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But he must go after all. The editor's den at Leeds is not the place for lungs bred on Perthshire breezes; and work rises before him, huger and heavier as he goes on, till he drops under the ever-increasing load. He will not believe it at first. In sweet childlike playful letters, he tells his mother that it is nothing. It has done him good-" opened the grave before his eyes, and taught him to think of death." "He trusts that he has not borne this, and suffered, and thought in vain." too, he hopes, is to be a fresh lesson-page of experience for his work. Alas! a few months more of bitter suffering and of generous kindness, and love from all around him,-and it is over with him, at the age of twenty-three. Shall we regret him?— shall we not rather believe that God knew best, and considering the unhealthy moral atmosphere of the press, and the strange confused ways into which old ultra-Radicalism, finding itself too narrow for the new problems of the day, has stumbled and floundered in the last fifteen years, believe that he might have been a worse man had he been a longer-lived one, and thank heaven that "the righteous is taken away from the evil to come ?"

As it is, he ends as he began. The first poem in his book is "The Ha' Bible;" and the last, written a few days before his death, is still the death-song of a man-without fear, without repining, without boasting, blessing and loving the earth which he leaves, yet with a clear joyful eye upwards and outwards and homewards. And so ends his little epic, as we called it. May Scotland see many such another!

The actual poetic value of his verses is not first-rate by any means. He is far inferior to Burns in range of subject, as he is in humour and pathos. Indeed, there is very little of these latter qualities in him anywhere-rather playfulness, flashes of childlike fun, as in "The Provost," and "Bonnie Bessie Lee." But he has attained a mastery over English, a simplicity and quiet which Burns never did; and also, we need not say, a moral purity. His "poems, illustrative of the Scotch peasantry," are charming throughout-alive and bright with touches of real humanity, and sympathy with characters apparently antipodal to his own.

His more earnest poems are somewhat tainted with that cardinal fault of his school, of which he steered so clear in prosefine words; yet he never, like the Corn-Law Rhymer, falls a cursing. He is evidently not a good hater even of "priests and kings, and aristocrats, and superstition;" or perhaps he worked all that froth safely over and off in debating club-speeches and leading articles, and left us, in these poems, the genuine Metheglin of his inner heart, sweet, clear, and strong; for there is no form of loveable or right thing which this man has come

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across, which he does not seem to have appreciated. Beside pure love and the beauties of nature, those on which every man of poetic power-and a great many of none, as a matter of course, have a word to say, he can feel for and with the drunken beggar, and the warriors of the ruined manor-house, and the monks of the abbey, and the old-mailed Normans with their "priest with cross and counted beads in the little Saxon chapel"things which a radical editor might have been excused for passing by with a sneer.

His verses to his wife are a delicious little glimpse of Eden; and his "People's Anthem" rises into somewhat of true grandeur by virtue of simplicity :

"Lord, from Thy blessed throne,

Sorrow look down upon!

God save the Poor!

Teach them true liberty

Make them from tyrants free

Let their homes happy be!

God save the Poor!

"The arms of wicked men

Do Thou with might restrain—
God save the Poor!

Raise Thou their lowliness

Succour Thou their distress

Thou whom the meanest bless!
God save the Poor!

"Give them stanch honesty

Let their pride manly be

God save the Poor!

Help them to hold the right;

Give them both truth and might,
Lord of all LIFE and LIGHT!

God save the Poor!"

And so we leave Robert Nicoll, with the parting remark, that if the "poems illustrative of the feelings of the intelligent and religious among the working-classes of Scotland" be fair samples of that which they profess to be, Scotland may thank God, that in spite of glen-clearings and temporary manufacturing rotheaps, she is still whole at heart, and that the influence of her great peasant poet, though it may seem at first likely to be adverse to Christianity, has helped, as we have already hinted, to purify and not to taint; to destroy the fungus, but not to touch the heart of the grand old Covenant-kirk life-tree.

Still sweeter, and, alas! still sadder, is the story of the two Bethunes. If Nicoll's life, as we have said, be a solitary melody, and short though triumphant strain of work-music, theirs is a

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harmony and true concert of fellow-joys, fellow-sorrows, fellowdrudgery, fellow-authorship, mutual throughout, lovely in their joint-life, and in their deaths not far divided. Alexander survives his brother John only long enough to write his Memoirs, and then follows; and we have his story given us by Mr. M'Combie, in a simple unassuming little volume-not to be read without many thoughts, perhaps not rightly without tears. Mr. M'Combie has been wise enough not to attempt panegyric. He is all but prolix in details, filling up some half of his volume with letters of preternatural length, from Alexander to his publishers and critics, and from the said publishers and critics to Alexander, altogether of an unromantic and business-like cast, but entirely successful in doing that which a book should do— namely, in shewing the world that here was a man of like passions with ourselves, who bore from boyhood to the grave hunger, cold, wet, rags, brutalizing and health-destroying toil, and all the storms of the world, the flesh and the devil, and conquered them every one.

Alexander is set at fourteen to throw earth out of a ditch so deep, that it requires the full strength of a grown man, and loses flesh and health under the exertion; he is twice blown up in quarrying with his own blast, and left for dead, recovers slowly, maimed and scarred, with the loss of an eye. John, when not thirteen, is set to stone-breaking on the roads during intense cold, and has to keep himself from being frost-bitten and heart-broken by monkey gambols; takes to the weaving trade, and having helped his family by the most desperate economy to save £10 wherewith to buy looms, begins to work them, with his brother as an apprentice, and finds the whole outlay rendered useless the very same year by the failures of 1825-26. So the two return to day-labour at fourteenpence a day. John in a struggle to do task-work honestly overexerts himself, and ruins his digestion for life. Next year he is set in November to clean out a water-course knee-deep in water, and then to take marl from a pit, and then to drain standing water off a swamp during an intense December frost, and finds himself laid down with a three months' cough, and all but sleepless illness, laying the foundation of the consumption which destroyed him. But they will not give in. Poetry they will write, and they write it to the best of their powers on scraps of paper, after the drudgery of the day, in a cabin pervious to every shower, teaching themselves the right spelling of the words from some "Christian Remembrancer" or other-apparently not our meek and unbiassed contemporary of that name; and all this without neglecting their work a day or even an hour, when the weather permitted-the only thing which tempted them to fret,'

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being-hear it readers and perpend!" the being kept at home by rain and snow." Then an additional malady (apparently some calculous one) comes on John, and stops by him for the six remaining years of his life. Yet between 1826 and 1832, John has saved £14 out of his miserable earnings, to be expended to the last farthing on his brother's recovery from the second quarry accident. Surely the devil is trying hard to spoil these men! But no. They are made perfect by sufferings. In the house with one long narrow room, and a small vacant space at the end of it, lighted by a single pane of glass, they write and write untiring, during the long summer evenings, poetry, "Tales of the Scottish Peasant Life," which at last bring them in somewhat; and a work on practical economy, which is bepraised and corrected by kind critics in Edinburgh, and at last publishedwithout a sale. Perhaps one cause of its failure might be found in those very corrections. There were too many violent political allusions in it, complains their good Mentor of Edinburgh, and persuades them, seemingly the most meek and teachable of heroes, to omit them; though Alexander, while submitting, pleads fairly enough for retaining them, in a passage which we will give, as a specimen of the sort of English possible to be acquired by a Scotch day-labourer, self-educated, all but the rudiments of reading and writing, and a few lectures on popular poetry from "a young student of Aberdeen," now the Rev. Mr. Adamson, who must look back on the friendship which he bore these two young men, as one of the noblest pages in his life.

"Talk to the many of religion, and they will put on a long face, confess that it is a thing of the greatest importance to all-and go away and forget the whole. Talk to them of education: they will readily acknowledge that its 'a braw thing to be weel learned,' and begin a lamentation, which is only shorter than the lamentations of Jeremiah, because they cannot make it as long, on the ignorance of the age in which they live; but they neither stir hand nor foot in the matter. But speak to them of politics, and their excited countenances and kindling eye shew in a moment how deeply they are interested. Politics are therefore an important feature, and an almost indispensable element in such a work as mine. Had it consisted solely of exhortations to industry and rules of economy, it would have been dismissed with an Ou ay, its braw for him to crack that way: but if he were whaur we are, deed he wad just hae to do as we do.' But by mixing up the science with politics, and giving it an occasional political impetus, a different result may be reasonably expected. In these days no man can be considered a patriot or friend of the poor, who is not also a politician."

It is amusing, by the bye, to see how the world changes its codes of respectability, and how, what is anathema one year,

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becomes trite in twenty more. The political sins in the work were, that "my brother had attacked the corn-laws with some severity; and I have attempted to level a battery against that sort of servile homage which the poor pay to the rich!"

There is no use pursuing the story much further. They again save a little money, and need it; for the estate on which they have lived from childhood changing hands, they are, with their aged father, expelled from the dear old dog-kennel, to find house-room where they can. Why not?" it was not in the bond." The house did not belong to them; nothing of it, at least, which could be specified in any known lease. True, there may have been associations, but what associations can men be expected to cultivate on fourteenpence a day? So they must forth, with their two aged parents, and build with their own hands a new house elsewhere, having saved some £30 from the sale of their writings. The house, as we understand, stands to this day-hereafter to become a sort of artisan's caaba and pilgrim's station, only second to Burns's grave. That, at least, it will become, whenever the meaning of the words "worth" and "worship" shall become rightly understood among us.

For what are these men, if they are not heroes and saints? not of the Popish sort, abject and effeminate, but of the true, human, evangelic sort, masculine and grand-like the figures in Raffaelle's Cartoons, compared with those of Fra Bartolomeo. Not from superstition, not from selfish prudence, but from devotion to their aged parents, and the righteous dread of dependence, they die voluntary celibates, although their writings shew that they, too, could have loved as nobly as they did all other things. The extreme of endurance, self-restraint, of "conquest of the flesh," outward as well as inward, is the life-long lot of these men; and they go through it. They have their share of injustice, tyranny, disappointment; one by one each bright boy's dream of success and renown is scourged out of their minds, and sternly and lovingly their Father in heaven teaches them the lesson of all lessons. By what hours of misery and blank despair that faith was purchased, we can only guess; the simple strong men give us the result, but never dream of sitting down and analyzing the process for the world's amusement, or their own glorification. We question, indeed, whether they could have told us; whether the mere fact of a man's being able to dissect himself, in public or in private, is not proof-patent that he is no man, but only a shell of a man, with works inside, which can of course be exhibited and taken to pieces a rather more difficult matter with flesh and blood. we believe that God is educating, the when, the where, and the how, are not only unimportant, but, considering who is the

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