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threw his native Paisley into a state of sadness and gloom. When the rising tide of the poet's reputation commenced to flow beyond the confines of his own literary circle, and when his love songs had begun to fascinate the blythe milkmaid and the artless young lassie at her spinningwheel, the sad intelligence of his melancholy end arrested the flowing tide. On the 16th of May, 1810, Tannahill walked to Glasgow to see his friend Alexander Borland, with whom he had a long conversation, in the course of which his friend became alarmed by his incoherent and rambling speech. Observing it was vastly different from the clear and well-ordered speech of the Tannahill of other days, he resolved to accompany him to Paisley. When opposite Crookston Castle, almost at the spot where the Poet and the Ettrick Shepherd parted only a few weeks previously, he made an effort to break away from his friend. By this strange action Borland deemed it prudent not to leave him till he saw him safe in his mother's dwelling, with whom he had lived since he returned from Bolton. He was put to bed and left under his mother's care, who, unfortunately, dozed off to sleep on her vigil. About three o'clock in the morning she discovered that he had stolen from his bed and could not be found. An alarm was quickly raised, and a search made. At length his coat and watch were found on the bank of Caudren Burn, and his lifeless body, discovered near-by, was carried to his mother's house by five o'clock on Thursday morning, 17th May, 1810.

Thus terminated the career of one whose intellectual faculties should have been at their highest and best. From his high poetic gifts and past achievements, the world had reason to expect much more in the future, and this expectation would no doubt have been realised had it not. been that a mind diseased thrust him into the merciless grip of relentless Fate.

WM. M'ILWRAITH.

THE SKINNER BI-CENTENARY.

N the evening of Monday, 3rd October, 1921, under

ON the auspices of the Vernacular Circle of the London

Burns Club, a large and distinguished company met in the Holborn Restaurant to do honour to the memory of John Skinner.

Canon Wilkinson, Peterhead, who proposed the toast of the evening, said that in Scotland that night many grateful tributes were being paid to the memory of John Skinner. At his own beloved village of Longside, half a mile from the famous house of Linshart, his successor in office was at that moment extolling the genius and limning the personality of his great predecessor. But none of those rejoicings had the significance of that gathering in the heart of London; for their commemoration was proof, if proof were needed, not only that Skinner's place in literature was acknowledged far beyond the boundaries of his own land, but that his message was of that indomitable stuff which, like Betty Buchan's wincey petticoat, would stand "soakin', and scourin', and wringin', and rubbin', and then be as gweed as on the day it was made!"

NO MILTONIC SPIRIT.

Skinner was no Miltonic spirit who sounded his trumpet among the stars. He kept to the ingle-neuk and the King's highway, where there were weel-kent faces and friendly hearts; and there with unerring insight he read and interpreted and declared the character of his own people and the conscience of his father's house. The modern poet, with his feet in Piccadilly and his mind sweeping the sands of Sahara for a new and startling simile, might be pardoned if he failed to perceive the essential greatness of a genius so beset with limitations that it preferred to find its inspiration, not at the ends of the earth,

but at home. For Skinner was undoubtedly a provincial. He was provincially born, provincially reared, provincially trained. The high road to England was possibly too crowded for his liking; but at any rate his honest brogues never ventured upon it, and only faint adumbrations of the great world-movements of his age penetrated the obscurity of his homely surroundings. Indeed, practically the whole of his long life was passed in one Scottish county, and by far the greater part of it in one secluded corner of the shire. "I'm a faur-traivelled man," boasted the Kirkintilloch shoemaker, "I've been twice tae Mullguy, and ance at Arran, and I've veesited the wife's mother at Auchtermuchty; and, eh, sirs, what an awfu' warld we leeve in !" Skinner, being only a village parson and not a cosmopolitan shoemaker, did not attempt to envisage the universe from the reeking lums of Linshart; and therefore, thanks to the littleness of his environment, he saw less of the grandeur of the world, with its turmoil and its wickedness, and more of its simplicity, its tranquility, and its grace. That was why in his writings there is no vast campus on which the forces of good and evil are arrayed in eternal rivalry, and no great peaks on which the devil strives for the mastery of man's soul.

SCOTTISH DIALECT POETRY.

This, indeed, was the strength, or weakness, just as they cared to regard it, of the great body of Scottish dialect poetry. Their country was peculiarly rich in vernacular verse. Every village had its laureate, every considerable township its little nest of singing-birds. The output was tremendous and persistent, and inevitably there was much that did not rise or get beyond the boundaries of the parish. Pegasus in the paddock had grace, sprightliness, and no small beauty; but his limitations were manifest even to himself, and they welcomed the splendid moment when he broke bounds and pranced bravely on the mountain side, where the winds of heaven played around him and the vision of the world was unrolled. They knew, of

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course, that not all true poetry had this universal note, but they knew also that there could be no great poetry without it; and that was one chief reason why, though Skinner was a fairly prolific writer and gave us many winsome thoughts alluringly expressed, it is simple truth to say that his fame rests almost exclusively on the " Ewie and "Tullochgorum." The most fruitful themes of Scottish lyrical poetry had been threefold-bonnie bruilzies, bonnie sichts, and bonnie Jeans-in other words, the adventure of war; the wantonness and witchery of Nature; and the love of a man for a maid: from Barbour to Burns and from Burns to Charles Murray they had enriched our literature and quickened the springs of our national life. But none of these themes inspired the pen of the poet-priest of Linshart. The " pomp and circumstance of glorious war touched no responsive chord in his nature and set no thought aflame; he never saw "the budding rose above the rose full blown," or if he did he let it bud unlyred; and though the tender passion was real to him, real and beautiful, he chose not to sing of it, and turned to other loves that are no less inseparable from the human heart, and as precious to the understanding of every age. What Burns saw in the "wee, modest, crimson-tipped flower," Skinner saw in our ewie wi' the crookit horn ❞—-helplessness, innocence, simplicity ruthlessly done to death; and he sang of it so wistfully, with such homely grace and couthy humour, that the pools of pity which lie deep among the bents of the Scottish character were stirred instantly by the compassion of his appeal. Tullochgorum," on the other hand, is a song of sunny-hearted fellowship it lifts brotherhood out of the atmosphere of the coldly ethical, and reveals it as a neighbourly thing, full of the joy of life, of genial, understanding tolerance, and of the charity that suffereth long and is kind. Thus, notwithstanding the limitations to which he had referred, John Skinner sounded two notes that had an eternal meaning and a universal range; and the obscure village parson, the casual clinker of rhymes, became one of the most notable

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figures of his generation, a poet whose niche in the temple of remembrance and whose place in the hearts of his ain folk were assured till a' the seas gang dry.

THE THEOLOGIAN TURNS POET.

If disembodied spirits had chins to rub and minds that were capable of analysing their emotions, John Skinner's fingers must be busy and his thoughts in a "sair trauchle" as in the Land of Shades he pondered the ploy that a humorous but long-headed fate had played upon him. For if he ever hoped to win fame and the gratitude of posterity it was certainly not as the manufacturer and retailer of what he himself, in his "Epistle to a Young Bookseller," has called " a decent stock of poetrie." It was a relaxation "now and then to spin a line," but only a relaxation. Such modest expectations as he cherished pointed in an altogether different direction. The son of an accomplished parochial dominie who gave him an admirable grounding in the Latin tongue, he entered Marischal College, Aberdeen, at the age of thirteen, graduated four years later, and began at Kemnay a schoolmastering career which ended abruptly at Monymusk. There two things happened that not only influenced his immediate future but shaped his whole life-he "dropped into poetry" and embraced the tenets of Scottish Episcopacy. He (Canon Wilkinson) would not presume on their good nature by discussing at any length John Skinner's position in Scotland as a theologian and ecclesiastic; but they would permit him to say this —that while his theology was now as dead as the dodo, it was during his lifetime a factor of first-rate importance in the religious and intellectual life of Aberdeenshire, while in the Church of his adoption his influence as an ecclesiastical statesman lingered unto this day. Honesty, sincerity, and utter fearlessness were not simply engraven on his character-they were woven into the woof and fibre of his personality; and until they had grasped this primary fact, the man John Skinner must elude them. Destined for the ministry of the Scottish Establishment

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