poets of the Church, of whom the
Church has not been greatly in the habit of boasting. Of Home, by a
curious chance the successor of Blair in his parish, little need be
said. He produced one good play and five enormously bad ones; and his
connection with the Church was very much an accident, and soon dissolved.
Blacklock, too, was as much a curiosity as a poet; and, save for his
blindness, would scarce have been very celebrated in even his own day.
Nor was Ogilvie, though more favourably regarded by Johnson than most
of his Scottish contemporaries, other than a mediocre poet. He is the
author, however, of a very respectable paraphrase--the sixty-second--of
all his works the one that promises to live longest; and we find the
productions of several other poets of the Church similarly preserved,
whose other writings have died. And yet the group of Scottish _literati_
that produced our paraphrases, if looking simply to literary
accomplishment--we do not demand genius--must be regarded as a very
remarkable one, when we consider that the greater number of the
individuals which composed it were all at one time the ministers of a
single Church, and that one of the smallest. We know of no Church,
either in Britain or elsewhere, that could now command such a
committee as that which sat, at the bidding of the General Assembly,
considerably more than sixty years ago, to prepare the 'Translations and
Paraphrases.' Of the sixty-eight pieces of which the collection is
composed, thirty are the work of Scottish ministers; and the groundwork
of most of the others, furnished in large part by the previously
existing writings of Watts and Doddridge, has been greatly improved,
in at least the composition, by the emendations of Morrison and Logan.
With all its faults, we know of no other collection equal to it as a
whole. The meretricious stanzas of Brady and Tate are inanity itself in
comparison. True, the later Blair, though always sensible, was ofttimes
quite heavy enough in the pieces given to him to render--more so than
in his prose; though, even when first introduced to that, Cowper could
exclaim, not a little to the chagrin of those who regarded it as
perfection of writing: 'Oh, the sterility of that man's fancy! if,
indeed, he has any such faculty belonging to him. Dr. Blair has such a
brain as Shakespeare somewhere describes, "dry as the remainder biscuit
after a voyage.'" But the fancy that Blair wanted, poor Logan had; and
the man