he lantern's dripping light,
At either end a-dwining.
Where was there one more low than thou--
Thou least of meanest things?[101]
And where than his was higher place
Except the throne of kings?
Oh, long, long, &c.!

[101] At this humiliating apostrophe, the beggar is reported to have
instinctively raised his staff--an action which the bard observed just
in time to avoid its descent on his back.

DOUGAL BUCHANAN.

Dougal Buchanan was born at the Mill of Ardoch, in the beautiful valley
of Strathyre, and parish of Balquhidder, in the year 1716. His parents
were in circumstances to allow him the education of the parish school;
on which, by private application, he so far improved, as to be qualified
to act as teacher and catechist to the Highland locality which borders
on Loch Rannoch, under the appointment of the Society for Propagating
Christian Knowledge. Never, it is believed, were the duties of a calling
discharged with more zeal and efficiency. The catechist was, both in and
out of the strict department of his office, a universal oracle,[102] and
his name is revered in the scene of his usefulness in a degree to which
the honours of canonization could scarcely have added. Pious, to the
height of a proverbial model, he was withal frank, cheerful, and social;
and from his extraordinary command of the Gaelic idiom, and its poetic
phraseology, he must have lent an ear to many a song and many a
legend[103]--a nourishment of the imagination in which, as well as in
purity of Gaelic, his native Balquhidder was immeasurably inferior to
the Rannoch district of his adoption.

The composition of hymns, embracing a most eloquent and musical
paraphrase of many of the more striking inspirations of scriptural
poetry, seems to have been the favourite employment of his leisure
hours. These are sung or recited in every cottage of the Highlands where
a reader or a retentive memory is to be found.

Buchanan's life was short. He was cut off by typhus fever, at a period
when his talents had begun to attract a more than local attention. It
was within a year after his return from superintending the press of the
first version of the Gaelic New Testament, that his lamented death took
place. His command of his native tongue is understood to have been
serviceable to the translator, the Rev. James Stewart of Killin, who had
probably been Buchanan's early acquaintance, as they were natives of the