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without its opening to devour me! And
shall a mortal oppose my purpose?'
"He raves, alas!" said Catharine.
'Haste to call some help. He will not
harm me; but I fear he will do evil to
himself. See how he states down on the
roaring waterfall !'

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'The glee-woman hastened to do as she was ordered; and Conachar's half frenzied spirit seemed relieved by her absence. Catharine,' he said, now she is gone, I will say I know thee-I know thy love of peace and hatred of But hearken I have, rather than strike a blow at my enemy, given up al! that a man calls dearest-I have lost honour, fame, and friends; and such friends! (he placed his hands before his face,) Oh! their love surpassed the love of woman! Why should I hide my tears? -All know my shame all should see my sorrow. Yes, all might see, but who would pity it? Catharine, as I ran like a madman down the strath, man and woman called shame on me!-The beggar to whom I flung an alms that I might purchase one blessing, threw it back in disgust, and with a curse upon the coward! Each bell that tolled rung out, Shame on the recreant caitiff! The brute beasts in their lowing and bleating-the wild winds in their rustling and howling-the hoarse waters in their dash and roar, cried, Out upon the dastard!'

"While the unhappy youth thus raved a rustling was heard in the bushes. "There is but one way,' he exclaimed, springing upon the parapet, but with a terrified glance towards the thicket, through which one or two attendants were stealing, with the purpose of surprising him. But the instant he saw a human form emerge from the cover of the thicket, he waved his hands wildly over his head, and shrieking out Bas air Eachin! plunged down the precipice into the raging cataract beneath.

It is needless to say, that aught save thistledown must have been dashed to pieces in snch a fall. But the river was swelled, and the remains of the unhappy youth were never seen. A varying tradition has assigned more than one supplement to the history. It is said by one account, that the young captain of Clan Quhele swam safe to shore, far below the Linns of Campsie; and that, wandering disconsolately in the deserts of Rannoch, he met with Father Clement,, who had taken up his abode in the wilderness as à hermit, on the principle of the old Culdees. He converted, it is said, the heartbroken and penitent Conachar, who lived with him in his cell, sharing his devotion and privations, till death removed thein in

succession.

"Another wilder legend supposes that he was snatched from death by the Daione Shie, or fairy-folk, and that he continues to wander through wood and wild, armed like an ancient Highlander, but carrying his sword in his left hand. The phantom appears always in deep grief. Sometimes he seems about to attack the traveller, but, when resisted with courage, always flies. These legends are founded on two peculiar points in his story-his evincing timidity, and his committing suicide, both of them circumstances unexampled in the history of a Mountain Chief.

"When Simon Glover, having seen his friend Henry duly taken care of in his own house in Curfew Street, arrived that evening at the Place of Campsie, he found his daughter extremely ill of a fever, in consequence of the scenes to which she had lately been a witness, and particularly the catastrophe of her late playmate. The affection of the glee maiden rendered her so attentive and careful a nurse, that the Glover said it should not be his fault if she ever touched lute again, safe for her own amusement.

"It was some time here Simon ventured to tell his daughter of Henry's late exploits, and his severe wounds.

"Catharine sighed deeply, and shook her head at the history of bloody Palm Sunday on the North Inch. But apparently she had reflected that men rarely advance in civilization or refinement beyond the ideas of their own age, and that a headlong and exuberant courage, like that of Henry Smith, was, in the iron days in which they lived, preferable to the deficiency which had led to Conachar's catastrophe. If she had any doubts on the subject they were removed in due time by Henry's protestations, so soon as restored health enabled him to plead his

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their sword-dance so featly as at the wedding of the boldest burgess and brighest maiden in Perth. Ten months after a gallant infant filled the well-spread cradle, and was rocked by Louise to the tune of

Bold and True,

In bonnet blue.

The names of the boy's sponsors are recorded as "Ane Hie and Michty Lord, Archibald Erl of Douglas, ane Honorabil and gude Knight, Schir Patrick Charteris of Kinfaunr, and ane gracious Princess, Marjory Dowaire of his Serene Highness Robert umquhile Duke of Rothsay." Under such patronage, a family rises fast; and several of the most respected houses in Scotland, but especially in Perthshire, and many individuals, distinguished both in arts and arms, record with pride their descent from the Gow Chrom and the Fair Maid of Perth."

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The infant grows, Plies fast his powers, strengthens every nerve, And, leaving far behind the childish lisp, Enters on boyhood:-then, no tears are shed, No moan of friends proclaims the wondrous change,

No sorrow fills the parent's breast with anguish !

The boy hastes onward with a firmer tread, Up the steep hill of life; and, grasping fast The hopes of coming manhood, stands, where youth

Greets him with laughter:-then, who weeps to find

Th' adventurer advanced upon his journey? And when, more near the summit of the as

cent,

Matured in body, and in mind renewed,
He starts a Man !-for higher destination,
And hurries forward, with a bolder step,
Towards the villa of glad Happiness,
In nearer distance view'd:-who, then, begins
To lengthen out the woeful countenance,
And dim the eyes tears? None are so mad;
The veriest fool that vegetates on earth
Knows wisdom better than to fret at this;
And spies a pleasure in the alteration!
And, when Time leads him through th' estate
of Age,

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In all these changes Nature seems to work
And she forbids the sigh, that will, perchance,
Strive t' escape its mental prison, and
Breathe forth its sorrowing tale! Each change
but told-

A tale of grandeur, truth, and comfort joined,
Of one great progress, one continued chain,
Of all commencing, changing, and improving,
In the grand scheme of a benign existence !
Death adds another link, which joins short
time
To long eternity; for Death is nought
But one step further in a man's existence !
Were it, indeed, complete annihilation
From off creation's page, or endless sleep;
Then, with some show of reason, we might

grieve,

When we found those we lived but for to love Sinking from our embrace: though, scarcely then,

Seeing that life is granted for a space,
A little space of time, and not for ever;
Scarce, even then, would reason tolerate
A useless grief:-but while we have the blest,
The full assurance of a brighter morn,
Rising when Death's dark night is past and
o'er ;

And know, for certain, that the dying pang,
The parting anguish, that the trav❜ller feels,
Is but the fare he pays for a conveyance,
That will conduet him to the realms of joy,
Content and Peace, which all his life he
sought.

There is no greater cause to grieve the mind When each one dies, than when he wanders on To boyhood, youth, to manhood, or to age! R. JAR MAN.

REMARKS ON THE SATIRE OF EMINENT ENGLISH AUTHORS.

Savage was a man of a superior class, but he was a villain. He was made so either by nature or his stars. Yet he must have had a strong semblance of some virtue, since Samuel Johnson loved him-for Samuel would not have loved a man merely on account of his talents. There was, however, a sympathy of situation and condition; for they were both poor, and necessity, as often and as much as choice, made them stroll together-moralizing and philosophizing,yet, we fear, not always so-up and down the midnight streets and lanes, and alleys of London. It was just as well that the

Where rugged paths through flow'rless meads Lexicographer was not with Savage in

appear,

And the poor mortal tired, and fatigued, Fainting with langour, fears the wish'd for spot,

Far yet beyond him, 's farther than he'll reach And sickens at the thought !-not, even then,

that house of ill-fame, when, in a doubtful brawl, he became a stabber, afterwards condemned to die on the scaffold. Savage showed the blackness of his heart in his conduct to the Countess of Mac ·

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clesfield, whom, if he indeed believed her to be his mother, he treated as unnaturally as he accused her of treating himself; and in that case like mother like son. But though Savage was no doubt somebody's bastard, he was not the bastard of that lady, as Boswell has proved; and we hope, for his own sake, that he never thought he was; in which case, he was not an unnatural monster, but merely an audacious swindler. A swindler he certainly was; and his insolent ingratitude to Pope, who either relieved him in prison, or kept him out of it-we forget which the detail, we think, is in one of our friend D'Israeli's admirable bookswas of itself quite enough to show his character in its real and odious light. Such a man could never have been a great satirist. His own conscience could never have been sufficiently at ease to allow him to chastise the crimes or vices of others; for it may be laid down as a general rule, admitting no exceptions, that a great satirist must be a good man. Yet there are admirable lines in Savage,

as

of the Wanderer sinks down dwarfed into the obscurest name. Cowper was a man, not only of the finest and profoundest sensibilities, but of very strong passions, which, cruelly thwarted and disappointed, and defrauded of their just joy in very early youth, shook the whole constitution of his being, and tainted it with melancholy and with madness, or aggravated and brought out the hereditary disease. His later life-indeed almost all his life, after he had reached the prime of manhood-was so calm and quiet in its ongoings to the outward eye, and for the most part was really so indeed ;-The hearth, at which he and Mrs. Unwin sat

the Mary, whose tender affection and its uncommon ties his genius has consecrated and immortalized-burned with such a seemingly cheerful and tender uniformity except when disturbed by thoughts for which at times there was no relief, not even the voice from Heaven;-The Poet was so devoted to his flowers, and his hot-house plants, and his pigeons and his rabbits, that is, to everything fair or harmless in animate or inanimate nature; -His intercourse with the world was so

"Conceived in rapture, and with fire begot." small, it being like that of some benevo

And,

"No tenth transmitter of a foolish face."

You think you see the young Esquire and his long line of ancestors-and his posterity too, for the Face will continue to be handed down, depend upon it, till death destroys a direct descendant before he has had time to propagate; and a nephew or cousin steps in to vary a little the physiognomy at the Hall, though the same dull, dead, large, grey goggle eye, remains ungouged; and in a few descents the Face will to a moral certainty re-appear in its pristine foolishness. Savage, besides, was probably something of a scholar, though Johnson's fine philosophical biography of him must be read with many salvoes; for nothing is more common than for men of great acquirements to transfer, in a fit of enthusiasm for some unworthy associate, the glory that is in themselves alone, to one whose endowments may be considerable, but who, on the whole, is but a very inferior character. Yet Savage is a sort of name in English literature; and the Wanderer is a vigorous, and, had he been an honest man, would have been a pathetic composition.

Different from Savage as light from darkness was Cowper as a moral creature, and as an intellectual one so infinitely his superior, that by the side of the immortal author of the Task, the transitory writer

lent hermit who had sought refuge in retirement from the troubles that beset him in society, without being in the least an ascetic, or his sympathies being either deadened or narrowed with the human beings living in another sphere;-All his more serious studies, (we make no allusion to his religion, which was more than serious, always solemn, and too often dreadful,) were of a kind so remote from the every-day interests of the passing time and even from the intellectual pursuits most popular and most powerful, for good or for evil, in the world which he had so nearly forsaken ;-His ambition and love of fame, which though deep, and strong, and pure, and high, because they were born and sustained by the consciousness of genius, that, beyond all things else, rejoiced in interpreting the word of God, as it is written in the fair volume of nature, and in the book which reveals what in nature is hidden, and beyond all finding out, were so linked with holy undertakings and achievements in which God alone should be glorified, that they seem to be hardly compatible with any permanent design of busying himself with drawing pictures of passions rife in common existence, so as to embody moral instruction in a satirical form;-Altogether there seems something so soft, so sweet, so delicate, so tender, almost so fragile in the peculiar structure of his bodily frame,-a spirit of cohesion among all his faculties both of thought and feeling so very un

now that the hand of heaven seems stretched forth to avenge and destroy. There is nothing in Byron of such sustained majesty as Cowper's Expostulation with this Queen of the Cities of the earth-nor even in Wordsworth. In a comparison or parallel between these two great bards, Cowper and Wordsworth, which we intend ere long to attempt, we shall venture on some quotations even from the poetry of the author of the Task, for we believe that by the Task he is chiefly known; nor is it wrong, or wonderful, that he should be but assuredly in his earlier poems, there is more of the vivida vis anima, even of the Mens Divinior, although for reasons that will be afterwards given to those who wish or want them, they never can be so incorporated with the read poetry of England. Even as a personal satirist-that is the satirist of particular vices, as they are exhibited in individual characters whose portraits are unsparingly drawn, we know of nobody with whom Cowper may not take rank, while, as a general satirist of that mysterious compound of good and evil, Man, we know nobody who may take rank with him, for spleen, rancour, bile, in his loftiest moods, he has none,-there is a profound melancholy often mingling with his ire, for he knows that he too is of the same blind race, whom he upbraids with their folly and their wickedness; he hates sin, but he loves and pities the sinner;→→→→ his is not the railing of sanctimonious pride, but as a Christian, he feels that he "does well to be angry;"-his Morality is always pure and high, but his Religion is a power purer and higher far-its denunciations are altogether of a different nature, appealing to other fears, and other hopes, and other sanctions; and in the spirit of religion alone will any satire ever be poured from the lips of man, which, because of its influence on human happiness and virtue, may be named sacred, holy, divine, and enrolled among the other records of Immortal Song.

worldly-and such a refinement of manners about him as may not be called fastidiousness, but rather a shrinking timidity, so that, like the sensitive plant, he was as it were, paralized by the least touch of rudeness, and, perhaps unknown to his own heart, courted retirement the more to escape the chance of such shocks as carelessness or coarseness often unintentionally inflict;That we are not prepared to think of such a being, if such Cowper were, standing forth a satirist of the follies and absurdities of his kind, no less than their worst and most flagrant delinquencies, and to see him with a bold grasp shaking the blossom of the full blown sins of the People. Yet this Cowper did; and his satire is sublime. There is not anywhere that we know of in the language such satires as his Table Talk, Progress of Error, Truth, Expostulation, Hope, Charity, Conversation, Retirement. Perhaps we ought to call those compositions by some other name, for they are full of almost all kinds of the noblest poetry. Never were the principles of the real wealth of nations more grandly expounded, illustrated, and enforced national honour, faith, freedom, patriotism, independence, religion, all sung in magnificent strains, kindled alternately by the pride and indignation of a Briton, exulting in, or ashamed of, the land of saints and heroes. No want of individual portraits of fools, knaves, and even ruffians. The same man, who was well satisfied to sit day after day beside an elderly lady, sewing caps and tippets, except when he was obliged to go and water the flowers, or feed the rabbits, rose up, when Poetry came upon him, sinewy and muscular as a mailed man dallying for a while with a two-edged sword, as if to try its weight and temper, when about to shear down the Philistines. Cowper goes forth in his holy ire like a man inspired and commissioned. You see his soul glowing and burning with fires kindled on the altar of religion. He comes strong from the study of the old To Cowper, Byron, as a satirist, was prophets. And in some of his most mag- far inferior in divine energy. Indeed his nificent marches, you think that you hear energy in that department, so far from the Bible transformed into another shape being divine, was intensely human, and of poetry, the essence being the same, nor in that intensity lay its power, often great are the sacred strains profaned by being and triumphant, but irregular and misdisounded to a lyre smote by such a hand rected, and just as often defeating itself-a hand uplifted duly, many times and the chief emotions produced in our mind oft, besides night and morn, in prayer, being pain to see such noble gifts abused and ever 66 open as day to melting chaindignation at the recklessness of his rity." How he sheds sudden day into injustice, and in some striking instances, the midnight darkness of London, lying a high sympathy with the scorn of the bare with all her sins and iniquities! men vainly imagined by him to be his The dark City quakes as she is suddenly victims-but, in truth, unscathed, in their brightened, and stands confessed in all genius and virtue, by the charges that, her guilt, in which she dares not to glory, though launched in lightning, either fall

"

harmless at their feet, and expire in smoke, or recoil dangerously on him from whose unhallowed hand they had been let loose, and bring the hurt and ignominy which were designed for theirs, on his own head -to the entire satisfaction of the world looking on the unprovoked assault, and for a while fearful of the issue. It is a numbling-a shocking-a revolting sight -to see a man of transcendent endowments, like Byron, vulgarly abusing the genius from which, in the highest inspiration of his poetry, he delights to borrow; to hear him expressing hatred and scorn of those men who had taught him so much of what was wise, and good, and great, in his own thoughts and feelings; and but for whom his own works, glorious as they are, had been less glorious; the wanderings of the "Noble Childe himself, "musing by flood and fell," had been less sublime; and Nature herself, to his eyes, as a poet, in a great measure, a sealed book. But the soul within him was easily disturbed and distracted, and his ear had been poisoned. Left to his own natural thoughts and feelings, which, in his solemn hours, were always great, or akin to greatness, Byron would have worshipped the genius of the living with much of the religion with which he worshipped the genius of the dead. But his moral being was assailed from many quarters and nature's best affections and passions, by his own fault, by the fault of another, by the fault of the world, and by evil fortune, seemed at last to be turned against him, so that Byron, in the blaze of fame, and all the glory of genius, did feel, he has himself confessed it,- -as if excommunicated! No wonder, then, perhaps, that his satire was reckless and bitter his merriment often outrageousbecause that of an unhappy man. But his genius seldom, though sometimes, deserted him, to whatever unworthy tasks it might be reduced. It remained faithful with him to the last; nor was its power or inspiration abated, but with the dying struggles of the poor expatriated poet, closing his eyes afar off from friendship and love from all kindred, and from the face of the young vision

“Ada, sole dau hter of his house and heart !"

Gifford, we suppose, was not a bad satirist; but of his powers it is hard to judge, for we know not how to distinguish between his own gall, his own bile, his own spleen, and those same charming commodities furnished to him by others by choice contributors to the Quarterly. Few satirical articles in the Quarterly have been of much merit-bitter bigotry is not

keen wit-and it requires original genius
Of fine,
to render tolerable intolerance.
free, flowing, fearless, joyous, extrava-
gant, horse-playing, horse-laughing,
horse-funking, insane and senseless mad
humour, not one single drop, not one
single gleam, not one single "nicher,"
ever moistened, or irradiated, or shook the
pages of that staid, sober, solemn, stately,
King-Church-and Constitution Period-
ical. The ghastly editor grinned as he
cut up the grubs, like a grim insect-but-
cher, instead of smiling like a suave
entomologist. Your true naturalist, ha-
ving first smoked his beetle to death, pins
him down in the glass case with a plea-
sant countenance, a preparation undisfi-
gured, though pierced through the spine
by a small thin, sharp, bright, polished
spear, labelled with the creature's scien-
tific name. O bright blue sunny spring
and summer skies, why hunt butterflies
with the same truculent physiognomy,
the same sly stealth, and the same bold

eap,

Yet

with which, in the deserts of Africa, you would attack a tiger roaring against you with a tufted tail, some ten or twenty feet high? Why treat an ass as if he were a lion? A dragon-fly is not a dragon. Mr. Merry was not an Avatar, descending in his Tenth Incarnation to destroy the world-Mrs. Mary Robinson though certainly not the thing, was yet not the Lady of Babylon, with her hellred petticoat and cap of abominations, in her sinful and city-sinking hand. the crabbed, elderly, retired little studious gentleman, was as proud of his Bæviad and Mæviad, as if, like another Hercules, he had scoured of robbers the inside and the outside of the whole world. Then it is one thing, we shrewdly suspect, to be the translator of Juvenal and Persius, and another thing to be those gentlemen themselves-just, too, as it is one thing for a true poet of the olden time to have composed, in a fit of inspiration of passion, that elegiac song of almost unendurable pathos,

"I wish I were where Helen lies, Day and night on me she cries," and another thing for a false poetaster of the new time to have scribbled in a sort of waspish grief, very like anger, an imitation thereof, as inferior in beauty to the original, as William Gifford's housekeeper, no doubt a worthy woman in her way, inclined to corpulency, and with hair too, too red, was inferior to Adam Fleming's Lady-Love, the Flower of Kirk-Connel, tall and graceful as the lily or the hare-bell, the blue-bell of Scotland, that on its airy stalk is beloved.

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