by men engaged in the rudest and most motion. His poems are like his countenance, notonous toil. To every man so writing, the coarse and ungoverned, yet with an intensity art, doubtless, is an ennobling one. The habit of eye, a rugged massiveness of feature, which of expressing thought in verse not only indi- would be grand but for the absence of love cates culture, but is a culture in itself of a and of humor-love's twin and inseparable very high order. It teaches the writer to think brother. Therefore it is, that although single tersely and definitely; it evokes in him the passages may be found in his writings, of humanizing sense of grace and melody, not which Milton himself need not have been merely by enticing him to study good models, ashamed, his efforts of dramatic poetry are but by the very act of composition. It gives utter failures, dark, monstrous, unrelieved by hima vent for sorrows, doubts, and aspirations, any really human vein of feeling or character. which might otherwise fret and canker within, As in feature, so in mind, he has not even the breeding, as they too often do in the utterly delicate and graceful organization which made dumb English peasant, self-devouring medita- up in Milton for the want of tenderness, and tion, dogged melancholy, and fierce fanaticism. so enabled him to write, if not a drama, yet And if the effect of verse writing had stopped still the sweetness of masques and idyls. there, all had been well; but bad models have had their effect, as well as good ones, on the half-tutored taste of the working men, and engendered in them but too often a fondness for frothy magniloquence and ferocious raving, neither morally nor æsthetically profitable to themselves or their readers. There are excuses for the fault: the young of all ranks naturally enough mistake noise for awfulness, and violence for strength; and there is generally but too much, in the biographies of these working poets, to explain, if not to excuse, a vein of bitterness, which they certainly did not learn from their master, Burns. The two poets who have done them most harm, in teaching the evil trick of cursing and swearing, are Shelley and the Corn-Law Rhymer; and one can well imagine how seducing two such models must be, to men struggling to utter their own complaints. Of Shelley this is not the place to speak. But of the Corn-Law Rhymer we may say here, that howsoever he may have been indebted to Burns's example for the notion of writing at all, he has profited very little by Burns's own poems. Instead of the genial loving tone of the great Scotchman, we find in Elliott a tone of deliberate savageness, all the more ugly, because evidently intentional. He tries to curse; "he delights"—may we be forgiven if we misjudge the man-in cursing;" he makes a science of it; he defiles, of malice prepens, the loveliest and sweetest thoughts and scenes (and be can be most sweet) by giving some sudden, sickening revulsion to his reader's feelings; and he does it generally with a power which makes it at once as painful to the calmer reader as alluring to those who are struggling with the same temptations as the poet. Now and then, his tricks drag him down into sheer fustian and bombast; but not always. There is a terrible Dantean vividness of imagination about him, perhaps unequalled in England, in his genera Rather belonging to the same school than to that of Burns, though never degrading itself by Elliott's ferocity, is that extraordinary poem, "The Purgatory of Suicides," by Thomas Cooper. As he is still in the prime of life and capable of doing more and better than he yet has done, we will not comment on it as freely as we have on Elliott, except to regret a similar want of softness and sweetness, and also of a clearness and logical connection of thought, in which Elliott seldom fails, except when cursing. The imagination is hardly as vivid as Elliott's, though the fancy and invention, the polish of the style, and the indications of profound thought on all subjects within the poet's reach, are superior in every way to those of the Corn-Law Rhymer; and when we consider that the man who wrote it had to gather his huge store of classic and historic anecdote while earning his living, first as a shoemaker, and then as a Wesleyan country preacher, we can only praise and excuse, and hope that the day may come when talents of so high an order will find some healthier channel for their energies than that in which they are now flowing. Our readers may wonder at not seeing the Ettrick Shepherd's poems among the list at the head of the article. It seems to us, however, that we have done right in omitting them. Doubtless, he too was awakened into song by the example of Burns; but he seems to us to owe little to his great predecessor, beyond the general consciousness that there was a virgin field of poetry in Scotch scenery, manners, and legends-a debt which Walter Scott himself probably owed to the Ayrshire peasant just as much as Hogg did. Indeed, we perhaps are right in saying, that had Burns not lived, neither Wilson, Galt, Allan Cunningham, nor the crowd of lesser writers who have found material for their fancy in Scotch peculiarities, would have written as they have. The first three names, Wilson's above all, opinion of those who, as we do, look on the The farm is lost by reverses, and manfully Robert Nicoll's father becomes a day laborer on the fields which he lately rented and there begins, for the boy, from his earliest recollections, a life of steady, sturdy drudgery. But they must have been grand old folks these parents, and in nowise addicted to wringing their hands over "the great might-havebeen." Like true Scots Bible-lovers, they do believe in a God, and in a will of God, underlying, absolute, loving, and believe that the might-have-been ought not to have been, simply because it has not been; and so they put their shoulders to the new collar patiently, cheerfully, hopefully, and teach the boys to do the same. The mother especially, as so many great men's mothers do, stands out large and heroic, from the time when, the farm being gone, she, "the ardent bookwoman," finds her time too precious to be spent in reading, and sets little Robert to read to her as she works-what a picture !— to the last sad day, when, wanting money to come up to Leeds to see her dying darling. she "shore for the siller," rather than borrow it. And her son's life is like her own-the most pure, joyous, valiant little epic. Robert does not even take to work as something beyond himself, uninteresting and painful, which, however, must be done courageously: he lives in it, enjoys it as his proper element, one which is no more a burden and an exertion to him than the rush of the strid is to the trout who plays and feeds in it day and night, unconscious of the amount of muscular strength which he puts forth in merely keeping his place in the stream. Whether there." carrying Kenilworth in his plaid to the woods | unfinished and hasty as they are, it can be read to read while herding, or selling currants and whiskey as the Perth storekeeper's apprentice, or keeping his little circulating library in Dundee, tormenting his pure heart with the thought of the twenty pounds which his mother has borrowed wherewith to start him, or editing the Leeds Times, or lying on his early deathbed, just as life seems to be opening clear and broad before him, he "Bates not a jot of heart or hope," but steers right onward, singing over his work, without bluster or self-gratulation, but for very joy at having work to do. There is a keen practical insight about him, rarely combined, in these days, with the singleminded determination to do good in his generation. His eye is single, and his whole body full of light. have been dependent only on my own head and "From seven years of age to this very hour, I hands for everything-for very bread. Long years ago-ay, even in childhood-adversity made me think, and feel, and suffer; and would pride allow me, I could tell the world many a deep tragedy enacted in the heart of a poor forgotten, uncared-for boy. . . . But I thank God, that though I felt and suffered, the scathing blast neither blunted my perceptions of natural and moral beauty, nor, by withering the affections of my heart, made me a selfish man. Often when I look back I wonder how I bore the burdenhow I did not end the evil day at once and for For Such is the man, in his normal state; and as was to be expected, God's blessing rests on him. Whatever he sets his hand to succeeds. Within a few weeeks of his taking the editorship of the Leeds Times, its circulation begins to rise rapidly, as was to be ex"It would indeed," writes the grocer's boy, encouraging his despondent and somewhat Wer-pected with an honest man to guide it. terean friend," be hangman's work to write articles one day to be forgotten to-morrow, if that were all; but you forget the comfort-the repayment. If one prejudice is overthrown, one error rendered untenable; if but one step in advance be the consequence of your articles and mine-the consequences of the labor of all true men-are we not deeply repaid ?” Or again, in a right noble letter to his noble mother : "That money of R.'s hangs like a mill-stone about my neck. If I had paid it, I would never borrow again from mortal man. But do not mistake me, mother: I am not one of those men who faint and falter in the great battle of life. God has given me too strong a heart for that. I look upon earth as a place where every man is set to struggle and to work, that he may be made humble and pure-hearted, and fit for that better land for which earth is a preparation-to which earth is the gate. . . . . If men would but consider how little of real evil there is in all the ills of which they are so much afraid-poverty included-there would be more virtue and happiness, and less world and Mammon-worship on earth than is. I think, mother, that to me has been given talent; and if so, that talent was given to make it useful to man. Nicoll's political creed, though perhaps neither very deep nor wide, lies clear and single before him, as everything else which he does. He believes naturally enough in ultra-Radicalism according to the fashions of the Reform Bill era. That is the right thing; and for that he will work day and night, body and soul, and if needs be, die. There, in the editor's den at Leeds, he "begins to see the truth of what you told me about the world's unworthiness; but stop a little. I am not sad as yet. . . . If I am hindered from feeling the soul of poetry among woods and fields, I yet trust I am struggling for something worth prizing-something of which I am not ashamed, and need not be. If there be aught on earth worth aspiring to, it is the lot of him who is enabled to do something for his miserable and suffering fellowmen; and this you and I will try to do at least." His friend is put to work a ministerial paper, with orders "not to be rash, but to elevate the population gradually;" and finding those orders to imply a considerable leaning towards the By-ends, Lukewarm, and Facing-both-ways school, kicks over the traces, wisely, in Nicoll's eyes, and breaks And yet, there is a quiet self-respect loose. about him withal : "In my short course through life," says he in confidence to a friend at one-and-twenty," I never =feared an enemy, or failed a friend; and I live in the hope I never shall. For the rest, I have written my heart in my poems; and rude and Keep up your spirits," says honest Nicoll. "You are higher at this moment in my estimation, in your own, and that of every honest man, than you ever were, before. Tait's advice was just such as I should have expected of him; honest as honesty itself. You must never again accept a paper but where you can tell the whole truth in hovels whereof none but God and the an without fear or favor.... Tell E. (the broken-gels know. loose editor's lady-love) from me to estimate as she ought the nobility and determination of the man who has dared to act as you have done. Prudent men will say that you are hasty: but you have done right, whatever may be the consequences." This is the spirit of Robert Nicoll; the spirit which is the fruit of early purity and self-restraint, of living "on bread and cheese and water," that he may buy books; of walking out to the Inch of Perth at four o'clock on summer mornings, to write and read in peace before he returns to the currants and the whiskey. The nervous simplicity of the man comes out in the very nervous simplicity of the prose he writes; and though there be nothing very new or elevated in it, or indeed in his poems themselves, we call on our readers to admire a phenomenon so rare, in the "upper classes "at least, in these days, and taking a lesson from the peasant's son, rejoice with us that "a man is born into the world." For Nicoll, as few do, practises what he preaches. It seems to him, once on a time, right and necessary that Sir William Molesworth should be returned for Leeds; and Nicoll having so determined, "throws himself, body and soul, into the contest, with such ardor, that his wife afterwards said, and we can well believe it, that if Sir William had failed, Robert would have died on the instant!"--why not? Having once made up his mind that that was the just and right thing, the thing which was absolutely good for Leeds, and the human beings who lived in it, was it not a thing to die for, even if it had been but the election of a new beadle? The advanced sentry is set to guard some obscure worthless dike-end-obscure and worthless in itself, but to him a centre of infinite duty. True, the fate of the camp does not depend on its being taken; if the enemy round it, there are plenty behind to blow them out again. But that is no reason whatsoever why he, before any odds, should throw his musket over his shoulder, and retreat gracefully to the lines. He was set there to stand by that, whether dike-end or representation of Leeds; that is the right thing for him; and for that right he will fight, and if he be killed, die. So have all brave men felt, and so have all brave deeds been done, since man walked the earth. It is because that spirit, the spirit of faith, has died out among us, that so few brave deeds are done now, except on battle-fields, and honorable and self-restraining love bring him So the man prospers. Several years of a wife, beautiful, loving, worshipping his talents; a help meet for him, such as God will send at times to those whom he loves. Kind men meet and love and help him-" The Johnstones, Mr. Tait, William and Mary Howitt." Sir William Molesworth, hearing of his last illness, sends him unsolicited fifty pounds, which, as we understand it, Nicol accepts without foolish bluster about independ ence. Why not?-man should help man and be helped by him. Would he not have done as much for Sir William? Nothing to us proves Nicoll's heart-wholeness more than the way in which he talks of his benefactors, in a tone of simple gratitude and affection without fawning, and without vaporing The man has too much self-respect to consider himself lowered by accepting a favor. But he must go after all. The editor's den at Leeds is not the place for lungs bred on Perthshire breezes; and work rises before him, huger and heavier as he goes on, till he drops under the ever-increasing load. He will not believe it at first. In sweet, childlike, playful letters, he tells his mother that it is nothing. It has done him good"opened the grave before his eyes, and taught him to think of death." "He trusts that he has not borne this, and suffered, and thought in vain." This, too, he hopes, is to be a fresh lesson-page of experience for his work. Alas! a few months more of bitter suffering and of generous kindness, and love from all around him,-and it is over with him, at the age of twenty-three. Shall we regret him?-shall we not rather believe that God knew best, and considering the unhealthy moral atmosphere of the press, and the strange confused ways into which old ultra-Radicalism, finding itself too narrow for the new problems of the day, has stumbled and floundered in the last fifteen years, believe that he might have been a worse man had he been a longer-lived one, and thank Heaven that "the righteous is taken away from the evil to come?" As it is, he ends as he began. The first poem in his book is "The Ha' Bible;" and the last, written a few days before his death, is still the death-song of a man-without fear, without repining, without boasting, blessing and loving the earth which he leaves, yet with a clear joyful eye upwards and outwards and homewards. And so ends his little epic, as we called it. May Scotland see many such another! The actual poetic value of his verses is not first-rate by any means. He is far inferior to Burns in range of subject, as he is in humor and pathos. Indeed, there is very little of these latter qualities in him anywhere -rather playfulness, flashes of childlike fun, as in "The Provost," and "Bonnie Bessie Lee." But he has attained a mastery over English, a simplicity and quiet which Burns. never did; and also, we need not say, a moral purity. His "Poems, illustrative of the Scotch peasantry," are charming throughout -alive and bright with touches of real humanity, and sympathy with characters apparently antipodal to his own. 66 Thou whom the meanest bless! "Give them staunch honesty- God save the Poor! God save the Poor!" And so we leave Robert Nicoll, with the parting remark, that if the " poems illustrative of the feelings of the intelligent and religious among the working-classes of Scotland" be fair samples of that which they profess to be, Scotland may thank God, that in spite of glen-clearings and temporary manufacturing rot-heaps, she is still whole at heart, and that the influence of her great peasant poet, though it may seem at first likely to be adverse to Christianity, has helped, as we have already hinted, to purify and not to taint; to destroy the fungus, but not to touch the heart of the grand old Covenant kirk life-tree. His more earnest poems are somewhat tainted with the cardinal fault of his school, of which he steered so clear in prose-fine words; yet he never, like the Corn-Law Rhymer, falls a cursing. He is evidently not a good hater even of priests and kings, and aristocrats, and superstition;" or perhaps he worked all that froth safely over and off in debating club-speeches and leading articles, Still sweeter, and, alas! still sadder, is the and left us, in these poems, the genuine me- story of the two Bethunes. If Nicoll's life, theglin of his inner heart, sweet, clear, and as we have said, be a solitary melody, and strong; for there is no form of loveable or short though triumphant strain of workright thing which this man has come across, music, theirs is a harmony and true concert which he does not seem to have appreciated. of fellow-joys, fellow-sorrows, fellow-drudBesides pure love and the beauties of nature, gery, fellow-authorship, mutual throughout, those on which every man of poetic power-lovely in their joint-life, and in their deaths and a great many of none, as a matter of course-have a word to say, he can feel for and with the drunken beggar, and the warriors of the ruined manor-house, and the monks of the abbey, and the old-mailed Normans with their "priest with cross and counted beads in the little Saxon chapel "-things which a radical editor might have been excused for passing by with a sneer. His verses to his wife are a delicious little glimpse of Eden; and his "People's Anthem" rises into somewhat of true grandeur by virtue of simplicity: "Lord, from Thy blessed throne, Teach them true liberty- "The arms of wicked men not far divided. Alexander survives his brother John only long enough to write his Memoirs, and then follows; and we have his story given us by Mr. M'Combie, in a simple unassuming little volume-not to be read without many thoughts, perhaps not rightly without tears. Mr. M'Combie has been wise enough not to attempt panegyric. He is all but prolix in details, filling up some half of his volume with letters of preternatural length, from Alexander to his publishers and critics, and from the said publishers and critics to Alexander, altogether of an unromantic and business-like cast, but entirely successful in doing that which a book should do-namely, in showing the world that here was a man of like passions with ourselves, who bore from boyhood to the grave hunger, cold, wet, rags, brutalizing and health-destroying toil, and all the storms of the world, the flesh and the devil, and conquered them every one. Alexander is set at fourteen to throw earth out of a ditch so deep, that it requires the full strength of a grown man, and loses flesh and health under the exertion; he is twice |