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 ! Come fill up my cup, etc. chiefs in the North; There are wild Duniewassals three thousand times three, With sour-featured whigs the Grass- Will cry hoigh ! for the bonnets o' Bonny market was cramm'd As if half the west had set tryst to be hang'd; There was spite in each look, there was fear in each e'e, Dundee. Come fill up my cup, etc. "There's brass on the target of barken'd bull-hide; As they watch'd for the bonnets o' Bonny There's steel in the scabbard that dangles Dundee ! Come fill up my cup, etc. beside; The brass shall be burnish'd, the steel shall flash free, These cowls of Kilmarnock had spits and At a toss of the bonnet o' Bonny Dundee. Come fill up my cup, etc. 'Away to the hills, to the caves, to the rocks Ere I own an usurper, I'll couch with the fox; And tremble, false whigs, in the midst of your glee, You have not seen the last of my bonnet and me! Come fill up my cup, etc. He waved his proud hand, and the trumpets were blown, The kettle-drums clash'd, and the horsemen rode on, Till on Ravelston's cliffs and on Clermiston's lee, Died away the wild war-notes o' Bonny Dundee. Come fill up my cup, come fill up my can, Come saddle my horses and call up the men, Come open your gates and let me gae free, For it's up with the bonnets o' Bonny Dundee ! JAMES MONTGOMERY'S poems have 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. 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) | 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. 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 The rolling seasons, day and night, THE COMMON LOT. Once, in the flight of ages past, To him exist in vain. The clouds and sunbeams, o'er his eye 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, Oblivion hides the rest. The bounding pulse, the languid limb, He suffer'd, but his pangs are o'er; more; And foes, his foes are dead. He loved, but whom he loved, the grave He saw whatever thou hast seen; 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 And milder moons emparadise the night; The wealthiest isles, the most enchanting Views not a realm so bountiful and fair, For in this land of heaven's peculiar grace, While in his softened looks benignly 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 reading, writing, and arithmetic; and at an early age he was sent to learn weaving, 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 |