South Africa. The first of the following passages describes his experience of the Boers after he had learnt Dutch enough to communicate with them and preach to the 'Colonial' Hottentots; the second was added just before the publication of the Narrative in 1834. Boer Neighbours in 1820. I thus found myself all at once, and not a little to my own surprise, performing the novel and somewhat incongruous functions of a sort of civil and military officer, of a medical practitioner, religious instructor, engineer, architect, gardener, plasterer, cabinet-maker, and, I might add, tinker! In short, I was driven to do the best I could in the peculiar position in which circumstances had placed me; and when (as was frequently the case) my own knowledge and the experience of others failed me, I was obliged to trust to 'mother-wit.' Few of About this period we were somewhat teased by Sunday visits from our Dutch-African neighbours of the lower part of the Glen-Lynden valley and the Tarka. Solicitous to keep upon friendly terms with these people, I always made it a point to receive them courteously, and usually asked them to dine with me. But finding that they made a practice of visiting us on Sundays, either to gratify idle curiosity or with a view to commercial dealings, I fell upon a scheme which effectually relieved us from this annoyance. I took care to acquaint them that it was contrary to our principles to transact secular business on the Sunday; and when any of them came, I offered them a seat among my Hottentot audience, and invited them to read aloud the Sunday service. them, I found, could read even the New Testament without much stammering and spelling; and they considered it, moreover, a shocking degradation to sit down amidst a group of Hottentots. We were therefore speedily relieved altogether from their Sunday visitations. other respects, we found them generally, however uncultivated, by no means disagreeable neighbours. They were exceedingly shrewd at bargain-making, it is true, and too sharp sometimes even for cautious Scotchmen; but they were also generally civil and goodnatured, and, according to the custom of the country, extremely hospitable. On the whole, their demeanour to us, whom they might be supposed naturally to regard with exceeding jealousy, if not dislike, was far more friendly and obliging than could, under all the circumstances, have been anticipated. In Vision of a British South African Empire. Nay, more; however Utopian such 'visions' may appear to some people, I will venture to predict that if some such system (I speak of the principle, not of the details-which may perhaps require to be greatly altered from this rude outline) shall be now adopted, and judiciously and perseveringly carried into operation, we shall at no remote period see the tribes beyond the frontier earnestly soliciting to be received under the protection of the colony, or to be embraced within its limits and jurisdiction. . . . The native tribes, in short, are ready to throw themselves into our arms. Let us open our arms cordially to embrace them as men and as brothers. Let us enter upon a new and nobler career of conquest. Let us subdue savage Africa by justice, by kindness, by the talisman of Christian truth. Let us thus go forth, in the name and under the blessing of God, gradually to extend the moral influence, and, if it be thought desirable, the territorial boundary also, of our colony, until it shall become an Empire, embracing Southern Africa from the Keisi and the Gareep to Mozambique and Cape Negro-and to which, peradventure, in after days, even the equator shall prove no ultimate limit. There is a Life of Pringle, by Leitch Ritchie, prefixed to the Poetical Works (1839). Francis Egerton, Earl of Ellesmere (1800-57), second son of the first Duke of Sutherland, was born in London, and educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford. He sat for Bletchingley, Sutherland, and South Lancashire, and was Irish Secretary (1828-30) and Secretary for War (1830). In 1833, on succeeding to the Bridgewater estates, he assumed the name of Egerton, in lieu of Leveson-Gower, and in 1846 was created Earl of Ellesmere. He translated a large number of books on military history, on subjects Italian, Turkish, and Chinese, and on things in general, in prose and in verse, from French, German, and Italian -from Dumas, Victor Hugo, Goethe, Schiller, and others-his Faust being perhaps his feeblest claim to remembrance, for it was neither vigorous nor faithful. His own poems were graceful; King Alfred and Bluebeard were plays. Joseph Blanco White (1775-1841), a Spaniard by birth, has the glory of having written what was by Coleridge overpraised as 'the finest and most grandly conceived sonnet in our language'-save for a single unimportant exception, his one poem. He was born at Seville, son of an Irish Roman Catholic merchant settled in Spain who had translated his name to Blanco and become to all intents a Spaniard. Ordained a priest in 1799, he acted for a while as chaplain and confessor, but having lost his faith, he came in 1810 to London, added White to his name, and for four years edited a monthly Spanish paper, subsidised by the English Government and designed to stir up national feeling against the French, then in Spain. He received an English pension of £250, was tutor to Lord Holland's son (1815-16), and was admitted to Anglican orders. Made a member of Oriel College, he became the intimate of Newman and Pusey, who learnt much from his knowledge of Catholic theology. He was for a time tutor in Whately's family at Dublin (1832-35), and became a Protestant champion, but fled to Liverpool when he found himself gradually driven to become a Unitarian. Though he worked diligently at English, he was never thoroughly at home in it; but he published Letters from Spain by Don Leucadio Doblado (1822), Internal Evidences against Catholicism (1825), Second Travels of an Irish Gentleman in Search of a Religion (in answer to Moore's; 1833), and other works both in English and Spanish. His Autobiography (edited by J. H. Thom, 1845) is reviewed in Glad stone's Gleanings. The following (Academy, 12th September 1891) is his latest version of the 'Sonnet on Night :' Mysterious Night! when our first parent knew Thee from report divine, and heard thy name, Did he not tremble for this goodly frame, This glorious canopy of light and blue? But through a curtain of translucent dew, Bathed in the rays of the great setting flame, Hesperus with the host of heaven came : And lo! Creation broadened to man's view! Who could have guessed such darkness lay concealed Within thy beams, O Sun? or who divined, When bud and flower and insect lay revealed, Thou to such countless worlds hadst made us blind? Why should we then shun Death with anxious strife? If Light conceals so much, wherefore not Life? The Second Lord Thurlow (EDWARD HOVELL THURLOW, 1781-1829), minor poet, was the son of the Bishop of Durham and nephew and successor (in the peerage) of the Lord Chancellor (see page 634). Born in London and educated at the Charterhouse and Magdalen College, Oxford, from 1810 onwards he published several collections of poems which, amid much affectation and some bad taste-sarcastically dealt with by Moore, Byron, and the critics contain not a little real poetry. Charles Lamb said of his work: 'A profusion of verbal dainties, with a disproportionate lack of matter and circumstance, is, I think, one reason of the coldness with which the public has received the poetry of a nobleman now living; which, upon the score of exquisite diction alone, is entitled to something better than neglect. I will venture to copy one of his sonnets in this place [the London Magazine], which for quiet sweetness has scarcely its parallel in our language.' To a Water-bird. O melancholy bird, a winter's day Thou standest by the margin of the pool, And his unthinking course by thee to weigh. More frequently quoted, and at least equally characteristic, is the following Song to May. May! queen of blossoms, And fulfilling flowers, With what pretty music Shall we charm the hours? Wilt thou have pipe and reed, Or to the lute give heed Thou hast no need of us, Ripened with fire; And many thousand more With new desire. Thou hast thy mighty herds, In the deep rivers; Coy fountains are tressed; Greenwoods are dressed, Robert Pollok (1798–1827), a young licentiate of the United Secession Church, survived only a few months the publication of his most notable work, The Course of Time, which speedily attained great popularity, especially among 'serious' people in Scotland. Many who scarcely ever dipped into modern poetry were tempted to read a work which set forth their theological tenets in this unwonted and impressive form; while for less devout readers the poem had force and originality enough to attract, in spite of its theme. The Course of Time is a long blank-verse poem in ten books, written in a style that sometimes imitates Milton, and at other times resembles the work of Cowper, Blair, and Young. In describing the spiritual life and destiny of man, the seer varies the religious speculations of an unhesitating Calvinist with episodical pictures and narratives. The poem is often harsh, turgid, and antipathetic; its worst fault-all but inseparable from the subject and plan-is its tediousness; whole sections are like a dull sermon in blank verse. But those who welcomed it warmly were more in the right than the moderns who neglect it utterly; there are many suprisingly fine things in it. The Course of Time,' said Professor Wilson, 'for so young a man is a vast achievement. . . . He has much to learn in composition. . . . But the soul of poetry is there, though often dimly developed; and many passages there are, and long ones too, that heave and hurry and flow along in a divine enthusiasm.' The encouraging critic of this scriptural poem is, be it remembered, the Kit North who loved cock fighting, and dealt so severely with Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Keats. Pollok was born at the farm of North Moorhouse in the parish of Eaglesham in Renfrewshire, and after some schooling at Mearns and Fenwick, and a brief interlude of cabinet-making, was sent to the University of Glasgow. While he was a student of divinity in the Hall of the United Secession Church, he wrote a series of prose Tales of the Covenanters, published anonymously. The Course of Time was all written in the eighteen months between the end of 1824 and the middle of 1826, before his last term at the divinity hall; and was published in the spring of 1827 by Blackwood on the advice of Professor Wilson and 'Delta' Moir, who both gave highly complimentary verdicts on the poem with the somewhat formidable title. Pollok was duly licensed to preach the gospel' in May; preached his first sermon after license in the church of Dr John Brown, father of the author of Rab and his Friends; and received kindly courtesy and encouragement from the literary patriarch of a long-past generation, Henry Mackenzie, the 'Man of Feeling,' now over eightyfour years of age. The poet-probationer was fast becoming famous; but pulmonary disease had declared itself, and it was evident that he was doomed to an early grave. The anxiety and effort of composition had aggravated the malady; the milder air of Shirley Common near Southampton brought no improvement; and after lingering a few weeks, the victim died on the 17th of September. This description of Lord Byron was one of the two passages first read by Wilson that moved him to his unexpectedly friendly and favourable judgment of the Course of Time: And first in rambling school-boy days, With years and drank from old and fabulous wells; He touched his harp, and nations heard, entranced. And soared untrodden heights, and seemed at home, Beneath their argument seemed struggling whiles; Great man! the nations gazed, and wondered much, And praised and many called his evil good. Wits wrote in favour of his wickedness; And kings to do him honour took delight. Thus full of titles, flattery, honour, fame; Beyond desire, beyond ambition full,— He died-he died of what? Of wretchedness. Drank every cup of joy, heard every trump Of fame; drank early, deeply drank; drank draughts That common millions might have quenched-then died Of thirst, because there was no more to drink. Love. (From Book IV.) Hail love, first love, thou word that sums all bliss! All rarest odours, all divinest sounds, All thoughts, all feelings dearest to the soul: But who would that expound, which words transcends, Of early love, and thence infer its worth. It was an eve of autumn's holiest mood. Its Maker. Now and then the aged leaf Such was the night, so lovely, still, serene, Beyond the wave: and hither now repaired, In the wide desert, where the view was large. Happiness. Whether in crowds or solitudes, in streets The Christian faith, which better knew the heart Of sympathy anointed, or a pang All who had hearts here pleasure found: and oft And watched them run and crop the tempting flower- Roses that bathe about the well of life, (From Book V.) A too bulky and detailed Memoir of Pollok by his brother was published in 1843. The pathos of his short life is well brought out in the little book in the 'Scots' series, by Miss Rosaline Masson, on the strangely contrasted pair, Pollok and Aytoun (1899). The Course of Time reached its twenty-fifth edition in 1867 (12,000 copies were sold the first eighteen months). On his tombstone in the Millbrook churchyard at Southampton stands the ominous epitaph His immortal poem is his monument.' For the inmortal poem, like the tombstone, is sought after by few, and, save in occasional quotation, all but forgotten. Scottish Vernacular Writers under George III. SCOTTISH VERNACULAR VERNACULAR WRITERS UNDER GEORGE III. 795 N 1792 Burns wrote in his first letter to George Thomson: 'Apropos, if you are for English verses, there is on my part an end of the matter. Whether in the simplicity of the ballad or the pathos of the song, I can only hope to please myself in being allowed at least a sprinkling of our native tongue.' So that Burns, who fairly represented the practice of his older contemporaries, and who became the standard of all later writers of Scottish verse, followed Ramsay's nondescript and elastic linguistic principle, and with better taste and vastly greater command of his instrument wrote - at times indiscriminatelyalmost pure English, nearly the broadest surviving vernacular, or a broken English, more or less largely sprinkled' with Scotch words. Sometimes even the words were not vernacular Scotch, but archaisms taken from Ramsay (who, as Lord Hailes proved, in ancient Scotch was sadly to seek); sometimes, as Dr Murray has pointed out, they were not Scotch words at all, but 'fancy Scotch' made by Scottifying ordinary English words on an assumed analogy. As a rule Burns was most broadly Scotch when he was most jocular, most largely English when the matter was most serious. In the longer poems, as The Cotter's Saturday Night, some verses are pure English, some nearly pure vernacular, and some a curious arbitrary mixture. Only in some of the songs does the (largely Anglicised) Scotch of his Ayrshire neighbours form the warp and woof of the whole, with English words thrown in. In some of the songs that are reckoned quite Scotch the blend is still more curious-the diction is substantially English, or even the somewhat stilted 'poetic diction' of contemporary southern versewriters, with a few of the words translated into imitation Scotch. My Nannie's awa' is one of Burns's most popular 'Scotch' songs, but nothing is less like the language of Scottish shepherds of any date than : Now in her green mantle blithe nature arrays, And listens the lambkins that bleat o'er the braes. Braes is the only genuine Scots word here; 'nature arraying in a green mantle and listening lambkins bleating' being not ordinary but poetic English, such as was used in many of the songbooks current in Burns's time. Most of the phrases actually occur in the songs given in Cecilia (1784), for example. Dr Murray has said: ""Scots wha hae" is fancy Scotch; that is, it is merely the English "Scots who have" spelled as Scotch. Barbour would have written "Scottis at hes;" Dunbar or Douglas, "Scottis quhilkis hes;" and even Henry Charteris, in the end of the sixteenth century, "Scottis quha hes." . . . "Scots wha hae wi' Wallace bled," although composed of Scotch words, is not vernacular Scotch any more than "How you carry you?" as a translation of "Comment vous portez vous?" is vernacular English.' 'Scots at hes,' it may be added, is still the current Scots form, as it was in Burns's time; 'wha hae' appears only as an imitation of Burns's imitation. North Germans sometimes use Low German words in High German stories, but the stories themselves do not thus become Platt-Deutsch works. And though a southern Frenchman in Paris gives his articles or verses a southern flavouring of words or phrases from his native Nîmes or Avignon, he is not therefore ranked amongst Provençal authors. Nor would Burns have been the greatest of writers in Scottish dialect unless he had in many of his best poems closely followed the Scottish spoken vernacular of his time. But, as we have seen from his own explicit testimony, while refusing to write 'English verses' at all, Burns was content to write Scotch verses' in which there was merely a 'sprinkling of his native tongue.' And this whether he was bowdlerising the old Scots songs for Thomson, making new ones to the old tunes and with the old refrains, or inditing his own most spontaneous and original strains. Most of his contemporaries, earlier and later, and almost all his successors have adopted a similarly fluctuating standard of mixed dialect; for many, Burns's very modest minimum of Scotticism has amply sufficed. But when it is remembered that the actually spoken Scotch has long been itself a mixed tongue, a patois rather than a dialect, their practice is not so strange as at first it might appear. Most Scottish writers, accepting Beattie's dictum (page 308) that 'to write in the vulgar broad Scotch and yet write seriously had become impossible,' essayed at times to find or construct a dialect which was not vulgar and was not exactly broad Scotch. Father Geddes's remarks, quoted below (page 799), are interesting as coming from a philological |