fighting, and dealt so severely with Coleridge,

Wordsworth, and Keats.

Pollok was born at the farm of North Moorhouse in the parish of Eaglesham in Renfrewshire, and after some schooling at Mearns and Fenwick, and a brief interlude of cabinet-making, was sent to the University of Glasgow. While he was a student of divinity in the Hall of the United Secession Church, he wrote a series of prose Tales of the Covenanters, published anonymously. The Course of Time was all written in the eighteen months between the end of 1824 and the middle of 1826, before his last term at the divinity hall; and was published in the spring of 1827 by Blackwood on the advice of Professor Wilson and 'Delta' Moir, who both gave highly complimentary verdicts on the poem with the somewhat formidable title. Pollok was duly licensed to preach the gospel' in May; preached his first sermon after license in the church of Dr John Brown, father of the author of Rab and his Friends; and received kindly courtesy and encouragement from the literary patriarch of a long-past generation, Henry Mackenzie, the 'Man of Feeling,' now over eightyfour years of age. The poet-probationer was fast becoming famous; but pulmonary disease had declared itself, and it was evident that he was doomed to an early grave. The anxiety and effort of composition had aggravated the malady; the milder air of Shirley Common near Southampton brought no improvement; and after lingering a few weeks, the victim died on the 17th of September.

This description of Lord Byron was one of the two passages first read by Wilson that moved him to his unexpectedly friendly and favourable judgment of the Course of Time:

And first in rambling school-boy days,
Britannia's mountain-walks, and heath-girt lakes,
And story-telling glens, and founts, and brooks;
And maids, as dew-drops pure and fair, his soul
With grandeur filled, and melody, and love.
Then travel came, and took him where he wished.
He cities saw, and courts, and princely pomp:
And mused alone on ancient mountain brows;
And mused on battle-fields, where valour fought
In other days; and mused on ruins grey
With years and drank from old and fabulous wells;
And plucked the vine that first-born prophets plucked ;
And mused on famous tombs; and on the wave
Of ocean mused; and on the desert waste.
The heavens, and earth of every country saw :
Where'er the old inspiring Genii dwelt,
Aught that could rouse, expand, refine the soul,
Thither he went, and meditated there.

He touched his harp, and nations heard, entranced.
As some vast river of unfailing source,
Rapid, exhaustless, deep, his numbers flowed,
And oped new fountains in the human heart.
Where fancy halted, weary in her flight,
In other men, his fresh as morning rose,

And soared untrodden heights, and seemed at home,
Where angels bashful looked. Others, tho' great,

Beneath their argument seemed struggling whiles;
He from above descending, stooped to touch
The loftiest thought; and proudly stooped, as tho'
It scarce deserved his verse. With Nature's self
He seemed an old acquaintance, free to jest
At will with all her glorious majesty.
He laid his hand upon the Ocean's mane,'
And played familiar with his hoary locks.
Stood on the Alps, stood on the Apennines,
And with the thunder talked, as friend to friend;
And wove his garland of the lightning's wing,
In sportive twist-the lightning's fiery wing,
Which, as the footsteps of the dreadful God,
Marching upon the storm in vengeance seemed—
Then turned, and with the grasshopper, who sung
His evening song, beneath his feet, conversed. . . .
Great man! the nations gazed, and wondered much,
And praised and many called his evil good.
Wits wrote in favour of his wickedness;
And kings to do him honour took delight.
Thus full of titles, flattery, honour, fame;
Beyond desire, beyond ambition full,-
He died he died of what? Of wretchedness.
Drank every cup of joy, heard every trump
Of fame; drank early, deeply drank; drank draughts
That common millions might have quenched-then died
Of thirst, because there was no more to drink.

Love.

(From Book IV.)

Hail love, first love, thou word that sums all bliss!
The sparkling cream of all Time's blessedness,
The silken down of happiness complete!
Discerner of the ripest grapes of joy
She gathered and selected with her hand,
All finest relishes, all fairest sights,

All rarest odours, all divinest sounds,

All thoughts, all feelings dearest to the soul:
And brought the holy mixture home, and filled
The heart with all superlatives of bliss.

But who would that expound, which words transcends,
Must talk in vain. Behold a meeting scene

Of early love, and thence infer its worth.

It was an eve of autumn's holiest mood.
The corn-fields, bathed in Cynthia's silver light,
Stood ready for the reaper's gathering hand;
And all the winds slept soundly. Nature seemed
In silent contemplation to adore

Its Maker. Now and then the aged leaf
Fell from its fellows, rustling to the ground;
And, as it fell, bade man think on his end.
On vale and lake, on wood and mountain high,
With pensive wing outspread, sat heavenly Thought,
Conversing with itself. Vesper looked forth
From out her western hermitage, and smiled;
And up the east, unclouded, rode the moon
With all her stars, gazing on earth intense,
As if she saw some wonder working there.

Such was the night, so lovely, still, serene,
When, by a hermit thorn that on the hill
Had seen a hundred flowery ages pass,
A damsel kneeled to offer up her prayer-
Her prayer nightly offered, nightly heard.
This ancient thorn had been the meeting-place
Of love, before his country's voice had called
The ardent youth to fields of honour far

Beyond the wave: and hither now repaired,
Nightly, the maid, by God's all-seeing eye
Seen only, while she sought this boon alone-
'Her lover's safety, and his quick return.'
In holy, humble attitude she kneeled,

And to her bosom, fair as moonbeam, pressed
One hand, the other lifted up to heaven.
Her eye, upturned, bright as the star of morn,
For all are friends in heaven, all faithful friends;
And many friendships in the days of time
Begun, are lasting here, and growing still;
So grows ours evermore, both theirs and mine.
Nor is the hour of lonely walk forgot

In the wide desert, where the view was large.
Pleasant were many scenes, but most to me
The solitude of vast extent, untouched
By hand of art, where nature sowed herself,
And reaped her crops; whose garments were the clouds;
Whose minstrels, brooks; whose lamps, the moon and
Whose organ-choir, the voice of many waters; [stars;
Whose banquets, morning-dews; whose heroes, storms;
Whose warriors, mighty winds; whose lovers, flowers;
Whose orators, the thunderbolts of God;
Whose palaces, the everlasting hills;
Whose ceiling, heaven's unfathomable blue;
And from whose rocky turrets, battled high,
Prospect immense spread out on all sides round,
Lost now beneath the welkin and the main,
Now walled with hills that slept above the storm.
(From Book V.)

Happiness.

Whether in crowds or solitudes, in streets
Or shady groves, dwelt Happiness, it seems
In vain to ask; her nature makes it vain ;
Though poets much, and hermits, talked and sung
Of brooks and crystal founts, and weeping dews,
And myrtle bowers, and solitary vales,

And with the nymph made assignations there,
And wooed her with a love-sick oaten reed;
And sages too, although less positive,
Advised their sons to court her in the shade?
Delirious babble all! Was happiness,
Was self-approving, God-approving joy,
In drops of dew, however pure? in gales,
However sweet? in wells, however clear?
Or groves, however thick with verdant shade?
True, these were of themselves exceeding fair;
How fair at morn and even! worthy the walk
Of loftiest mind, and gave, when all within
Was right, a feast of overflowing bliss ;
But were the occasion, not the cause of joy.
They waked the native fountains of the soul
Which slept before, and stirred the holy tides
Of feeling up, giving the heart to drink
From its own treasures draughts of perfect sweet.

The Christian faith, which better knew the heart
Of man, him thither sent for peace, and thus
Declared: Who finds it, let him find it there;
Who finds it not, for ever let him seek
In vain; 'tis God's most holy, changeless will.
True Happiness had no localities,
No tones provincial, no peculiar garb.
Where Duty went, she went, with Justice went,
And went with Meekness, Charity, and Love.
Where'er a tear was dried, a wounded heart
Bound up, a bruised spirit with the dew

Of sympathy anointed, or a pang
Of honest suffering soothed, or injury
Repeated oft, as oft by love forgiven;
Where'er an evil passion was subdued,
Or Virtue's feeble embers fanned; where'er
A sin was heartily abjured and left;
Where'er a pious act was done, or breathed
A pious prayer, or wished a pious wish,
There was a high and holy place, a spot
Of sacred light, a most religious fane,
Where Happiness, descending, sat and smiled.

But these apart. In sacred memory lives
The morn of life, first morn of endless days,
Most joyful morn! Nor yet for nought the joy.
A being of eternal date commenced,

A young immortal then was born! And who
Shall tell what strange variety of bliss
Burst on the infant soul, when first it looked
Abroad on God's creation fair, and saw
The glorious earth and glorious heaven, and face
Of man sublime, and saw all new, and felt
All new! when thought awoke, thought never more
To sleep! when first it saw, heard, reasoned, willed,
And triumphed in the warmth of conscious life!
Nor happy only, but the cause of joy,
Which those who never tasted always mourned.
What tongue!-no tongue shall tell what bliss o'erflowed
The mother's tender heart, while round her hung
The offspring of her love, and lisped her name;
As living jewels dropped unstained from heaven,
That made her fairer far, and sweeter seem,
Than every ornament of costliest hue!
And who hath not been ravished, as she passed
With all her playful band of little ones,
Like Luna with her daughters of the sky,
Walking in matron majesty and grace?

All who had hearts here pleasure found: and oft
Have I, when tired with heavy task, for tasks
Were heavy in the world below, relaxed
My weary thoughts among their guiltless sports,
And led them by their little hands afield,
And watched them run and crop the tempting flower-
Which oft, unasked, they brought me, and bestowed
With smiling face, that waited for a look

Of praise—and answered curious questions, put
In much simplicity, but ill to solve;
And heard their observations strange and new;
And settled whiles their little quarrels, soon
Ending in peace, and soon forgot in love.
And still I looked upon their loveliness,
And sought through nature for similitudes
Of perfect beauty, innocence, and bliss,
And fairest imagery around me thronged;
Dew-drops at day-spring on a seraph's locks,

Roses that bathe about the well of life,

Young Loves, young Hopes, dancing on Morning's cheek, Gems leaping in the coronet of Love!

(From Book V.)

A too bulky and detailed Memoir of Pollok by his brother was published in 1843. The pathos of his short life is well brought out in the little book in the 'Scots' series, by Miss Rosaline Masson, on the strangely contrasted pair, Pollok and Aytoun (1899). The Course of Time reached its twenty-fifth edition in 1867 (12,000 copies were sold the first eighteen months). On his tombstone in the Millbrook churchyard at Southampton stands the ominous epitaph His immortal poem is his monument.' For the immortal poem, like the tombstone, is sought after by few, and, save in occasional quotation, all but forgotten.

795

N 1792 Burns wrote in his first letter to George Thomson : 'Apropos, if you are for English verses, there is on my part an end of the matter. Whether in the simplicity of the ballad or the pathos of the song, I can only hope to please myself in being allowed at least a sprinkling of our native tongue.' So that Burns, who fairly represented the practice of his older contemporaries, and who became the standard of all later writers of Scottish verse, followed Ramsay's nondescript and elastic linguistic principle, and with better taste and vastly greater command of his instrument wrote-at times indiscriminately — almost pure English, nearly the broadest surviving vernacular, or a broken English, more or less largely 'sprinkled' with Scotch words. Sometimes even the words were not vernacular Scotch, but archaisms taken from Ramsay (who, as Lord Hailes proved, in ancient Scotch was sadly to seek); sometimes, as Dr Murray has pointed out, they were not Scotch words at all, but 'fancy Scotch' made by Scottifying ordinary English words on an assumed analogy. As a rule Burns was most broadly Scotch when he was most jocular, most largely English when the matter was most serious. In the longer poems, as The Cotter's Saturday Night, some verses are pure English, some nearly pure vernacular, and some a curious arbitrary mixture. Only in some of the songs does the (largely Anglicised) Scotch of his Ayrshire neighbours form the warp and woof of the whole, with English words thrown in. In some of the songs that are reckoned quite Scotch the blend is still more curious-the diction is substantially English, or even the somewhat stilted 'poetic diction' of contemporary southern versewriters, with a few of the words translated into imitation Scotch. 'My Nannie's awa' is one of Burns's most popular 'Scotch' songs, but nothing is less like the language of Scottish shepherds of any date than :

Now in her green mantle blithe nature arrays,

And listens the lambkins that bleat o'er the braes.

Braes is the only genuine Scots word here; 'nature arraying in a green mantle and listening lambkins bleating' being not ordinary but poetic English, such as was used in many of the songbooks current in Burns's time. Most of the

phrases actually occur in the songs given in Cecilia (1784), for example. Dr Murray has said: ""Scots wha hae" is fancy Scotch; that is, it is merely the English "Scots who have" spelled as Scotch. Barbour would have written "Scottis at hes;" Dunbar or Douglas, "Scottis quhilkis hes;" and even Henry Charteris, in the end of the sixteenth century, Scottis quha hes." ... "Scots wha hae wi' Wallace bled," although composed of Scotch words, is not vernacular Scotch any more than "How you carry you?" as a translation of "Comment vous portez vous?" is vernacular English.' Scots at hes,' it may be added, is still the current Scots form, as it was in Burns's time; 'wha hae' appears only as an imitation of Burns's imitation.

North Germans sometimes use Low German words in High German stories, but the stories themselves do not thus become Platt-Deutsch works. And though a southern Frenchman in Paris gives his articles or verses a southern flavouring of words or phrases from his native Nîmes or Avignon, he is not therefore ranked amongst Provençal authors. Nor would Burns have been the greatest of writers in Scottish dialect unless he had in many of his best poems closely followed the Scottish spoken vernacular of his time. But, as we have seen from his own explicit testimony, while refusing to write 'English verses' at all, Burns was content to write Scotch verses' in which there was merely a 'sprinkling of his native tongue.' And this whether he was bowdlerising the old Scots songs for Thomson, making new ones to the old tunes and with the old refrains, or inditing his own most spontaneous and original strains. Most of his contemporaries, earlier and later, and almost all his successors have adopted a similarly fluctuating standard of mixed dialect; for many, Burns's very modest minimum of Scotticism has amply sufficed. But when it is remembered that the actually spoken Scotch has long been itself a mixed tongue, a patois rather than a dialect, their practice is not so strange as at first it might appear. Most Scottish writers, accepting Beattie's dictum (page 308) that 'to write in the vulgar broad Scotch and yet write seriously had become impossible,' essayed at times to find or construct a dialect which was not vulgar and was not exactly broad Scotch.

Father Geddes's remarks, quoted below (page 799), are interesting as coming from a philological

scholar of great acquirements and thoroughly familiar with the vernacular. In the introduction to one of his own poems, Sir Alexander Boswell, one of Burns's most fervent admirers, and author of some of the most popular and 'broadest' Scotch songs since Burns's time, admirably and authoritatively summed up the case as it stood in 1810 with regard to the mixed dialects of English and Scotch, which, though they afford so many facilities in measure and rhyme, are, I am told, not quite legitimate. I shall therefore [in this particular poem] endeavour to confine myself to that which, till the Gentle Shepherd once more awoke the Scottish reed, seemed to be for ever the destined dialect of British Poesy. But while our later Bards have wooed the Scottish muse-and even Robert Burns is subject to the criticismone-half of what has been written, by a slight alteration of vowels and a few consonants added or subtracted, becomes plain English. Jamieson will tell you it is not Scotch; but it is a pleasing mélange, which carries to the soul the sweetest sentiments, and we care not how we come by them.'

Doctor

Sir Alexander's pronouncement holds good of the score of Burns's contemporaries, earlier and later, from whom extracts are given below. Some of the minor writers have left a few admirable but whether for songs or total achievesongs; ment, none of them stands near Burns, and none of them is worthy to be named beside him save Fergusson of those earlier in date, and Tannahill and Lady Nairne amongst those who were born soon after him. Meanwhile the principal writers of Scottish birth and blood were doing their best in book English. What they accomplished may be seen in the preceding pages, and may be recalled here by the names of Beattie, Bruce, and Logan, Macpherson and Mickle, the two Blairs, Dugald Stewart, Henry Mackenzie, Mackintosh, Bruce and Mungo Park, Grahame and Leyden, Joanna Baillie and Thomas Campbell.

D. P.

Jean Elliot and Mrs Cockburn. - Two songs, both by women, and both bearing the name of The Flowers of the Forest, still divide the favour of lovers of Scottish song. The first, bewailing the losses sustained at Flodden, was written by Jean Elliot of Minto (1727-1805), daughter of Sir Gilbert Elliot, and sister of the author of the lyric, My sheep I neglected, I broke my sheep-hook' (page 423). The second song (1765), which is usually taken to have been on the same subject, was in reality occasioned by the bankruptcy of a number of gentlemen in Selkirkshire; it was written by Alicia Cockburn (1713-95), the daughter of Robert Rutherford of Fernilie, who in 1731 married Patrick Cockburn, advocate, and died in Edinburgh. Most modern Scotsmen agree with Allan Cunningham in preferring Miss Elliot's song; but both have their merits; the second is most usually sung. Sir Walter Scott praises the

David Herd (1732-1810) did for Scottish song what Bishop Percy had done for the old English ballads. The son of a farmer in Kincardineshire, he became an accountant's clerk in Edinburgh, and devoted the scanty leisure and savings of a bachelor life to the acquisition of a valuable library and a sound knowledge of the popular lyric poetry of Scotland. Sir Walter Scott, who praises his 'shrewd manly common-sense and antiquarian science,' made use of his rich manuscript collections for the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, and recent editors of Burns have been glad to draw illustrations from the same source. His Ancient Scottish Songs, Heroic Ballads, &c., appeared at first anonymously in a single volume in 1769, and afterwards, with his name, in two volumes, in 1776 (the best edition) and 1791. It was, as Scott described it, 'the first classical collection' of the kind, for the earliest Scottish song-books do not count for much as literature; and the Ancient Scottish Poems of Lord Hailes (1770) were not songs, but a more critical reprint of some of the contents of the Bannatyne MS. than Allan Ramsay had presented in his Evergreen (1724-27), called a collection of 'Scots poems wrote by the ingenious before 1600.' Watson's Choice Collection of Scottish Poems (1706–11) contained only a few songs, such as 'Old Long Syne,' 'Lady Anne Bothwell's Lament,' and the verses attributed to Montrose, and these are not Scotch in language at all. More notable in this regard is Allan Ramsay's Tea-Table Miscellany, the first volume of which appeared in 1724. Ramsay printed some of the older songs, and published many from the pens of contemporary verse-writers like Robert Crawford and the Hamiltons of Bangour and Gilbertfield (pages 309, 310). But not a few of these new songs were eighteenth-century English in language and sentiment; too many of the old ones were the spurious imitations produced by Durfey and his school; and nowhere is Ramsay's treatment of his texts to be trusted. Quite as uncritical was the Orpheus Caledonius, a collection of songs (largely appropriated from the Tea-Table Miscellany, which, however, revenged itself by such reprisals as that of Lady Grizel Baillie's famous song) set to music and published by a certain William Thomson in 1725–33. Of the same order were the collection of Scottish melodies by James Oswald, Yair's Charmer (1749-51), and the selection entitled The Lark -the last a Scottish and English medley, blending 'Todlin Hame' and 'The Ewe Bughts,' 'Waly, waly' and 'The Blithesome Bridal,' with 'Chevy Chace,' first issued in London in 1746, and reprinted at Edinburgh in an edition which contained Mrs Cockburn's 'Flowers of the Forest,' and is known to have been possessed by Burns. On such merely popular publications the critical collection of Herd was a great advance. His texts have always enjoyed the reputation of superior accuracy, and his choice of specimens is ample |

and judicious. Ballads as well as songs were included in his work, and it is noteworthy that when one has made subtraction from it of 'Gil Morice' and 'Sir Patrick Spens' and their like, as well as of Anglicised verses like 'The Bush aboon Traquair' and the 'Broom o' the Cowdenknowes,' very little of what is now recognised as classical Scottish song remains. The majority and assuredly the best of the genuine old Scottish songs printed by Herd are of the bacchanalian, comicamorous, and not always too decorous kind, exemplified by The Tailor,' 'The Bob o' Dumblane,' and 'Todlin Hame.' Songs of passion and pathos, such as are now taken as typical of Scottish minstrelsy, are conspicuously few. They make

their appearance first from the master-hand of Burns in James Johnson's Scots Musical Museum (1787-1803) and George Thomson's Collection of Scottish Songs and Airs (1793-1841), which, by grace of the genius of their chief contributor rather than through any editorial scholarship, rank along with Herd's modest anthology as the great books of Scottish song. Pinkerton's rather unreliable Select Scotish Ballads (1783; Pinkerton and some others made a point of spelling Scotish) and Joseph Ritson's scholarly volume of Scottish Songs (1794) also deserve mention. St Cecilia, or the Lady's and Gentleman's Harmonious Companion, also called Wilson's Musical Miscellany, published at Edinburgh for C. Wilson' in 1779, was of the Lark type. It complained that all previous collections 'had one general fault-viz. that they abounded too much with obscene songs, that tend to suppress virtue; which proves that the editors thereof have had but a mean taste. . . . Particular care hath been taken in the selection of this collection, and nothing is inserted that can give the least offence to that delicacy of taste for which the present age is so remarkable;' and yet used considerable freedom in this very department. This collection, English and Scotch, contains many of the Scotch songs Burns commended and imitated, and was doubtless known to him. The Chearful Companion (Perth, 1780; 3rd ed. 1790) was one of several provincial song-books in common use. A good reprint of Herd's collection was published in 1869.

Robert Graham (c. 1735-97) of Gartmore inherited the family estate (part of it handed on from the last Earl of Menteith) on the death of his brother William in 1774. He assumed the name of Cunninghame before Graham (Cunninghame-Graham) on succeeding to the estates of the Glencairn earldom at the death of his cousin, the fifteenth and last Earl of Glencairn (1796), through his mother, Lady Margaret Cunninghame, daughter of William, twelfth Earl. Graham studied at Glasgow, was for some years Receiver-General of Jamaica, and from 1794 to 1796 was M.P. for Stirlingshire. An advanced Liberal, the friend of Charles James Fox, and an