rue pathos and sublime of
human life." His prose-letters are sometimes tinctured with affectation.
They seem written by a man who has been admired for his wit, and is
expected on all occasions to shine. Those in which he expresses his
ideas of natural beauty in reference to Alison's Essay on Taste, and
advocates the keeping up the remembrances of old customs and seasons,
are the most powerfully written. His English serious odes and moral
stanzas are, in general, failures, such as The Lament, Man was made to
Mourn, &c. nor do I much admire his "Scots wha hae wi' Wallace bled." In
this strain of didactic or sentimental moralising, the lines to
Glencairn are the most happy, and impressive. His imitations of the old
humorous ballad style of Ferguson's songs are no whit inferior to the
admirable originals, such as "John Anderson, my Joe," and many more. But
of all his productions, the pathetic and serious love-songs which he has
left behind him, in the manner of the old ballads, are perhaps those
which take the deepest and most lasting hold of the mind. Such are the
lines to Mary Morison, and those entitled Jessy.

"Here's a health to ane I lo'e dear--
Here's a health to ane I lo'e dear--
Thou art sweet as the smile when fond lovers meet,
And soft as their parting tear--Jessy!

Altho' thou maun never be mine,
Altho' even hope is denied;
'Tis sweeter for thee despairing,
Than aught in the world beside--Jessy!"

The conclusion of the other is as follows.

"Yestreen, when to the trembling string
The dance gaed through the lighted ha',
To thee my fancy took its wing,
I sat, but neither heard nor saw.
Tho' this was fair, and that was bra',
And yon the toast of a' the town,
I sighed and said among them a',
Ye are na' Mary Morison."

That beginning, "Oh gin my love were a bonny red rose," is a piece of
rich and fantastic description. One would think that nothing could
surpass these in beauty of expression, and in true pathos: and nothing
does or can, but some of the old Scotch ballads themselves. There is in
them a still more original cast of thought, a more romantic imagery--
the thistle's glittering down, the gilliflower on the old garden-wall,
the horseman's silver bells, the hawk on its perch--a closer intimacy
with nature, a firmer reliance on it, as the only stock of wealth which
the mind has to resor