who too severely criticises his flowing and elegant paraphrases
would do well to beware of the memories of his children. A poet whose
pieces cannot be forgotten may laugh at the critics. Altogether, our
'Translations and Paraphrases' are highly creditable to the literary
taste and ability of the Church during the latter half of the last
century; and it serves to show how very much matters changed in this
respect in about forty years, that while in the earlier period the men
fitted for such work were all to be found within the pale of the
Church's ministry, at a later time, when the late Principal Baird set
himself, with the sanction of the General Assembly, to devise means for
adding to the collection, and for revising our metrical version of the
Psalms, he had to look for assistance almost exclusively to poets
outside the precincts of even its membership.

And yet, even at this later time, the Church had its true poets--poets
who, though, according to Wordsworth, they 'wanted the accomplishment
of verse,' were of larger calibre and greater depth than their
predecessors. Chalmers had already produced his _Astronomical
Discourses_, and poor Edward Irving had begun to electrify his London
audiences with the richly antique imagination and fiery fervour of his
singularly vigorous orations. Stewart of Cromarty, too, though but
comparatively little known, was rising, in his quiet parish church,
into flights of genuine though unmeasured poetry, of an altitude to
which minor poets, in their nicely rounded stanzas, never attain. Nor
is the race yet extinct. Jeffrey used to remark, that he found more
true feeling in the prose of Jeremy Taylor than in the works of all
the second-class British poets put together; and those who would now
wish to acquaint themselves with the higher and more spirit-rousing
poetry of our Church, would have to seek it within earshot of the
pulpits of Bruce, of Guthrie, and of James Hamilton. Still, however,
it ever affords us pleasure to find it in the more conventional form
of classic and harmonious verse. A Church that possesses her poets
gives at least earnest in the fact that she is not falling beneath the
literature of her age; and much on this account, but more, we think,
from their great intrinsic merit, have we been gratified by the
perusal of a volume of poems which has just issued from the press
under the name of one of our younger Free Church ministers, the Rev.
James D. Burns. We are greatly