Famine," it must be upon some other ground than
the injustice or cruelty of the attack upon poor Scotland, or the hardness
of the hits delivered, it may be, by a fist gloved in iron.

Who grudges the attack? Not Sawney himself, if it is made in masterly
style. A magnanimous combatant, who has the true enthusiasm of the fight,
admires the skill of the stroke that threatens him with defeat or death.
Spite, malice, aversion, enmity, are not ingratiating demonstrations. Far
from it. Ill-will is naturally met with ill-will. But besides that which
is unavoidably self-regarding in such a relation of parties, room is open
for views of a more general feature, of a more generous complexion. John
Bull scowls at Sawney, and makes mouths at his oatmeal diet, with lips to
which the memory of his own roast-beef cleaves. The last-mentioned dish is
not altogether unknown north of the Tweed. But John Bull knows not the
unimaginable fact, or knew it not, for the barrier is now widely broken
down. Sawney has humour enough to be amused by the writhing apprehension
of dry and lean fare which deforms the well-fed and jocund face of the
bacon-bolter.

There is in the description and Amabaean lament of the two gaunt and
shivering young Arcadians, and in the cave of the tutelary Goddess,
Famine, the intention at least of the picturesque and poetical. The fault
is, that the thing has no bringing out or completeness. It is
incomposite--as a plan, unintelligible. Are the _dramatis personae_,
Sawney, Jockey, and the Goddess, with Sawney's love, the whole population
of Scotland? Do the two lads, and their sheep, and Famine, occupy the same
sole cave which is all the houses in Scotland? Is it a comprehensive
Allegory under the guise of a pastoral Idyl? A ground is laid; and it is
easy to conceive that a Hogarth in verse, with his stored eye, and that
hand mimic and creative, which, by some unmistaken touch of nature, sets
upon capricious extravagance the known seal of truth, might have finished
a picture which experience itself would have half-believed in spite of its
conviction, that never had there been such an hungered race. But such a
Hogarth in verse was not Churchill. Upon the ground laid, a Satire might
have been made out by such a genius, exaggerated, witty,
poetical--pleasing even to the posterity of the victims. But instead of
crowded ideas, here are but three or four. This writing does, in fact, not
express the national prejudices of South