ped into his
mind that the orbs, floating in space, might be called the CLUSTER of
creation, he thinks of a cluster of grapes, and says, that they all hang
on the great vine, drinking the "nectareous juice of immortal life." His
conceits are sometimes yet less valuable. In the "Last Day" he hopes to
illustrate the reassembly of the atoms that compose the human body
at the "Trump of Doom" by the collection of bees into a swarm at the
tinkling of a pan. The Prophet says of Tyre that "her merchants are
princes." Young says of Tyre in his "Merchant,"

"Her merchants princes, and each DECK A THRONE."

Let burlesque try to go beyond him.

He has the trick of joining the turgid and familiar: to buy the alliance
of Britain, "Climes were paid down." Antithesis is his favourite, "They
for kindness hate:" and "because she's right, she's ever in the wrong."
His versification is his own; neither his blank nor his rhyming
lines have any resemblance to those of former writers; he picks up no
hemistichs, he copies no favourite expressions; he seems to have laid
up no stores of thought or diction, but to owe all to the fortuitous
suggestions of the present moment. Yet I have reason to believe that,
when once he had formed a new design, he then laboured it with very
patient industry; and that he composed with great labour and frequent
revisions. His verses are formed by no certain model; he is no more like
himself in his different productions than he is like others. He seems
never to have studied prosody, nor to have had any direction but from
his own ear. But with all his defects, he was a man of genius and a
poet.

MALLET.

Of David Mallet, having no written memorial, I am able to give no other
account than such as is supplied by the unauthorised loquacity of common
fame, and a very slight personal knowledge. He was by his original one
of the Macgregors, a clan that became, about sixty years ago, under the
conduct of Robin Roy, so formidable and so infamous for violence and
robbery, that the name was annulled by a legal abolition; and when they
were all to denominate themselves anew, the father, I suppose, of this
author, called himself Malloch.

David Malloch was, by the penury of his parents, compelled to be Janitor
of the High School at Edinburgh, a mean office of which he did not
afterwards delight to hear. But he surmounted the disadvantages of his
birth and fortune; for, when the Duke of Montrose applied to th