rty of the Duke of
Buccleuch, and of a mother whose family have been tenants on the same
estate for nearly two hundred years, was born at Drumcrool, in the
parish of Durrisdeer, and county of Dumfries, on the 25th June 1812. At
the age of sixteen, in February 1828, he arrived in London, and entered
a house of business in the city. During the nine ensuing years, he
assiduously pursued his avocation, and strove to make himself master of
the elements and practice of trade. In 1837 he commenced on his own
responsibility, and every succeeding year has advanced him in mercantile
prosperity and position. Now, at the head of the firm of Bennoch,
Twentyman, & Rigg, wholesale traders and manufacturers, there is no name
in the city more universally respected.

In the corporate body of the city of London Mr Bennoch for some years
took a prominent part as a citizen, a common councilman, and lastly as
the deputy of a ward. An independent man and a reformer of abuses, he
has so managed his opposition to measures, and even to men, as to win
the warm approval of his own friends, and the respect of the leaders of
all parties. His plans for bridging the Thames may be referred to in
proof of his patriotic devotedness to improvement.

Influenced in his youth by the genius of the locality in which he was
born, to which the Ayrshire Ploughman had left a legacy of immortal
song, succeeded by Allan Cunningham, and a number of distinguished
followers, it was not, however, till he had been two years a denizen of
the metropolis that Mr Bennoch's Scottish feeling sought to vent itself
in verse. The love of country is as inherent and vehement in the
children of the North as in the Swiss mountaineers; wheresoever they
wander from it, their hearts yearn towards the fatherland--

"Land of brown heath and shaggy wood,
Land of the mountain and the flood,
Land of their sires"--

with the same cherished and enduring affection which excites in the
_Rans des Vaches_ so overpowering a sympathy. And the pastoral is
perhaps even more replete with the poetical elements than the "stern and
wild." It is amid such scenes as the Doon, the Tweed, the Teviot, the
Ettrick, the Gala, and the Nith adorn, that the jaded senses are prone
to seek recreation, and the spirit, tired with work or worn with cares,
flees rejoicingly from the world to the repose of its first breathing
and time-sweetened, boyish delights. Thus we find young Bennoch, amid
the clatte