nd great
beauty; and, liberally as she bestowed benefactions on her fellow-kind
in many other respects, it may be said no gifts conferred could bear in
their beneficial effects a comparison to the songs which she has
written. Her strains thrilled along the chords of a common nature,
beguiling ruder thought into a more tender and generous tone, and
lifting up the lower towards the loftier feeling. If feeling constitutes
the nursery of much that is desirable in national character, it is no
less true that well assorted and confirmed nationality will always prove
the most trustworthy and lasting safeguard of freedom. It is the
combination of heart--the universal unity of sentiment--which renders a
people powerful in the preservation of right and privilege, home and
hearth; and few things of merely human origin will serve more thoroughly
to promote such unity, than the songs of a song-loving people. The
continual tendency of these is to imbue all with the same sentiment, and
to awaken, and keep awake, those sympathies which lead mankind to a
knowledge of themselves individually, and of one another in general,
thus preventing the different grades of society from diverging into
undue extremes of distinction. Nor ought the observation to be omitted,
that if a lady of high standing in society, of genius, refined taste and
feeling, and withal of singular purity of heart, could write songs that
the inhabitants of her native land could so warmly appreciate as by
their singing to render them popular, it would evince no inconsiderable
worth in that people that she could so sympathise and so identify
herself with them.

From the position and circumstances of Lady Nairn, those of the Ettrick
Shepherd were entirely different. Hogg was one of the people. To write
songs calculated to be popular, he needed only to embody forth in poetic
shape what he felt and understood from the actual experiences of life
amid the scenes and circumstances in which he had been born and bred;
his compeers, forming that class of society in which it has been thought
the nature of man wears least disguise, were his first patrons. He
required, therefore, less than Lady Nairn the exercise of that sympathy
by which we place ourselves in the circumstances of others, and know how
in these, others think and feel. His poetic effusions were homely and
graphic, both in their sprightful humour and more tender sentiment. They
were sung by the shepherd on the hill, and the