the influence of classic lore prevailed less perhaps than in the other, which included the chief seat of government; and its poets, thrown more into the bosom of nature, or in other words, on their own resources, sought at hand, and found, all the materials of song which their more eastern brethren found, too readily sometimes, in the pages of Greece and Rome. Thus in Ramsay we see no traces of foreign imitation; his Gentle Shepherd, the only true pastoral of the island, is copied, language, scene, and sentiment, from his native glens: Burns went at once and drank at the fountain-head, and obeying only the voice of nature, sang with a freedom, a manliness, and a grace, equal to the palmiest times of the muse: while Hogg, yielding to the wild and supernatural impulses of his fine imagination, sang a most romantic and wayward strain, but in which there is nothing, not even a line, of the romance of other lands; all is of the Ettrick and the Yarrow natural and national.

The birth-place of Burns, like the dwelling-places of other bards, has had its revolutions. The houses in which Milton lived are cast down; the home of Shakspeare has become a butcher's shop; through part of the abode of Cowley the members of a turnpike trust have driven a road; in the grove of Pope, the nightingale of Twickenham, birds, but not of song, roost and abide; while in the cottage of Burns an alehouse keeper bottles off his barrels, and makes an honest penny of passers by, who halt to look at the place whence the great light of Scottish song came. All around are to be seen places made sacred by his muse: every hill has its fame; every stream its praise; every wood its immortality; nor has the poet failed to consecrate in verse the rude structure which has

been described. In the words uttered by the midwife in the hour of his birth, he indicates the fame which awaits him.

"He'll be a credit to us a',

We'll a' be proud of Robin."

A random sentiment of his own-but now the fixed opinion of mankind.

TAM O' SHANTER.

"So Maggie runs, the witches follow,
Wi' mony an eldrich screech and hollow."

is

THE Scene of this most vivid and varied of all poems on the banks of the Doon, and the story is embellished from tradition by the genius of the poet. It has, so far, a foundation in truth: but men without fancy have striven to find for every image and incident a real and substantial origin, as if all the bright threads of the magic web of the story were spun from a veritable distaff, and the characters and incidents which compose it had come, like sitters to a portrait painter, to have their likenesses transferred to the poet's canvas. A cupful of truth will color an ocean of fiction: Burns only emblazoned his tale with a few localities, to give it the air of the district, and never imagined that he was writing a story—

"Whose accuracy all men durst swear for."

Yet I have met with men, and critical ones, who averred that they had tippled with the real and original Tam o' Shanter, in the company of the miller and the smith; had heard the souter tell his queerest stories, when the landlord laughed and the landlady was condescending and more than that, assert, that this poem, written on the banks of Nith, was conceived on those of Doon; and that they knew the scenes where the characters of the drama dwelt; and were intimate with Nanny, who wore the

:

sark of Paisley harn, and had heard more of her spells than Burns had related. Those men no doubt believed what they asserted; but they were ignorant of the ways of the muse; they were unacquainted with her secrets of composition; and as fancy was unknown to them, they supposed that Burns, like a portrait painter, could not paint truly without individual models. Well may we exclaim, with the poet of another isle

The very scene which the poet's fancy has so strangely peopled, is seen through the poetic medium of a thunderstorm, and by a man excited by superstition and liquor. All that gives air and force to the tale is matter of imagination.

Of the realities embellished by the muse, something, however, may be said. I allude not to the Howff in the town of Ayr, where Tam merrily prepared himself for the road; nor to Doon, with all her floods spanned by a solitary arch; but I mean the storm of rain and fire through which he galloped, and the images of fear and terror which in quick succession prepared him for the blazing kirk and its infernal inmates. "I seem to gain, in buffeting with the wind," says Sir Walter Scott, in his inimitable Diary for 1825, "a little of the high spirit with which in younger days I used to enjoy a Tam o' Shanter ride through darkness, wind, and rain, the boughs groaning and cracking over my head, the good horse free to the road and impatient for home, and feeling the weather as little as I did.

'The storm around might rair and rustle,

We didna mind the storm a whistle.""

If the intrepid poet of Marmion had taken a midnight gallop over the suspicious way where the stout farmer of Kyle rode, he might have thought less of the fire and the storm, than of the place where the pedlar perished in the snow; the stone which broke the neck of tippling Charlie; the cairn where hunters found the murdered child, and the haunted bush on which the mother of poor Mungo hanged herself. All these touching circumstances are, it is said, matters of tradition or of certainty; and had they not existed, the poet would have supplied their place with something of the like spirit to stimulate Tam, and prepare us for the infernal jubilee.

Of Tam o' Shanter there are few copies existing in the handwriting of Burns: the only one which contains variations is in the library of Abbotsford. A relic so sacred was duly esteemed by its great possessor: he loved to show it to literary visiters, and point out two additional lines which distinguished his copy from all others. I shall put them into their place: they will be easily discovered among their companions, for few who read one can fail to have the poem by heart.

"Care, mad to see a man sae happy,

E'en drown'd himsel amang the nappy.
As bees flee hame wi' lades o' treasure,
The minutes wing'd their way wi' pleasure.
The cricket raised its cheering cry,

The kittlen chased its tail in joy.

Kings may be blest, but Tam was glorious,
O'er a' the ills o' life victorious."

A poem which Campbell, Wordsworth, and Scott have praised, and on which Cooper has employed his pencil, requires no further commendation. It was written on Nithside, as a bribe to induce Grose to admit Alloway