have been false taste and delicacy
in such a man to have forborne speaking of himself. His return, after
an absence equal to the term of two full generations, to his native
cottage, is an incident exquisitely poetic. He finds his father's
humble chapel converted into a workshop, and strangers sit beside the
hearth that had once been his mother's. And where were that father and
mother? Their bones moulder in a distant land, where the tombstones
cast no shadow when the fierce sun looks down at noon upon their
graves. 'Taking their lives in their hands,' they had gone abroad to
preach Christ to the poor enslaved negro, for whose soul at that
period scarce any one cared save the United Brethren; and in the midst
of their labours of piety and love, they had fallen victims to the
climate. He passed through the cottage and the workshop, calling up
the dream-like recollections of his earliest scene of existence, and
recognising one by one the once familiar objects within. One object he
failed to recognise. It was a small tablet fixed in the wall. He went
up to it, and found it intimated that James Montgomery the poet had
been born there. Was it not almost as if one of the poets or
philosophers of a former time had lighted, on revisiting the earth as
a disembodied spirit, on his own monument? Of scarce less interest is
his anecdote of Monboddo. The parents of the poet had gone abroad, as
we have said, and their little boy was left with the Brethren at
Fulneck, a Moravian settlement in the sister kingdom. He was one of
their younger scholars at a time when Lord Monboddo, still so well
known for his great talents and acquirements, and his scarce less
marked eccentricities, visited the settlement, and was shown, among
other things, their little school. His Lordship stood among the boys,
coiling and uncoiling his whip on the floor, and engaged as if in
counting the nail-heads in the boarding. The little fellows were all
exceedingly curious; none of them had ever seen a real live lord
before, and Monboddo was a very strange-looking lord indeed. He wore a
large, stiff, bushy periwig, surmounted by a huge, odd-looking hat;
his very plain coat was studded with brass buttons of broadest disk,
and his voluminous inexpressibles were of leather. And there he stood,
with his grave, absent face bent downwards, drawing and redrawing his
whip along the floor, as the Moravian, his guide, pointed out to his
notice boy after boy. 'And this,' said