printers, that we now rarely see a Latin note without some such blunder, and the errors which they make in the English text are more mischievous because they are less conspicuous. Every printer used formerly to have a competent corrector of the press in his employ, and we shall continue to notice the incorrectness of the works which come before us, in the hope that this may again be considered as ne cessary. ART. XXII.-The Sabbath, and Sabbath Walks; by JAMES GRAHAME. 8vo. pp. 136. SO remarkably successful has this little poem been, that it had reached a third edition before it came to our hands. For some part of its success it has been inlebted to its title. and it may also have hala sectarian circulation, but undoubtedly as much is to be attributed to the true genius which it displays. The preface has nothing prefatory, but it is a striking chapter or chapterlet in the manner of Montesquieu. "He who has seen threescore and ten years, has lived ten years of Sabbaths. The appropriation of so considerable a portion of butan life to religious duties, to domestic enjoyment, and to meditative leisure, is a most merciful branch of the divine dispensation. It is the grand bulwark of poverty against the encroachments of capital. The Jabouring classes all their time. The rich are the buyers, at least they are the chief buyers; for it is obvious, that more than the half of the waking hours of those who earn their bread by the sweat of their brow, is consunned in the manufacture of articles, that cannot he deemed either necessaries or com forts. Six days of the week are thus disposed of already. If Sunday were in the market, it would find purchasers too. The abolition of the Sabbath would, in truth, be equivalent to a sentence, adjudging to the rich the services of the poor for life." The poem begins very beautifully: « How still the morning of the hallowed day! Mute is the voice of rural labour, hushed The ploughboy's whistle, and the milkmaid's song. The scythe lies glittering in the dewy wreath Sounds the most faint attract the ear,--the Of early bee, the trickling of the dew, And sweeter from the sky the gladsome lark Marmurs more gently down the deep-worn glen; While from yon lowly roof, whose curling smoke The voice of psalms, the simple song of O'ermounts the mist, is heard, at intervals, praise, "With dove-like wings, Peace o'er yon The dizzying mill-wheel rests; the anvil's du man, free, Her deadliest foe. The toil-worn horse, set After describing the social worship of Scotland and "the loftier ritual” of England, the poet paints the solitary sabbath of the shepherd's boy, who reads of the son of Jesse keeping sheep; and then marking the place in his bible with a sprig of thyme, sings the hymns which he has been taught at home. A fine passage follows in a higher strain; "Far other times our fathers' grandsires A virtuous race, to godliness devote. to soil men Of worldly minds have dared to stigmatize Their constancy in torture, and in death,— On history's honest page be pictured bright On which the angel said, See where the Lord ways, O'er hills, thro' woods, o'er dreary wastes, they sought The upland moors, where rivers, there but brooks, Dispart to different seas: Fast by such brooks, Amid the heathery wild, that all around The infatuate monarch and his wavering host,) In gentle stream: then rose the song, the loud Acclaim of praise; the wheeling plover ceased weakening their effect. What a tale for instance is this! hours, John Brown, having performed the "One morning, between five and six worship of God in his family, was going, with a spade in his hand, to make ready some peat-ground. The mist being very dark, he knew not until cruel and bloody Claverhouse compassed him with three troops of horse. brought him to his house, and there examined him; who, though he was a man of stammering speech, yet answered him distinctly and solidly; which made Claverhouse to exănrire throse whom he had taken to be his guide through the mirs, if they had heard him preach? They answered, No, no, he was never a preacher.' He said, "If he has never preached, meikle he has prayed in his time." He said to John, Go to your prayers, for you shall immediately die. When he was praying, Claverhouse interrupted him three times one time that he stopped him, he was pleading that the Lord would spare a remnant, and not inake a full end in the day of his anger. Claverhouse said, I give you time to pray, and ye are begun to preach? he turned about upon his knees, and said, Sir, you know neither the nature of praying nor preaching, that calls this preaching then continued without confusion. When ended, Claverhouse caid, Take good night of your wife and children.' His wife standing by with her child in her arms that shie had brought forth to him, and another child of his first wife's, he came to her, and said Now, Marion, the day is come that I told you would come, when I spake first to you of marrying me.' She said, 'Indeed, John, I can willingly part with you.' Then he said, · This is all I desire, I have no more to do but die.' He kissed his wife and bairns, and wished purchased and promised blessings to be multiplied upon them, and his blessing. Claverhouse ordered six men to shoot him; the most part of the bullets came upon his head, which scattered his brains upon the ground. Claverhouse said to his wife, What thinkest thou of thy husband now, woman?" She said, I thought ever much of him, and now as much as ever.' He said, 'It were justice to lay thee beside him.' She said, If ye were permitted, I doubt not but your cruelty would go that length; but how will ye mke answer for this morning's work He said, 'To man I can be answerable; and for God, I will take him in mine own hand,' Claverhouse mounted his horse, and marched, and left her, with the corpse of her dead husband lying there. She set the bairn on the ground, and tied up his head, and straighted his body, and covered him in her plaid, and sat down, and wept over him. It being a very desart place, where never victual grew, and far from neighbours, it was some time before any friends came to her; the first that came was a very fit hand, that old singular christian woman in the Cummerhead, named Elizabeth Menzies, three miles distant, who had been tried with the violent death of her husband at Pentland, afterwards of two worthy sons, Thomas Weir, who was killed at Drumclog, and David Steel, who was, suddenly shot afterwards when taken. The said Marion Weir, sitting upon her husband's grave, told me, that before that, she could see no blood but she was in danger to faint, and yet she was helped to be a witness to all this, without either fainting or confusion; except when the shots were let off, her eyes dazzled. His corpse were buried at the end of his house, where he was slain." PEDEN'S Life. Why is it that religious enthusiasm is fatal to genius? This very butcher who is as famous below by the name of Claverhouse as he is on earth by his title of Dundee, is the hero of Highland songs; the very cow-stealers on the border had better poets than Alexander the Great could get, and yet the wild sufferings and admirable courage of the Cameronians have not produced a single ballad. · Religious enthusiasm is not merely fatal to genius by what it prevents, but it seems to debase whatever it touches, as witness all the versions of the Psalms! An exquisite image occurs in the description of the debtor's sabbath. "Or turn thee to that house, with studded doors, And iron-visor'd windows;—even there The Sabbath sheds a beam of bliss, tho' faint; The debtor's friends (for still he has some friends) Have time to visit him; the blossoming pea, That climbs the rust-worn bars, seems fresher tinged; And on the little turf, this day renewed, Mr. Grahame inveighs against the indiscriminate cruelty of the criminal laws, but he recommends death as the punishnient for blasphemy! We hope he will reflect upon the iniquity of all persecu tion, and omit this very exceptionable passage. One extract more from these delightful : speaking of the Scotch emigrants poems: in America, he thus describes the blind Deplores its distance now. There well be knew Each object, though unseen; there could he wend His way, guideless, through wilds and mazy woods; Each aged tree, spared when the forest fell, Was his familiar friend, from the smooth birch, With rind of silken touch, to the rough eln: The three gray stones, that marked where he roes lay, Mourned by the harp, mourned by the meting voice Of Cona, oft his resting-place had been. Upon the hallowed morn, the saddening change: No more he hears the gladsome village bell Ring the blest summons to the house of God; And, for the voice of psalms, loud, solins, grand, That cheered his darkling path, as, with slow step And feeble, he toiled up the spire-topt hill,A few faint notes ascend among the trees." Were we to select all the passages of striking merit, it would far exceed our limits. There is a want of method and of order in the poem, and all parts are not equally good. When the author speaks of the missionaries, he sinks into a methodist versifier. He rises again upon the subject of the slave-trade. Scotland may indeed well boast that not a single slaveship sails from a Scottish port! but are not many of the planters and most of the overseers in our accursed islands Scotchmen? The Sabbath Walks contain many beartiful lines and images caught from netare; but the connection with the Sabbath is too arbitrary. After a separate poem upon the Sunday, these walks had better have been taken upon another day. We copy a note to the last poem, because it contains a plan which ought to be adopted, and enforced by law. no means are ever thought of, for the preservation of the lives of shephe ds during Sow-storins. I believe, that in nine instances out of ten, the death of the unhappy persons who perish in the snow is owing to their losing their way. A proof of this is, that very few are lost in the day-time. The remedy, then, is both easy and obvious. Let means be used for enabling the shepherd, in the darkest night, to know precisely the spot at which he is, and the bearings of the surrounding grounds. Snow-storms are almost always accompanied with wind. Suppose a pole, fifteen feet high, well fixed in the ground, with two cross spars placed near the bottom, to denote the airts, or points of the compass;-a bell hung at the top of this pole, with a piece of flat wood attached to it, projecting upward, would ring with the slightest breeze. For a few hundred pounds, every square mile of the southern district of Scotland might be supplied with such bells. As they would be purposely made to have different tones, the shepherd would soon be able to distinguish one from another. He could never be more than a mile distant from, one or other of them. On coming to the spot, he would at once know the points of the compass, and of course the direction in which his home lay." Mr. Grahame wants that correctness which can only be attained by long practice; he has however the true feeling of a poet. We have seldom seen a poem from which so many fine passages and single lines of striking excellence could be selected. Its success has not been beyond its merits; it will become perma nently popular. ART. XXIII.—Simple Poems on Simple Subjects. By CHRISTIAN MILN, Wife of a Journeyman Sh.p-carpenter in Footdee Aberdeen. 8vo. pp. 183. THE contents of this volume may most fivourably be characterized by negatives. The rhymes are not bad, the style is not ART. XXIV.—The Pleasures of Love, a Poem. THE versification of this little poem is evidently modeled from "The Loves of the Plants" of Dr. Darwin. It displays tnuch glitter, and some affcetation, and may be read from beginning to end, or from the end to the beginning, or by alternate pages, without the least detriment to its sense or harmony, as the following specimen will evince: “O'er every surge, through every fateful The distant sailor chaunts his fair-one's form; steer, O'er tepid waves if high his bak career; ART. XXV ---The Pleasures of Love; being affected, and probably no other journeyman ship-carpenter's wife in Aberdeen can write better. By JOHN STEWART, Esq. 8vo. pp. 177. dwell; And bid the airy modulations swell; Plucks the ripe cocoa from the nectar'd glade, Or laves her white limba in the gelid flood. Marks the white sail, and waves her lily- As, soon across the scintillating foam, Ah! sweet enthusiast! soon th' ideal breast rum, but offences against good taste might easily be pointed out. It is upon the whole a dull selection, and will we appre hend be little in request either for the shelves of the library, or the secret cabinets of the fashionable dressing-rooms. ART. XXVI.-Poems. By P. L. COURTIER. Vol. 2. 12mo. pp. 154. THE first word in the volume is false grammar. Him who of solitude erewhile Not vainly sung, now courts the smile We notice it however only as a piece of mens. Song. "Call it truth, or call it art, In her sunile such magic hes Since I cannot but believe thee, The Kiss. “When first the lips of lovers meet, ART. XXVII.—Rhymes on Art; or, the Remonstrance of a Painter : In two Park. WA Notes, and a Preface, including Strictures on the State of the Arts, Criticism, Putronage, and Fublic Taste By MARTIN ARCHER SHEE, R. A. 8vo. pp. 106. MR. SHEE informs us in his preface that having written a poem in four books upon the subject of painting, in which more particularly the early progress of the student is attempted to be illustrated and encouraged, he has sent the first book abroad to ascertain by its success how far such an article of his manufacture may be acceptable in the market. Though, with respect to this general plan, it may be acting somewhat file the man who put a brick in his pocket, in order to his house, yet he offers the present produc enable a purchaser to form a judgment of tion as a fair sample of the commodity he deals in; he sends it up as a small balleon, to ascertain the current of the air before he commit's himself to the mercy of the clements in his larger and more hazardous machine.” The preface to his volume is of unusual length, and unusual interest. It is indeed like the poem which it ushers in, an appeal to the nation on the part of the fine arts for that national patronage, with out which, though they may exist, they cannot flourish. "It is a mistake unworthy of an enlightened government, to conceive that the arts, left to the influnce of ordinary events, turned loose upon society, to fight and scramble, in the rude and revolting contest of coarser occupations, can ever arrive at that perfection which contributes so materially to the permament glory of a state. "This is the true handicraft consideration of the subject-the warehouse wisdom of z dealer and chapman, who would make të artist a manufacturer, and measure his wors by the yard. The arts treated commercial, intrusted to that vulgar and inadequate irfound in the mass of society, never dil, 2. ↑ pression of their importance, which is to be never can flourish in any country. Thepilciple of trade, and the principle of the arts, an not only dissimilar, but incompatible. Pre the other. Employment is the pabulum at is the impelling power of the one—prase, c' of the first-encouragement, of the k and genius, they differ as widely in mearing These terms are synonymous in the ordir v avocations of life; but in the pursuits of tate coldness from Kindness, as the or&d conmerce of mechanics, from the liberal intercourse of gentlemen.” "Without any adequate as istance, may, i obstructed and oppressed by circumstores of England have already advanced beyond peculiarly hostile to their interests, the ans our hopes, and taken precedence of their age. What may we not therefore anticipate fro their exertions, if they shall be so fortunate s to experience those inspiting proofs of pub estimation, which, in all former instance, 1 have been essential to their existence? |