. Inspiring bold John Barleycorn! What dangers thou canst make us scorn! Wi' tippenny we fear nae evil; Wi' usquabae we'll face the devil! The swats sae ream'd in TAMMIE'S noddle, A winnock-bunker in the east, There sat auld Nick in shape o' beast; A towzie tyke, black, grim, and large, To gie them music was his charge: He screw'd the pipes and gart them skirl, Till roof and rafters a' did dirl. Coffins stood round like open presses, That shaw'd the dead in their last dresses; And by some devilish cantrip sleight, Each in his cauld hand held a light.— By which heroic TAM was able To note upon the haly table, A murderer's banes in gibbet-airns; Twa span-lang, wee, unchristen'd bairns; A thief, new-cutted frae a rape, Which ev'n to name wad be unlawfu'. AS TAMMIE glowr'd, amaz'd, and curious The dancers quick and quicker flew; They reel'd, they set, they cross'd, they cleekit, Till ilka carlin swat and reekit, And coost her duddies to the wark, And linkit at it in her sark! Now TAM, O TAM! had thae been queans, A' plump and strappin' in their teens; Their sarks, instead o' creeshie flannen, Been snaw-white se'enteen hunder linen; Thir breeks o' mine, my only pair, That ance were plush o' gude blue hair, I wad hae gi'en them off my hurdies, For ae blink o' the bonnie burdies! But wither'd beldams, auld and droll, But TAM kenn'd what was what fu' brawlie, (Lang after kenn'd on Carrick shore! It was her best, and she was vauntie- But here my muse her wing maun cour; And how TAM stood, like one bewitch'd, Till first ae caper, syne anither, TAM tint his reason a' thegither, And roars out, "Weel done, Cutty-sark!" And in an instant a' was dark: And scarcely had he Maggie rallied, When out the hellish legion sallied. As bees biz out wi' angry fyke, When, pop! she starts before their nose; As eager runs the market-crowd, When "Catch the thief!" resounds aloud; Wi' monie an eldritch skreech and hollow. Ah, TAM! ah, TAM! thou'lt get thy fairin: The carling claught her by the rump, Now, wha this tale o' truth shall read, SECURING THE HEART. 6 'JUST before the battle of Malplaquet,' say the chronicles of the campaign in which this encounter occurred, a young recruit procured a round iron plate-' and 'what did he want with a round plate?' perhaps some inquistive reader asks; a question which would have been already settled but for this untimely interference. A round iron plate, which (to continue our quotation) he desired a tailor to fasten on the inside of his coat, above his left breast, to secure his heart from being shot through.' And here let us remark, How praiseworthy was the intention of this raw recruit! Not had he obtained a round iron plate for that common use such articles are put to, viz. the protection of the head. To endeavour to strengthen the caput would have been a vile insinuation against dame Nature, and indeed a libel upon her sanity, as conveying an idea that she had really endowed with brains the heads of men who made so little use of that gift as to risk their lives for sixpence daily. Rightly had he judged that as that part which he sought to defend is the seat of the affections, the fountain of life, the source of the passions, were he in the first affair he should be concerned in to have a hole bored in his heart, then would he have but a bad heart on the whole affair. Much and well too had this shrewd soldier considered the radix or root of that word coragium, the Low Latin whence near all European nations derived their idea of that 'king-becoming grace,' as Macbeth hath it, courage.' And properly had he reasoned that as couragium (the outward and visible sign) was derived from cor, the heart, so (the inward, spiritual grace) courage came from the heart; and that to protect the latter from danger was to preserve the former from fear. The preservation of a hero's heart is committed to the art of a tailor, to whom it is commanded to fasten the plate 'on the inside of the left breast of the coat' but like that learned character in Moliere's Le Médecin malgré Liu, our thing of shreds and patches' had not bound himself to an implicit belief in the old-fangled notions of the ancients. Whether or not, indeed, the tailor had even heard of that famous comedy is not at present the question, but a part of it as it is done into English by our own Scriblerus Secundus, is extremely accordant with the sentiments we may suppose to have been uppermost in the tailor's mind, just as he was skenning the matter over, and calculating the cabbage to be abstracted. Speaking of Miss Charlotte's dumbness, Gregory, who obtained his pharmacy as children take the cow-pox by in-knock-ulation, says, that certain spirits passing from the left side which is the seat of the liver, to the right which is the seat of the heart:' when her father remarks, 'I always thought, till now, that the heart was on the left side, and the liver on the right.' To which "The Mock Doctor' replies, 'Ay, sir, so they were formerly: but we have changed all that. The college at present, sir, proceeds on an entire new method.' Proceeding on an entire new method,' and not forgetting, for he as well as everybody else who had read Chaucer, the line in the Canterbury Tales anent this abstruse mystery, where the poet discourseth of changing his courage (meaning of course the seat thereof to another place :') the tailor, thus the chronicle continues, 'fixed it in the seat of his breeches. He [the recruit] no sooner put on his regimentals, than he was ordered to the field of battle.' Battles have often been known to change the state of the atmosphere, and the very rumour of this rencontre caused such an alteration in the wind, that one half of the army, and amongst them our hero, trembled at every joint, 'it was so very cold. However 'La Trompette appelle aux allarmes,' as the French song saith; 'Advance,' saith the commander; and, as Shakspeare hath it, Their discipline • When Greek meets Greek, then comes the tug of war,' saith the poet; and, to conclude our list of quotations, Courage,' says Addison, courage that grows from constitution, very often forsakes a man when he has occasion for it ;' a truism but too fully verified by our hero at the battle of Malplaquet. On this point, however, we will follow the historian, and merely say, that 'Being obliged to fly, he was getting over a hedge, when a foe gave him a push with his bayonet in the breech, but it luckily hit on the iron plate, and pushed the young soldier clean over the hedge.' This favourable circumstance made him honestly confess, that the tailor had more sense than himself, and knew better where his heart lay. Here might I make some apposite similes drawn from the Third Book of Homer's Iliad, were it not for two excellent reasons: first, one comparison, if it be a good one, is quantum suff., and who will deny the palm of a close similarity between the story we are now narrating, and that passage where Parishis shining javelin threw : Full on Atrides' ringing shield it fled: Nor pierc'd the brazen orb, but with a bound Secondly, our artist has so ably depicted the chagrin of the discomfited bayonetteer, that on this subject, at least,' Comparisons are odious.' LIFE. TO-MORROW, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusky death. Out, out, brief candle ! That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more! It is a tale |