EXTRACTS FROM THE LETTERS OF PETER PLYMLEY. 481 centuries since an English pig has fallen in a fair battle upon English ground, or a farm-house been rifled. There is a village (no matter where) in which the inhabitants, on one day in the year, sit down to a dinner prepared at the common expense: by an extraordinary piece of tyranny (which Lord Hawkesbury would call the wisdom of the village ancestors), the inhabitants of three of the streets, about an hundred years ago, seized upon the inhabitants of the fourth street, bound them hand and foot, laid them upon their backs, and compelled them to look on while the rest were stuffing themselves with beef and beer: the next year, the inhabitants of the persecuted street (though they contributed an equal quota of the expense) were treated precisely in the same manner. The tyranny grew into a custom; and (as the manner of our nature is) it was considered as the most sacred of all duties to keep these poor fellows without their annual dinner: the village was so tenacious of this practice, that nothing could induce them to resign it; every enemy to it was looked upon as a disbeliever in Divine Providence, and any nefarious churchwarden who wished to succeed in his election, had nothing to do but to represent his antagonist as an abolitionist, in order to frustrate his ambition, endanger his life, and throw the village into a state of the most dreadful commotion. By degrees, however, the obnoxious street grew to be so well peopled, and its inhabitants so firmly united, that their oppressors, more afraid of injustice, were more disposed to be just. At the next dinner they are unbound, the year after allowed to sit upright, then a bit of bread and a glass of water; till at last, after a long series of concessions, they are emboldened to ask, in pretty plain terms, that they may be allowed to sit down at the bottom of the table, and to fill their bellics as well as the rest. Forthwith a general cry of shame and scandal: "Ten years ago, were you not laid upon your backs? Don't you remember what a great thing you thought it to get a piece of bread? How thankful you were for cheese-parings? Have you forgotten that memorable æra, when the lord of the manor interfered to obtain for you a slice of the public pudding? And now, with an audacity only equalled by your ingratitude, you have the impudence to ask for knives and forks, and to request, in terms too plain to be mistaken, that you may sit down to table with the rest, and be indulged even with beef and beer: there are not more than half a dozen dishes which we have reserved for ourselves: the rest has been thrown open to you in the utmost profusion; you have potatoes and carrots, suet dumplings, sops in the pan, and delicious toast and water, in incredible quantities. Beef, mutton, lamb, pork, and veal are ours; and if you were not the most restless and dissatisfied of human beings, you would never think of aspiring to enjoy them." Is not this, my dainty Abraham,' the very nonsense, and the very insult which is talked to and practised upon the Catholics? You 1 Abraham Plymley, to whom the letters were addressed. are surprised that men who have tasted of partial justice should ask for perfect justice; that he who has been robbed of coat and cloak will not be contented with the restitution of one of his garments. He would be a very lazy blockhead if he were content; and I (who, though an inhabitant of the village, have preserved, thank God, some sense of justice) most earnestly counsel these half-fed claimants to persevere in their just demands till they are admitted to a more complete share of a dinner for which they pay as much as the others; and if they see a little attenuated lawyer2 squabbling at the head of their opponents, let them desire him to empty his pockets, and to pull out all the pieces of duck, fowl, and pudding which he has filched from the public feast, to carry home to his wife and children. XV. PROFESSOR WILSON. JOHN WILSON was born in Paisley in 1785. His father had been a wealthy manufacturer in the town, and young Wilson, after a course of education at the University of Glasgow, was entered at Magdalene College, Oxford. At Oxford he was distinguished both for his love of athletic sports and for his great literary ability. On leaving college he bought a small estate, called Elleray, near Lake Windermere; and there, in the society of Wordsworth, and amid scenery whose beauties he so keenly appreciated, Wilson spent what were doubtless the happiest years of his life. Pecuniary misfortunes, however, drove him from his retirement and compelled him to adopt some profession. He became an advocate at Edinburgh, and on the death of Dr Brown, was appointed Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of that town, an office which he held till near his death. In 1851 the Queen bestowed a pension upon him, which enabled him to resign his professorship, as he was no longer able for its duties, and he died at Edinburgh in 1854. Except his poems "The Isle of Palms," and "The City of the Plague," Wilson's works were all originally prepared for "Blackwood's Magazine," a periodical which owes much of its very high reputation to Wilson's ability. His poetry is distinguished by gentle meditative sweetness. His chief prose works are his "Noctes Ambrosianæ," "Recreations of Christopher North," "Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life," and "Trials of Margaret Lindsay." As a critic, Wilson is the only one of our periodical writers who has been thoroughly qualified to judge of the excellences of our modern poetry; and his works, though usually brief and fragmentary, abundantly evince his depth of thought, liveliness of fancy, kindly disposition, shrewd wit, broad humour, and unrivalled command of the riches of the language. 1. A SCOTTISH COTTAGE.-("LIGHTS AND SHADOWS OF SCOTTISH LIFE.") Gilbert Ainslie was a poor man; and he had been a poor man all the days of his life, which were not few, for his hair was now wax 2 Mr Perceval. A SCOTTISH COTTAGE. 483 ing gray. He had been born and bred on the small moorland farm which he now occupied ; and he hoped to die there, as his father and grandfather had done before him, leaving a family just above the more bitter wants of this world. Labour, hard and unremitting, had been his lot in life; but, although sometimes severely tried, he had never repined; and through all the mist and gloom, and even the storms that had assailed him, he had lived on from year to year in that calm and resigned contentment which unconsciously cheers the hearthstone of the blameless poor. With his own hands he had ploughed, sowed, and reaped his often scanty harvest, assisted, as they grew up, by three sons, who, even in boyhood, were happy to work along with their father in the fields. Out of doors or in, Gilbert Ainslie was never idle. The spade, the shears, the plough-shaft, the sickle, and the flail, all came readily to hands that grasped them well; and not a morsel of food was eaten under his roof, or a garmcnt worn there, that was not honestly, severely, nobly earned. Gilbert Ainslie was a slave, but it was for them he loved with a sober and deep affection. The thraldom under which he lived God had imposed, and it only served to give his character a shade of silent gravity, but not austere; to make his smiles fewer, but more heartfelt; to calm his soul at grace before and after meals, and to kindle it in morning and evening prayer. There is no need to tell the character of the wife of such a man. Meek and thoughtful, yet gladsome and gay withal, her heaven was in her house; and her gentle and weaker hands helped to bar the door against want. Of ten children that had been born to them, they had lost three; and as they had fed, clothed, and educated them respectably, so did they give them who died a respectable funeral. The living did not grudge to give up for a while some of their daily comforts for the sake of the dead; and bought, with the little sums which their industry had saved, decent mournings, worn on Sabbath, and then carefully laid by. Of the seven that survived, two sons and a daughter were farm-servants in the neighbourhood, while two daughters and two sons remained at home, growing, or grown up, a small, happy, hard-working household. Many cottages are there in Scotland like Moss-side, and many such humble and virtuous cottagers as were now beneath its roof of straw. The eye of the passing traveller may mark them, or mark them not, but they stand peacefully in thousands over all the land; and most beautiful do they make it, through all its wide valleys and narrow glens,—its low holms encircled by the rocky walls of some bonny burn,-its green mounts elated with their little crowning groves of plane-trees, its yellow corn-fields,-its bare pastoral hillsides, and all its heathy moors, on whose black bosom lie shining or concealed glades of excessive verdure, inhabited by flowers, and visited only by the far-flying bees. Moss-side was beautiful to a careless or hasty eye; but when looked on and surveyed, it seemed a pleasant dwelling. Its roof, overgrown with grass and moss, was almost as green as the ground out of which its weather-stained walls appeared to grow. The moss behind it was separated from a little garden by a narrow slip of arable land, the dark colour of which showed that it had been won from the wild by patient industry, and by patient industry retained. It required a bright sunny day to make Moss-side fair; but then it was fair indeed; and when the little brown moorland birds were singing their short songs among the rushes and the heather, or a lark, perhaps lured thither by some green barley-field for its undisturbed rest, rose ringing all over the enlivened solitude, the little bleak farm smiled like the paradise of poverty, sad and affecting in its lone and extreme simplicity. The boys and girls had made some plots of flowers among the vegetables that the little garden supplied for their homely meals; pinks and carnations, brought from walled gardens of rich men farther down in the cultivated strath, grew here with somewhat diminished lustre; a bright show of tulips had a strange beauty in the midst of that moorland; and the smell of roses mixed well with that of the clover, the beautiful fair clover that loves the soil and the air of Scotland, and gives the rich and balmy milk to the poor man's lips. 2. THE SNOW-STORM. Little Hannah Lee had left her master's house soon as the rim of the great moon was seen by her eyes, that had been long anxiously watching it from the window, rising, like a joyful dream, over the gloomy mountain-tops; and all by herself she tripped along beneath the beauty of the silent heaven. Still as she kept ascending and descending the knolls that lay in the bosom of the glen, she sang to herself a song, a hymn, or a psalm, without the accompaniment of the streams, now all silent in the frost, and ever and anon she stopped to try to count the stars that lay in some more beautiful part of the sky, or gazed on the constellations that she knew, and called them, in her joy, by the names they bore among the shepherds. There were none to hear her voice or see her smiles but the ear and eye of Providence. As on she glided, and took her looks from heaven, she saw her own little fireside her parents waiting for her arrival-the Bible opened for worship— her own little room kept so neatly for her, with its mirror hanging by the window, in which to braid her hair by the morning light— her bed prepared for her by her mother's hand-the primroses in her garden, peeping through the snow-old Tray, who ever welcomed her home with his dim white eyes-the pony and the cow; -friends all and inmates of that happy household. So stepped she along, while the snow-diamonds glittered around her feet, and the frost wore a wreath of lucid pearls round her forehead. She had now reached the edge of the Black-moss, which lay halfway between her master's and her father's dwelling, when she heard a loud noise coming down Glen-Scrae, and in a few seconds she felt on her face some flakes of snow. She looked up the glen, and saw THE SNOW-STORM. 485 the snow-storm coming down fast as a flood. She felt no fears; but she ceased her song, and, had there been a human eye to look upon her there, it might have seen a shadow upon her face. She continued her course, and felt bolder and bolder every step that brought her nearer to her parents' house. But the snow-storm had now reached the Black-moss, and the broad line of light that had lain in the direction of her home was soon swallowed up, and the child was in utter darkness. She saw nothing but the flakes of snow, interminably intermingled and furiously wafted in the air close to her head; she heard nothing but one wild, fierce, fitful howl. The cold became intense, and her little feet and hands were fast being benumbed into insensibility. "It is a fearful change," muttered the child to herself; but still she did not fear, for she had been born in a moorland cottage, and lived all her days among the hardships of the hills. "What will become of the poor sheep?" thought she; but still she scarcely thought of her own danger, for innocence, and youth, and joy are slow to think of aught evil befalling themselves, and, thinking benignly of all living things, forget their own fear in their pity for others' sorrow. At last she could no longer discern a single mark on the snow, either of human steps or of sheep-track, or the footprint of a wildfowl. Suddenly, too, she felt out of breath and exhausted, and, shedding tears for herself at last, sank down in the snow. It was now that her heart began to quake with fear. She remembered stories of shepherds lost in the snow; of a mother and a child frozen to death on that very moor; and in a moment she knew that she was to die. Bitterly did the poor child weep; for death was terrible to her, who, though poor, enjoyed the bright little world of youth and innocence. The skies of heaven were dearer than she knew to her; so were the flowers of earth. She had been happy at her work, happy in her sleep, happy in the kirk on Sabbath. A thousand thoughts had the solitary child, and in her own heart was a spring of happiness, pure and undisturbed as any fount that sparkles unseen all the year through in some quiet nook among the pastoral hills. But now there was to be an end of all this; she was to be frozen to death, and lie there till the thaw might come, and then her father would find her body, and carry it away to be buried in the kirkyard. The tears were frozen on her cheeks as soon as shed, and scarcely had her little hands strength to clasp themselves together, as the thought of an overruling and merciful Lord came across her heart. Then, indeed, the fears of this religious child were calmed, and she heard without terror the plover's wailing cry, and the deep_boom of the bittern sounding in the moss. I will repeat the Lord's Prayer;" and, drawing her plaid more closely around her, she whispered beneath its ineffectual cover, "Our Father which art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name; Thy kingdom come; Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven." Had human aid been within |