f Homer in his head, and his bow and arrow in his hand; in calmer
hours, he nearly completed a spirited version of Hesiod, which
constantly occupied his after-studies; yet our minstrel-archer did not
less love the severer sciences.

Selected at length to rise to the eminent station of the Village
Schoolmaster,--from the thankless office of pouring cold rudiments
into heedless ears, RITSON took a poetical flight. It was among the
mountains and wild scenery of Scotland that our young Homer, picking
up fragments of heroic songs, and composing some fine ballad poetry,
would, in his wanderings, recite them with such passionate expression,
that he never failed of auditors; and found even the poor generous,
when their better passions were moved. Thus he lived, like some old
troubadour, by his rhymes, and his chants, and his virelays; and,
after a year's absence, our bard returned in the triumph of verse.
This was the most seducing moment of life; RITSON felt himself a
laureated Petrarch; but he had now quitted his untutored but feeling
admirers, and the child of fancy was to mix with the everyday business
of life.

At Edinburgh he studied medicine, lived by writing theses for the
idle and the incompetent, and composed a poem on Medicine, till at
length his hopes and his ambition conducted him to London. But the
golden age of the imagination soon deserted him in his obscure
apartment in the glittering metropolis. He attended the hospitals,
but these were crowded by students who, if they relished the
science less, loved the trade more: he published a hasty version
of Homer's Hymn to Venus, which was good enough to be praised, but
not to sell; at length his fertile imagination, withering over the
taskwork of literature, he resigned fame for bread; wrote the preface
to Clarke's Survey of the Lakes, compiled medical articles for the
Monthly Review; and, wasting fast his ebbing spirits, he retreated to
an obscure lodging at Islington, where death relieved a hopeless
author, in the twenty-seventh year of his life.

The following unpolished lines were struck off at a heat in trying his
pen on the back of a letter; he wrote the names of the Sister Fates,
Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos--the sudden recollection of his own fate
rushed on him--and thus the rhapsodist broke out:--

I wonder much, as yet ye're spinning, Fates!
What threads yet twisted out for me, old jades!
Ah, Atropos! perhaps for me thou spinn'st
Neglect, co