d painful his string,
So heavy the letter it grew.

It flew all around,
Till Colin he found,
Then perch'd on his head with the prize;
Whose heart, while he reads,
With tenderness bleeds,
For the pigeon that flutters and dies.

JOHN TAIT.

John Tait was, in early life, devoted to the composition of poetry. In
Ruddiman's _Edinburgh Weekly Magazine_ for 1770, he repeatedly published
verses in the Poet's Corner, with his initials attached, and in
subsequent years he published anonymously the "Cave of Morar," "Poetical
Legends," and other poems. "The Vanity of Human Wishes, an Elegy,
occasioned by the Untimely Death of a Scots Poet," appears under the
signature of J. Tait, in "Poems on Various Subjects by Robert Fergusson,
Part II.," Edinburgh, 1779, 12mo. He was admitted as a Writer to the
Signet on the 21st of November 1781; and in July 1805 was appointed
Judge of Police, on a new police system being introduced into Edinburgh.
In the latter capacity he continued to officiate till July 1812, when a
new Act of Parliament entrusted the settlement of police cases, as
formerly, to the magistrates of the city. Mr Tait died at his house in
Abercromby Place, on the 29th of August 1817.

"The Banks of the Dee," the only popular production from the pen of the
author, was composed in the year 1775, on the occasion of a friend
leaving Scotland to join the British forces in America, who were then
vainly endeavouring to suppress that opposition to the control of the
mother country which resulted in the permanent establishment of American
independence. The song is set to the Irish air of "Langolee." It was
printed in Wilson's Collection of Songs, which was published at
Edinburgh in 1779, with four additional stanzas by a Miss Betsy B----s,
of inferior merit. It was re-published in "The Goldfinch" (Edinburgh,
1782), and afterwards was inserted in Johnson's "Musical Museum." Burns,
in his letter to Mr George Thomson, of 7th April 1793, writes--"'The
Banks of the Dee' is, you know, literally 'Langolee' to slow time. The
song is well enough, but has some false imagery in it; for instance--

"'And sweetly the nightingale sung from the tree.'

In the first place, the nightingale sings in a low bush, but never from
a tree; and, in the second place, there never was a nightingale seen or
heard on the banks of the Dee, or on the banks of any other river in
Scotland. Creative rural imagery is