as peculiarly a verse-hater, and 'puts into his mouth
that condemnation of elegant pursuits which he imputes to the whole
party;' 'overlooking or suppressing the fact,' says the Doctor, 'that
there was at that very time in the camp of the Covenanters a man who,
besides his other accomplishments, was a poet superior to any on the
opposite side.' It is equally a fact, however, and shows how thoroughly
the mind of even a highly intellectual people may be prostrated by a
long course of tyranny and persecution, that Scotland had properly no
literature after the extinction of its old classical school in the
person of Drummond of Hawthornden, until the rise of Thomson. The age in
England of Milton and of Cowley, of Otway, of Waller, of Butler, of
Dryden, and of Denham, was in Scotland an age without a poet vigorous
enough to survive in his writings his own generation. For even the
greater part of the popular version of its Psalms, our Church was
indebted to the English lawyer Rous. Here and there we may find in it the
remains of an earlier and more classical time: its version of the
hundredth Psalm, for instance, with its quaintly-turned but stately
octo-syllabic stanzas, was written nearly a hundred years earlier than
most of the others, by William Keith, a Scottish contemporary of Beza
and Buchanan, and one of the translators of the Geneva Bible. But we
find little else that is Scotch in it; the Church to which, in the
previous age, the author of the most elegant version of the Psalms ever
given to the world had belonged, had now--notwithstanding the
exertions of its Zachary Boyds--to import its poetry. In the following
century, the Church shared in the general literature of the time. She
missed, and but barely missed, having one of its greatest poets to
herself--the poet Thomson--who at least carried on his studies so far
with a view to her ministry, as to commence delivering his probationary
discourses. We fear, however, he would have made but an indolent
minister; and that, though his occasional sermons, judging from the
hymn which concludes the _Seasons_, might have been singularly fine
ones, they would have been marvellously few, and very often repeated. The
greatest poet that did actually arise within the Church during the
century was Thomson's contemporary, Robert Blair,--a man who was not an
idle minister, and who, unlike his cousin Hugh, belonged to the
evangelical side. The author of the _Grave_ was one of the bosom