truth and nature. Every thing, indeed, conspired to make our author exert his powers on such a subject;---the elevated rank of the prisoner, her unparalleled sufferings, her sex, her beauty, and his own attachment to the house of Stuart, all crowded together in his mind, and banished from it every sentiment ludicrous or trifling. The following stanzas express strongly what may have passed, on the occasion, in the mind of the unfortunate queen, who was herself a worshipper of the Muses.

"Now blooms the lily by the bank,
The primrose down the brae;
The hawthorn's budding in the glen,
An' milk-white is the slae:

The meanest hind in fair Scotland

May rove their sweets amang ;
But I, the queen of a' Scotland,
Maun lie in prison strang.

"But as for thee, thou false woman,

My sister an' my fae,

Grim vengeance yet shall whet a sword

That through thy soul shall gae.
The weeping blood in woman's breast
Was never known to thee,

Nor the balm that draps on wounds of woe,
Frae woman's pitying e'e."

THE verses To Robert Graham of Fintry, Esq. are a tribute of respect and gratitude to one of the poet's steadiest friends and patrons; but there is less originality in them than perhaps in any other of BURNS's poems. The attack on critics is mere hackneyed common-place; and is the less excusable, that hardly any other poet has had so little ground of complaint against them.

THE Lament for James Earl of Glencairn is in a different measure from that of the Lament of Mary Queen of Scots, but not inferior to it in merit of any kind. The Earl of Glencairn was one of the poet's earliest patrons, and never deserted him to the day of his death. As the heart of BURNS was susceptible of all the finer feelings, and particularly of gratitude, he thus describes a bard laden with years bewailing his lord," whom death had all untimely ta'en."

"He lean'd him on an ancient aik,

Whase trunk was mould'ring down with years;
His locks were bleached white with time,

His hoary cheek was wet wi' tears:

And as he touch'd his trembling harp,
And as he tun'd his doleful sang,
The winds, lamenting through their caves,
To echo bore the notes alang."