But the young plants of grace they look'd There are hills beyond Pentland, and couthie and slee, lands beyond Forth, Thinking, luck to thy bonnet, thou Bonny If there's lords in the Lowlands, there's Dundee !

With sour-featured whigs the Grass- Will cry hoigh ! for the bonnets o' Bonny market was cramm'd

As they watch'd for the bonnets o' Bonny There's steel in the scabbard that dangles Dundee !

These cowls of Kilmarnock had spits and At a toss of the bonnet o' Bonny Dundee.

They sought her baith by bower and ha'; Whiles a hen and whiles a soo;

JAMES MONTGOMERY.

1771-1854.

no features that betray the land of his birth, and could hardly be expected to have; for though born a Scotchman, and bearing a Scotch name, his parents were Irish, and his upbringing English. When some friends expressed their surprise at his preserving no trace of his nationality, he replied by quoting Johnson's remark about catching a Scotchman when young. He was born on the 4th November 1771, at Irvine, in Ayrshire, where his father, John Montgomery, a Moravian missionary, was stationed for a short time. His parents went to the West Indies, and both died there his mother in Tobago, and his father in Barbadoes. Young Montgomery was educated at a Moravian school, at Fulneck, Yorkshire; and, being unwilling to qualify for the ministry, he was apprenticed to a grocer.

JAMES MONTGOMERY's poems have | sion was committed to York Castle and fined; but he had the good sense to regard his persecution with moderation, and possibly gained more than he lost by it in the end. His first volume of poems, The Wanderer of Switzerland and other Poems, appeared in 1806. It reached a third edition in 1807, and then underwent the lash of the Edinburgh Review, with the usual result of increasing its circulation. He afterwards published The West Indies, in honour of the abolition of the slave trade, in 1807; Prison Amusements; The World before the Flood; Thoughts on Wheels, an attack on lotteries; and The Climbing Boy's Soliloquies, against employing boys to sweep chimneys by climbing up them. In 1819, he published Greenland, in five cantos; and in 1827, The Pelican Island. In 1825, he retired from the editorship of The Sheffield Iris, and in 1830-31 delivered a course of lectures on Poetry and General Literature at the Royal Institution. On the recommendation of Sir Robert Peel, he received a pension of £150 a-year, which he enjoyed till his death, which took place in 1854.

In his sixteenth year he ran off from his first situation, and found another, which he left in turn for London, with the view of getting his poems published. Having failed in this, he returned to Yorkshire, and engaged as a clerk in a newspaper office in Sheffield, in 1791. After some time his employer failed, and, with the assistance of some friends, Montgomery established the Sheffield Iris, a weekly newspaper, at the head of which he remained till 1825. In the years 1794 and 1795, he was tried for political offences, and on each occa(12)

Montgomery's larger poems, though possessing descriptive beauties, are artificial and strain after effect, and are now seldom read. The greater part of his minor pieces, which are mostly religious, are commonplace; but a few have genuine poetic sentiments happily expressed. He is a sort of phenomenon in

2 Y

poetic literature; for though he was in
search of a publisher before his twen-
tieth year, and continued to write till
he was eighty, hardly anything he Erewhile his portion, life and light,
wrote bears the impress of spontaneous
genius. The specimens we have given
are his best.

The rolling seasons, day and night,
Sun, moon, and stars, the earth and
main,

THE COMMON LOT.

Once, in the flight of ages past,

To him exist in vain.

The clouds and sunbeams, o'er his eye
That once their shades and glory threw,
Have left in yonder silent sky

No vestige where they flew.

The annals of the human race,

Their ruins, since the world began,

There lived a man :—and who was he? Of him afford no other trace

Mortal! howe'er thy lot be cast,

That man resembled thee.

Unknown the region of his birth,

The land in which he died unknown: His name has perish'd from the earth; This truth survives alone:

That joy and grief, and hope and fear,

Alternate triumph'd in his breast; His bliss and woe,-a smile, a tear!Oblivion hides the rest.

The bounding pulse, the languid limb,
The changing spirits' rise and fall;
We know that these were felt by him,
For these are felt by all.

He suffer'd, but his pangs are o'er;
Enjoy'd,--but his delights are fled;
Had friends,-his friends are now no

more;

And foes,-his foes are dead.

He loved, but whom he loved, the grave
Hath lost in its unconscious womb :
O, she was fair !-but nought could save
Her beauty from the tomb.

He saw whatever thou hast seen;
Encountered all that troubles thee:
He was,-whatever thou hast been ;
He is, what thou shalt be.

Than this,-there lived a man!

HOME.

There is a land, of every land the pride, Beloved by heaven o'er all the world beside;

Where brighter suns dispense serener
light,

And milder moons emparadise the night;
A land of beauty, virtue, valour, truth,
Time-tutored age, and love-exalted youth,
The wandering mariner, whose eye ex-
plores

The wealthiest isles, the most enchanting
shores,

Views not a realm so bountiful and fair,
Nor breathes the spirit of a purer air.
In every clime the magnet of his soul,
Touched by remembrance, trembles to
that pole;

For in this land of heaven's peculiar grace,
The heritage of nature's noblest race,
| There is a spot of earth supremely blest,
A dearer, sweeter spot than all the rest,
Where man, creation's tyrant, casts aside
His sword and sceptre, pageantry and
pride,

While in his softened looks benignly blend

The sire, the son, the husband, brother,

friend;

TANNAHILL, for delicacy and refinement of feeling and expression, comes nearest to Burns of all our song-writers. His range was narrow, even compared with Hogg and Lady Nairne; for he had not the imagination of the one, nor the humour of the other; yet he possessed that sensitive tenderness of the poetic instinct, capable of touching the finest chords in nature to which the human soul has ever responded, in a degree which Burns alone excelled. Like all their contemporaries, he was greatly Burns's inferior in passion, both as to range and intensity.

Paisley, in which town his father,
James Tannahill, was
a silk-gauze
weaver. His mother, Janet Pollock,
the daughter of a small proprietor, or
bonnet-laird, in Ayrshire, was a woman
of superior talents and intelligence.
Robert was born on the 3d June 1774,
and was the fourth of six sons. His
school education was limited to read-
ing, writing, and arithmetic; and at an
early age he was sent to learn weav-
ing, then a prosperous occupation, and
the leading trade of Paisley.

Tannahill gave early indications of a poetic temperament, accompanied with Robert Tannahill was a native of a taste for music, not always found to