In rainy days keep double guard, I dress my face with studious looks, And on the drowning world remark: Sometimes I dress, with women sit, * Law, licensed breaking of the peace, To which vacation is disease; A gipsy diction scarce known well By the magi, who law-fortunes tell, I shun; nor let it breed within Anxiety, and that the spleen. I never game, and rarely bet, Am loath to lend or run in debt. No Compter-writs me agitate; Who moralising pass the gate, ** * And there mine eyes on spendthrifts turn, Who vainly o'er their bondage mourn. Wisdom, before beneath their care, Pays her upbraiding visits there, And forces folly through the grate This view, profusely when inclined, Experience, joined with common sense, Reforming schemes are none of mine; * * * Since disappointment galls within, And subjugates the soul to spleen, Most schemes, as money snares, I hate, And bite not at projector's bait. Sufficient wrecks appear each day, And yet fresh fools are cast away. Ere well the bubbled can turn round, Their painted vessel runs aground; Or in deep seas it oversets By a fierce hurricane of debts; Or helm-directors in one trip, Freight first embezzled, sink the ship. When Fancy tries her limning skill I guard my heart, lest it should woo Forced by soft violence of prayer, And thus she models my desire : A farm some twenty miles from town, And drive, while t'other holds the plough; A pond before full to the brim, Where cows may cool, and geese may swim; Behind, a green, like velvet neat, Soft to the eye, and to the feet; Where odorous plants in evening fair And woods impervious to the breeze, Here stillness, height, and solemn shade, Fresh pastures speckled o'er with sheep, Thus sheltered free from care and strife, May I enjoy a calm through life; See faction, safe in low degree, ANNE, COUNTESS OF WINCHELSEA. 'It is remarkable,' says Mr Wordsworth, 'that excepting The Nocturnal Reverie, and a passage or two in the Windsor Forest of Pope, the poetry of the period intervening between the publication of "Paradise Lost" and the "Seasons," does not contain a single new image of external nature.' The 'Nocturnal Reverie' was written by ANNE, COUNTESS OF WINCHELSEA, the daughter of Sir William Kingsmill, Southampton, who died in 1720. Her lines are smoothly versified, and possess a tone of calm and contemplative observation: A Nocturnal Reverie. In such a night, when every louder wind When curlews cry beneath the village walls, Joys in the inferior world, and thinks it like her own: The following is another specimen of the correct and smooth versification of the countess, and seems to us superior to the Nocturnal Reverie?' Life's Progress. How gaily is at first begun Our life's uncertain race! How smiling the world's prospect lies, Which wander through our minds! As flowers the western winds! The gently-rising hill of Time, From whence with grief we see that prime, The die now cast, our station known, The thorns which former days had sown, That helps to bear us down; WILLIAM SOMERVILLE. The author of The Chase is still included in our editions of the poets, but is now rarely read or consulted. WILLIAM SOMERVILLE (1682-1742), was, as he tells Allan Ramsay, his brother-poet, A squire well born, and six foot high. Wormervile. His estate lay in Warwickshire, and brought him in £1500 per annum. He was generous, but extrava gant, and died in distressed circumstances, 'plagued The important work. Me other joys invite; blank and contains practical instructions and admonitions to sportsmen. The following is an animated sketch of a morning in autumn, preparatory to 'throwing off the pack:' Now golden Autumn from her open lap Her fragrant bounties showers; the fields are shorn; Somerville wrote a poetical address to Addison, on the latter purchasing an estate in Warwickshire. In his verses to Addison,' says Johnson, the couplet which mentions Clio is written with the most exquisite delicacy of praise; it exhibits one of those happy strokes that are seldom attained.' Addison, it is well-known, signed his papers in the 'Spectator' with the letters forming the name of Clio. The couplet which gratified Johnson so highly is as follows: And counts his large increase; his barns are stored, Hail, gentle Dawn! mild, blushing goddess, hail! When panting virtue her last efforts made, In welcoming Addison to the banks of Avon, Somerville does not scruple to place him above Shakspeare as a poet! In heaven he sings; on earth your muse supplies Gross as this misjudgment is, it should be remembered that Voltaire also fell into the same. The cold marble of Cato was preferred to the living and breathing creations of the myriad-minded' magician. ALLAN RAMSAY. The Scottish muse had been silent for nearly a century, excepting when it found brief expression in some stray song of broad humour or simple pathos, chanted by the population of the hills and dales. The genius of the country was at length revived in all its force and nationality, its comic dialogue, Doric simplicity and tenderness, by ALLAN RAMSAY, whose very name is now an impersonation of Scottish scenery and manners. The religious austerity of the Covenanters still hung over Scotland, and damped the efforts of poets and dramatists; but a freer spirit found its way into the towns, along with the increase of trade and commerce. The higher classes were in the habit of visiting London, though the journey was still performed on horseback; and the writings of Pope and Swift were circulated over the North. Clubs and taverns were rife in Edinburgh, in which the assembled wits loved to indulge in a pleasantry that often degenerated to excess. Talent was readily known and appreciated; and when Ramsay appeared as an author, he found the nation ripe for his native humour, his mannerspainting strains,' and his lively original sketches of Scottish life. Allan Ramsay was born in 1686, in the village of Leadhills, Lanarkshire, where his Allan Ramsay. father held the situation of manager of Lord Hopeton's mines. When he became a poet, he boasted that he was of the auld descent' of the Dalhousie family, and also collaterally sprung from a Douglas loin. His mother, Alice Bower, was of English parentage, her father having been brought from Derbyshire to instruct the Scottish miners in their art. Those who entertain the theory, that men of genius usually partake largely of the qualities and dispositions of their mother, may perhaps recognise some of the Derbyshire blood in Allan Ramsay's frankness and joviality of character. His father died while the poet was in his infancy; but his mother marrying again in the same district, Allan was brought up at Leadhills, and put to the village school, where he acquired learning enough to enable him, as he tells us, to read Horace 'faintly in the original.' His lot might have been a hard one, but it was fortunately spent in the country till he had reached his fifteenth year; and his lively temperament enabled him, with cheerfulness To wade through glens wi' chorking feet, When neither plaid nor kilt could fend the weet; Yet blythely wad he bang out o'er the brae, And stend o'er burns as light as ony rae, Hoping the morn1 might prove a better day. At the age of fifteen, Allan was put apprentice to a wig-maker in Edinburgh-a light employment suited to his slender frame and boyish smartness, but not very congenial to his literary taste. His poetical talent, however, was more observant than creative, and he did not commence writing till he was about twenty-six years of age. He then penned an address to the Easy Club,' a convivial society of young men, tinctured with Jacobite predilections, which were also imbibed by Ramsay, and which probably formed an additional recommendation to the favour of Pope and Gay, a distinction that he afterwards enjoyed. Allan was admitted a member of this To theek the out, and line the inside, In the year 1712 he married a writer's daughter, Now frae the east nook of Fife the dawn Carles wha heard the cock had craw'n, And greedy wives, wi' girning thrawn, Dogs barked, and the lads frae hand bookseller's shop, opposite to Niddry's Wynd.' Ramsay now left off wig-making, and set up a He next appeared as an editor, and published two works, The Tea Table Miscellany, being a collection of songs, partly his own; and The Evergreen, a collection of Scottish poems written before 1600. He of this kind, being deficient both in knowledge and was not well qualified for the task of editing works taste. poems, two pieces of his own, one of which, The Great daring darted frae his ee, Of just proportions large; Amazed, I gazed, To see, led at command, In 1725 appeared his celebrated pastoral drama, The had previously represented himself as the vicegerent of Apollo, and equal to Homer! He now removed to a better shop, and instead of the Mercury's head which had graced his sign-board, he put up 'the presentment of two brothers' of the Muse, Ben Jonson and Drummond. He next established a circu lating library, the first in Scotland. He associated on familiar terms with the leading nobility, lawyers, wits, and literati of Scotland, and was the Pope or Swift of the North. His son, afterwards a distinguished artist, he sent to Rome for instruction. But the prosperity of poets seems liable to an uncommon share of crosses. He was led by the promptings of a taste then rare in Scotland to expend his savings in the erection of a theatre, for the performance of the regular drama. He wished to keep his troop' together by the pith of reason;' but he did not calculate on the pith of an act of parliament in the hands of a hostile magistrate. The statute for licensing theatres prohibited all dramatic exhibitions without special license and the royal letters-patent; and on the strength of this enactment the magistrates of Edinburgh shut up Allan's theatre, leaving him without redress. To add to his mortification, the envious poetasters and strict religionists of the day attacked him with personal satires and lampoons, under such titles as-'A Looking-Glass for Allan Ramsay; The Dying Words of Allan Ramsay;' and 'The Flight of Religious Piety from Scotland, upon the account of Ramsay's lewd books, and the hell-bred playhouse comedians,' &c. Allan endeavoured to enlist President Forbes and the judges on his side by a poetical address, in which he prays for compensation from the legislature Syne, for amends for what I've lost, His circumstances and wishes at this crisis are more particularly explained in a letter to the president, which now lies before us: 'Will you,' he writes, give me something to do? Here I pass a sort of half idle scrimp life, tending a trifling trade, that scarce affords me the needful. Had I not got a parcel of guineas from you, and such as you, who were pleased to patronise my subscriptions, I should not have had a gray groat. I think shame (but why should I, when I open my mind to one of your goodness?) to hint that I want to have some small commission, when it happens to fall in your way to put me into it."* It does not appear that he either got money or a post, but he applied himself attentively to his business, and soon recruited his purse. A citizen-like good sense regulated the life of Ramsay. He gave over poetry before,' he prudently says, 'the coolness of fancy that attends advanced years should make me risk the reputation I had acquired.' Frae twenty-five to five-and-forty, About the year 1743, his circumstances were sufficiently flourishing to enable him to build himself a small octagon-shaped house on the north side of * From the manuscript collections in Culloden House. Ramsay Lodge. goose pie. He told Lord Elibank one day of this ludicrous comparison. What,' said the witty peer, 'a goose pie! In good faith, Allan, now that I see you in it, I think the house is not ill named.' He lived in this singular-looking mansion (which has since been somewhat altered) twelve years, and died of a complaint that had long afflicted him, scurvy in the gums, on the 7th of January 1758, at the age of seventy-two. So much of pleasantry, good humour, and worldly enjoyment, is mixed up with the history of Allan Ramsay, that his life is one of the green and sunny spots' in literary biography. His genius was well rewarded; and he possessed that turn of mind which David Hume says it is more happy to possess than to be born to an estate of ten thousand a-year-a disposition always to see the favourable side of things. Ramsay's poetical works are sufficiently various; and one of his editors has ambitiously classed them under the heads of serious, elegiac, comic, satiric, epigrammatical, pastoral, lyric, epistolary, fables and tales. He wrote trash in all departments, but failed in none. His tales are quaint and humorous, though, like those of Prior, they are too often indelicate. The Monk and Miller's Wife, founded on a poem of Dunbar, is as happy an adaptation of an old poet as any of Pope's or Dryden's from Chaucer. His lyrics want the grace, simplicity, and beauty which Burns breathed into these wood-notes wild,' designed alike for cottage and hall; yet some of those in the 'Gentle Shepherd' are delicate and tender; and others, such as The last time I came o'er the Moor, and The Yellow-haired Laddie, are still favourites with all lovers of Scottish song. In one of the least happy of the lyrics there occurs this beautiful image: How joyfully my spirits rise, When dancing she moves finely, O; His Lochaber no More is a strain of manly feeling and unaffected pathos. The poetical epistles of |