or by fame, are forgotten. 'The Iniquity of Oblivion blindly scattereth
his Poppy.'

Had you been born some years earlier you would have been even as
these unnamed Immortals, leaving great verses to a little clan--verses
retained only by Memory. You would have been but the minstrel of your
native valley: the wider world would not have known you, nor you the
world. Great thoughts of independence and revolt would never have burned
in you; indignation would not have vexed you. Society would not have
given and denied her caresses. You would have been happy. Your songs
would have lingered in all 'the circle of the summer hills;' and your
scorn, your satire, your narrative verse, would have been unwritten or
unknown. To the world what a loss! and what a gain to you! We should
have possessed but a few of your lyrics, as

When o'er the hill the eastern star
Tells bughtin-time is near, my jo;
And owsen frae the furrowed field,
Return sae dowf and wearie O!

How noble that is, how natural, how unconsciously Greek! You found,
oddly, in good Mrs. Barbauld, the merits of the Tenth Muse:

In thy sweet sang, Barbauld, survives
Even Sappho's flame!

But how unconsciously you remind us both of Sappho and of Homer in these
strains about the Evening Star and the hour when the Day _metenisseto
boulytoide_?* Had you lived and died the pastoral poet of some silent
glen, such lyrics could not but have survived; free, too, of all that
in your songs reminds us of the Poet's Corner in the 'Kirkcudbright
Advertiser.' We should not have read how

Phoebus, gilding the brow o' morning,
Banishes ilk darksome shade!

Still we might keep a love-poem unexcelled by Catullus,

Had we never loved sae kindly,
Had we never loved sae blindly,
Never met--or never parted,
We had ne'er been broken-hearted.

But the letters to Clarinda would have been unwritten, and the thrush
would have been untaught in 'the style of the Bird of Paradise.'

*Transliterated from Greek.

A quiet life of song, _fallentis semita vitae_', was not to be yours.
Fate otherwise decreed it. The touch of a lettered society, the strife
with the Kirk, discontent with the State, poverty and pride, neglect and
success, were needed to make your Genius what it was, and to endow the
world with 'Tam o' Shanter,' the 'Jolly Beggars,' and 'Holy Willie's
Prayer.' Who can praise them too highly--who admire in them too much the
humour, the scorn, the wis