called into action, and the storm, and tempest, and thick darkness of John Balfour of Burley, have darkened the whole breathing congregation of the Cameronians, and turned their sunny hill-side into a

dreary desert. All the sufferers of England, and of Scotland too, have lifted up their voices against this an cient remnant of the Scottish covenant, and all the backslidings of the numerous sectaries of the north have been fairly wrought into a kind of tapestry picture, and hung over the honoured grave of Richard Cameron. All this, which would have provoked the patience, and obtained the anathemas of other churches, failed to discompose the meekness and the sedate serenity of the mountaineers; they read, and they smiled at Meston, and with the unrivalled novelist they are charmed and enchanted; they would sooner part with the splendour of the victory of Drumclog, or the name of Alexander Peden, than pass the Torwood curse on the legend of Old Mortality.

It has been my particular good for tune, in the early part of a life protracted beyond the customary span, to live in friendship and familiarity with many of the most respectable of the congregation, and sundry of their most popular preachers. A frequent visitor of their preachings, I have hearkened with delight and edification to the poetical and prophetic eloquence of their discourses. A guest at their hearths and their tables, I have proved the cheerful and open hospitality of their nature; and have held converse and fellowship with almost all the burning and the shining lights that have distinguished the present house of Cameron. I have made their character my study, and their pursuits my chief business, and collected many curious sayings, and songs, and adventures, which belong to this simple and unassuming race. In accomplishing all this, I have certainly redeemed from oblivion many matters of doubt ful virtue and of dubious beauty, and I have sometimes surmised, that the ballads and the traditions to which I listened, partook strongly of the character of the narrator, and perhaps owed some of their embellishments to his kindred spirit. Of this, perhaps, I am not the safest judge. And I would willingly think, that however much some of the ballads may be modified and modernized in their oral passage from the period of the persecution, that something of the ancient spirit still remains to hallow them-that the ore is the same, though the stamp is VOL. VII.

different. I have also, with the usual sagacity of an editor, hazarded sundry emendations, and even ventured to supply some lines where the treacherous memory of the reciter left the sense imperfect. If these remain undiscovered, I shall feel rewarded. Certainly the most wondrous part of the Cameronian character is the poetical warmth and spirit which everywhere abounds in their sermons and their sayings: and, though profane minstrelsy was wisely accounted as an abomination, yet poetry, conceived and composed in the overflowing and passionate style of their compositions, has been long privately cherished among the most enlightened of the flock. But I by no means claim rank for the Cameronian bards, with those who lent their unstinted strength to the strings. Their glimpses of poetical inspiration cannot equal the fuller day of those who gloried in the immortal intercourse with the muse. Of my converse with the Cameronian worthies of the last and the present age, I would willingly render some account; but the pen which, in my hand, is a cold and frozen medium of communication, would abate the particular vigour and beauty of the original, and I shall prefer rather to introduce some of their poetical remains to the curiosity of the reader. Many years have elapsed since my collection was made, and many of the enthusiastic and delightful people who contributed to it, are sleeping in the silent church-yard. I have to regret, too, an occurrence which the wisdom of man cannot repair-the death of my respected relative, Marion Moorhead, relict of Peter Morison, in Dumfriesshire, with whom have perished sundry Cameronian songs, of the mixed nature of love, religion, and politics. To the faithfulness of her retentive memory I committed them-in her remembrance they were as safe as words written on brass or ivory; and it was a matter to me of no ordinary pleasure to hear her recount the titles of my treasures.But the beautiful Cameronian dame who influenced my youth is numbered with inanimate things—and though her remembrance and her beauty are continued by her daughters, my glorious Cameronian lyrics have perished with their author. All that remains in my memory is the following verse. 3 Q