1810, deserves a few lines in
this tale of Scots singers. Tannahill, like Cunningham in humble
circumstances originally, never became more than a weaver. His verse has
not the _gusto_ of Allan or of Hogg, but is sweet and tender enough.
William Motherwell too, as much younger than Allan as Tannahill was
older (he was born in 1797 and died young in 1835), deserves mention,
and may best receive it here. He was a Conservative journalist, an
antiquary of some mark, and a useful editor of Minstrelsy. Of his
original work, "Jeanie Morrison" is the best known; and those who have
read, especially if they have read it in youth, "The Sword Chant of
Thorstein Raudi," will not dismiss it as Wardour Street; while he did
some other delightful things. Earlier (1812) the heroicomic _Anster
Fair_ of William Tennant (1784-1848) received very high and deserved no
low praise; while William Thom, a weaver like Tannahill, who was a year
younger than Motherwell and lived till 1848, wrote many simple ballads
in the vernacular, of which the most touching are perhaps "The Song of
the Forsaken" and "The Mitherless Bairn."

To return to England, Bryan Waller Procter, who claimed kindred with the
poet from whom he took his second name, was born in 1790, went to
Harrow, and, becoming a lawyer, was made a Commissioner of Lunacy. He
did not die till 1874; and he, and still more his wife, were the last
sources of direct information about the great race of the first third of
the century. He was, under the pseudonym of "Barry Cornwall," a fluent
verse writer of the so-called cockney school, and had not a little
reputation, especially for songs about the sea and things in general.
They still, occasionally from critics who are not generally under the
bondage of traditional opinion, receive high praise, which the present
writer is totally unable to echo. A loyal junior friend to Lamb, a wise
and kindly senior to Beddoes, liked and respected by many or by all,
Procter, as a man, must always deserve respect. If

The sea, the sea, the open sea,
The blue, the fresh, the ever free,

and things like it are poetry, I admit myself, with a sad humility, to
be wholly destitute of poetical appreciation.

The Church of England contributed two admirable verse writers of this
period in Henry Cary and Reginald Heber. Cary, who was born in 1772 and
was a Christ Church man, was long an assistant librarian in the British
Museum. His famous translation of the _Di