And cried, forsooth, because his arm was hampered, (O cruel irony!); these come too late, And only mock whom they were meant to honour! The Death of the Strong Man. Strength, too! thou surly and less gentle boast Of those that loud laugh at the village ring! A fit of common sickness pulls thee down With greater ease than e'er thou didst the stripling That rashly dared thee to the unequal fight. What groan was that I heard? Deep groan, indeed, With anguish heavy laden! let me trace it: From yonder bed it comes, where the strong man, By stronger arm belaboured, gasps for breath Like a hard-hunted beast. How his great heart Beats thick his roomy chest by far too scant To give the lungs full play! What now avail The strong-built sinewy limbs and well-spread shoulders? See how he tugs for life, and lays about him, Mad with his pain! Eager he catches hold Of what comes next to hand, and grasps it hard Just like a creature drowning. Hideous sight! O how his eyes stand out, and stare full ghastly! While the distemper's rank and deadly venom Shoots like a burning arrow 'cross his bowels, And drinks his marrow up. Heard you that groan? It was his last. See how the great Goliah, Just like a child that brawled itself to rest, Lies still. What mean'st thou then, O mighty boaster, To vaunt of nerves of thine? What means the bull, Unconscious of his strength, to play the coward, And flee before a feeble thing like man: That, knowing well the slackness of his arm, Trusts only in the well-invented knife? A Great Church at Night. See yonder hallowed fane! The pious work Of names once famed, now dubious or forgot, And buried midst the wreck of things which were: There lie interred the more illustrious dead. The wind is up: hark! how it howls! methinks Till now I never heard a sound so dreary! The mansions of the dead. Roused from their slumbers, Pass and repass, hushed as the foot of night. Friendship! mysterious cement of the soul, Man, sick of bliss, tried evil; and Alas! too well he sped; the good he scorned Like those of angels, short and far between. 'Angel visits, short and bright,' came from Norris of Bemerton (see above, page 259) to Blair, and from Blair to Campbell : What though my winged hours of bliss have been, The passage so often quoted by Burns (surely for the idea rather than for the characteristically conversational and unrhythmical expression of it) also contains a reminiscence of Norris : Tell us, ye dead! Will none of you in pity The last paragraph, passing from death to the resurrection, has naturally a more cheerful note, and thus impressively concludes: 'Tis but a night, a long and moonless night; Thus at the shut of even the weary bird THE SCOTTISH VERNACULAR REVIVAL.* W HEN on signing the Act of Union in 1707 the Scottish Chancellor, Seafield, uttered his memorable saying, 'Now there's ane end of ane old song,' the echo of his words sent a chill to the hearts of all good Scotsmen, whatever their party or politics. The bulk of the people not merely regretted but resented the loss of their Parliament, last conspicuous emblem of 'Scotland a nation. And the gradual introduction of English coinage, English weights and measures, English taxation, and English ways produced a vehement nationalism of which the Jacobite risings in the '15 and the '45 were but one consequence. A more permanent outcome was (not the revival of the national literature, but) the revival of the native speech as a literary vehicle. In one thing at least Scotticism might be cherished with even warmer affection than heretofore-but within well-understood limits; the revival of the old Scots for general literary purposes was forever out of the question. The native tongue was not dead; but it had been too long divorced from the national culture to be a natural or sufficient instrument for expressing the various interests of the eighteenth century. Scotland was now a part of Europe; Scottish writers justly ambitious of a European audience would stultify themselves by harking back to a local dialect that for a hundred years had lived on mainly in the mouths of country-folks, fishers, and handicraftsmen, and become greatly limited in its scope and capacities. Scotsmen were about to claim a very conspicuous place in English literature, and, writing in English, to bestow on posterity a richer bequest than the old Scottish authors of Scotland's first golden age; Edinburgh was to be recognised as the Modern Athens. Can we-speaking only of the works of men born before the end of the first quarter of the eighteenth century-imagine Hume's Essays in 'broad Scotch,' or his History of England? or Reid's Philosophy of the Intellectual Powers? Thomson's Seasons? Robertson's Charles V.? or Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations? The old literary tongue was, as such, dead; nor could any combination of wit and wisdom put back the shadow on the dial. Long before Scotch ceased to be a literary tongue in the full sense, the chief models for Scottish writers were their great English predecessors and contemporaries. After the Reformation the language of literature, of the Church, and of public life came to be normally EnglishEnglish with a difference-and the language of Scottish civic society became increasingly anglicised. Bible, psalm-book, confession, catechism, were in English, made in England. The books of devotion were English; at most, like Rutherford's letters, English with Scotch words brought in with effect at wide intervals. By the end of the seventeenth century books were no longer printed in Scotch; and for more than half a century nobody had been taught to spell or write Scotch. Scottish authors wrote regularly in English. Nothing but occasional songs, pasquils, or chap-books appeared in Scotch, and then the Scotch was seldom Scotch throughout. All but the utterly uneducated were, in town or country, constantly hearing English, reading nothing but English, and, even if they spoke Scotch, writing their letters in English. Yet then and now, in spite of adverse circumstances, this mixed dialect lived on in surprising vigour amongst the humbler classes, and was not merely a pithy spoken vernacular, but (for specific uses) an admirably effective literary instrument. It was least anglicised amongst those living farthest from the towns. Most largely anglicised was the macaronic used by the educated who condescended to the vernacular in conversation with their illiterate neighbours, in hours of relaxation or domesticity, and for jests and anecdotes. The 'broad Scotch' heard by Dr Johnson amongst Scottish literati was substantially English spoken with a markedly Scottish intonation. The old heroic ballads, even, were rarely in quite broad Scotch, never in the broadest Scotch. To make Blind Harry's Wallace intelligible to his contemporaries, higher and lower, Hamilton of Gilbertfield in 1722 translated the poem into English; and it was the English version that, half a century later, poured a flood of Scottish prejudice into Burns's breast. Scotsmen writing for Scotsmen even on Scottish subjects employed English regularly-as witness the authors dealt with above at pages 301-305. A prose treatise wholly in Scotch on any subject whatever was impossible; so was a sustained and dignified poem. But verse-writing in the vernacular had never wholly ceased, and was practised sporadically in various kinds with curious limitations. Jocular, facetious, and satirical verse was produced in as broad a form of the vernacular as the writer could attain; love poems, also, when they professed to reproduce the lovers' spoken utterance, and in a less broad form. Very much in proportion as the subject was serious was the English tinge or element in vernacular verse conspicuously large. often even passing into English altogether. Beattie, author of the Minstrel, who * Copyright 1902 by J. B. Lippincott Company. was publishing his first poems about the middle of the century, did write admirable and pithy vernacular verse on occasion; but said, not long before Burns's time, 'To write in the vulgar broad Scotch, and yet seriously, is now impossible; for more than half a century it has by the Scots been considered a dialect of the vulgar.' About the time Beattie speaks of, Allan Ramsay was of another opinion. It was Ramsay who fixed the standard for the revived Scottish vernacular poetising, a standard in rhyme and diction so closely followed by his successors, Fergusson and Burnsthough both Fergusson and Burns avoided many of the traps into which honest Allan fell open-eyed, and, with truer humour and better taste, recognised the limits within which the vernacular was available without becoming grotesque. Allan even wrote elegies in Scotch in which noble Scottish ladies are incongruously addressed by the pseudo-classic names of Keitha and Southeska! And profitably to paraphrase Horace, the most courtly and elegant of Latin poets, in a dialect deliberately rejected by the educated and resigned to the special use of the day-labourer and the mechanic, is about as feasible as it would be to reproduce Eschylus in Mr Barnes's excellent Dorsetshire, or to render the gems of the Greek anthology in the actually spoken and pithy dialect of the Old Kent Road. Ramsay had acquired some credit as the laureate of a club, and as author of a few pithy occasional and satirical verses in the manner of Sempill, before he conceived the patriotic ambition of awakening interest in old Scottish poetry, and of continuing the production of it on a larger scale. His loose and sadly vulgarised version of part of Christ's Kirk on the Green, as well as his editing of the Evergreen, shows how illequipped he was for undertaking this work from the historical and philological side. The dialogue of his Gentle Shepherd is about as far removed from the actual rough-and-ready speech of contemporary Scottish country-folk as are the idyllic pictures of their amiable occupations from a representation of actual life on a Lowland farm. And his songs remain to show how little sense he had for a pure style of Scotch, the substance of them being at times sound vernacular (occasionally with an archaic word or two), at times ordinary English, at times the characteristic, stilted, and formal English poetic diction of the eighteenth century, already artificial enough, but made still more unnatural by being done over into a kind of fancy Scotch. Ramsay wrote some poems in English throughout, and sometimes evidently meant to write in his mixed artificial jargon of broken English. But for him and his successors, it was perhaps almost inevitable that the typical Scotch should be that which was most patriotically unlike English : they did not distinguish between the purer Scots of the landward folks and the debased dialect of the Edinburgh slums, often London slang transported to the north; and the lingo that would have reproduced aptly enough in verse the actual speech of the haunters of low town pothouses was transferred simpliciter to poems in which noble ladies and gentlemen were the interlocutors. The academy for regulating the revived Scottish tongue was not even the man in the street and the man on the moors, but the men and women who spoke the most uncouth and even debased form of the tongue corruptions, monstrosities, and barbarisms, ignorant mispronunciations and illiterate misspellings, were equally welcome-not indeed to Ramsay, but to many of his imitators. 'The Carritches' for the Catechism is as typical Scotch as sparrer-grass or sparrow-grass is the typically English form of asparagus; 'pockmantie' is an extraordinarily debased form of portmanteau ; a large proportion of modern Scotch words are simply the result of slurred and slovenly utterance -'Embro' for Edinburgh and 'scomfish' for discomfit are parallel to 'gemman' and 'nuffink' in London; 'dinna' and 'canna,' now universally accepted in place of the old Scots do nocht' and 'can nocht,' are precisely on the same philological level as the Cockney "e dunno' for 'he don't know ;' and 'Ou ay, a' ae oo' for 'Oh ay, all one wool,' instead of being a triumph of expressiveness, shows how a nervous, pithy organism like the Scottish tongue can be degraded to boneless pulp. Nothing more convincingly shows that a language has fallen out of the race than when its characteristic words and sounds are spelt, even by those who use them, in terms of another language, with another phonetic system. The practice of spelling Scots words with the modern English power of the vowels, long established and now carried much further, shows that Scots was no longer a rule to itself. A Scotsman who knows Scots can pronounce house, cow, town, round, die, without having the English phonetic equivalents-hoos, coo, toon, roond, dee-provided for him as in a pronouncing' dictionary; 'ceevil' and 'peety' are not Scotch words, but English spellings of the way an old-fashioned Scotsman pronounces civil and pity. And 'tae dae' are not words at all, but attempts, and extremely inaccurate attempts, to indicate to an eye trained to English spelling the value given in old Scots to the vowels in 'to do,' the old and only genuine Scots spelling. Seafield's words, 'Now there's ane end of ane old song,' might have been said of the Scots tongue as a literary language for general use. The very form of his utterance proves it; as does the fact that when it is quoted it is almost never cited as he said it and as it was reported at the time, but translated into some such form as 'Noo there's an en' o' an auld sang.' But that the song was not yet at an end in various and admirable shapes and uses, the extracts from the following author's show. D. P. In his attempts in English verse Pennecuik was not content with imitation, but would sometimes plagiarise an entire passage from Rochester or Ayton. There was another Alexander Pennecuik, possibly a relative (died 1730), an Edinburgh citizen who wrote Streams from Helicon (1720) and Flowers from Parnassus (1726) in the Scotch vernacular, and described the coarser aspects of Edinburgh life in the fashion set by Allan Ramsay. One of his effusions tells the story of 'half-hangit Maggie Dickson,' who escaped so strangely from the executioner's hands in 1724. It and others of his most characteristic verses appear in a Collection of Scots Poems on Several Occasions, printed at Edinburgh in 1756. Alexander Robertson of Strowan (1668– 1749), a Perthshire laird and irreconcilable Jacobite, who was in almost every rebellion from 1689 to 1745, wrote some verses which were published at Edinburgh in 1751 in a volume that is one of the curiosities sought after by Scottish bibliophiles. It is described not unfairly by Macaulay as a volume of poems always very stupid and often very profligate,' which, had it been manufactured in Grub Street, 'would scarcely have been honoured with a quarter of a line in the Dunciad! As the recreations of a Highland chief, however, produced in a Highland hut before Culloden (for Strowan, through confiscation and dissipation, was reduced to sordid poverty), the verses have a certain historic interest, although the only good lines in them are nothing but an impudent theft from Butler's Hudibras. William Hamilton of Gilbertfield (1665 ?— 1751), son of a Fife laird, served as a lieutenant in the army, and after his retirement made the acquaintance of Allan Ramsay, with whom he corresponded in some rhyming epistles, which seem to have given Burns an occasional hint. He has a minor place among Ramsay's contemporaries in virtue of his Last dying Words of Bonnie Heck, a poem in the 'Habbie Simpson' stanza and sentiment on the death of a famous Fife greyhound, which appeared in Watson's Choice Col lection in 1706. More notable historically was his metrical modernisation of Blind Harry's 'Wallace,' dedicated to the High Puissant and most noble Prince James, Duke of Hamilton,' and published in 1722. The version, as will be seen from the following specimen, is no better than doggerel, but it won instant popularity among the Scottish peasantry, and is memorable in a way as the book which gave Burns his boyish reading and 'poured a Scottish prejudice' into his veins. It is significant of the progress of anglicisation that in this highly successful attempt to popularise an old Scottish classic amongst the Scottish people, the medium adopted was modern English. The Battle of Stirling. The day of battle does approach at length, In the plain field upon the other side. Hugh Kirkingham the vanguard on led he, Cressingham William Hamilton of Bangour (1704-54) was born at his father's estate of Bangour in Linlithgowshire, and was bred a Whig at North Berwick by his stepfather, Lord President Dalrymple. He was the delight of the fashionable circles of his native country, and became early distinguished as a poet by his contributions to Ramsay's Tea-table Miscellany (1724-27). At Rome, whither he had been sent for his health, he is said to have been converted to Jacobitism by Prince Charlie himself; and in 1745 he joined his standard, and became the volunteer laureate' of the Jacobites by celebrating the battle of Gladsmuir. After Culloden he succeeded in escaping to France, and in Dennistoun's Memoirs of Sir Robert Strange there are some interesting notes of his residence at Rouen. But, through his friends and admirers at home, a pardon was procured for him, and in 1750 he succeeded his elder brother in the paternal estate. He did not live long to enjoy his good fortune; his health had always been delicate, and a pulmonary attack forced him to seek the warmer climate of the Continent. He gradually declined, and died at Lyons. In 1748 some person unknown to him (seemingly Adam Smith) collected and published his poems in Glasgow; but the first genuine and correct copy did not appear till 1760, after Hamilton's death, when a collection was made from his own manuscripts. A notable feature in his English verse is his ornate diction, and there he usually shows more fancy than feeling : In everlasting blushes seen, Such Pringle shines, of sprightly mien ; The lively step, the mirthful joke, Is all abroad upon her face; All charms are there, and all alive. Others of his amatory verses are full of conceits and exaggerated expression, without a trace of real passion. He wrote a didactic poem, 'Contemplation,' and, in blank verse, a national one on the Thistle, and the order of knighthood named from it : How oft beneath Its martial influence have Scotia's sons, His ballad of The Braes of Yarrow' is his masterpiece, and in virtue of it he ranks high amongst the revivers of vernacular poetry. Suggested, it may be, by the old ballad of 'The Dowie Dens of Yarrow' (printed by Scott in the Border Minstrelsy), it has real nature, tenderness, and pastoral simplicity, and it struck the keynote of Wordsworth's Three Yarrows.' A. Lang maun she weep, lang maun she, maun she weep, Pu'ing the birks on the Braes of Yarrow. Her luver dear, the cause of sorrow, And I hae slain the comeliest swain That e'er pu'd birks on the Braes of Yarrow. Why runs thy stream, O Yarrow, Yarrow, red? Why on thy braes heard the voice of sorrow? And why yon melancholeous weids Hung on the bonnie birks of Yarrow? What's yonder floats on the rueful, rueful flude? 'Tis he, the comely swain I slew Upon the duleful Braes of Yarrow. Wash, O wash his wounds, his wounds in tears, His helpless fate on the Braes of Yarrow. Flows Yarrow sweet? as sweet, as sweet flows Tweed, Busk ye, then busk, my bonnie, bonnie bride; And think nae mair on the Braes of Yarrow. The boy put on his robes, his robes of green, |