It is not uninteresting to mark the rise and progress of certain branches of poetry and the belles lettres in their connection with sects and Churches. They form tests by which at least the taste and literary standing of these bodies can be determined; and the degree of success with which they are cultivated within the same Church, in different ages, throws at times very striking lights on its condition and history. One wholly unacquainted with the recorded annals of the Church of Scotland might safely infer, from its literature alone, that it fared much more hardly in the seventeenth century, during which the literature of England rose to its highest pitch of grandeur, than in the previous sixteenth, in which its Knoxes, Buchanans, and Andrew Melvilles flourished; and further, that its eighteenth century was, on the whole, a quiet and tranquil time, in which even mediocrity had leisure afforded it to develope itself in its full proportions. Literature is not the proper business of Churches; but it is a means, though not an end. And it will be found that all the better Churches have been as literary as they could; and that, if at any time the literature has been defective, it has been rather their circumstances that were unpropitious, than themselves that were in fault. Their enemies have delighted to represent the case differently. Our readers must remember the famous instance in Old Mortality, so happily exposed by the elder M’Crie, in which Sir Walter, when he makes his Sergeant Bothwell a writer of verses, introduces Burley as peculiarly a verse-hater, and ‘puts into his mouth that condemnation of 303 elegant pursuits which he imputes to the whole party;’ ‘overlooking or suppressing the fact,’ says the Doctor, ‘that there was at that very time in the camp of the Covenanters a man who, besides his other accomplishments, was a poet superior to any on the opposite side.’ It is equally a fact, however, and shows how thoroughly the mind of even a highly intellectual people may be prostrated by a long course of tyranny and persecution, that Scotland had properly no literature after the extinction of its old classical school in the person of Drummond of Hawthornden, until the rise of Thomson. The age in England of Milton and of Cowley, of Otway, of Waller, of Butler, of Dryden, and of Denham, was in Scotland an age without a poet vigorous enough to survive in his writings his own generation. For even the greater part of the popular version of its Psalms, our Church was indebted to the English lawyer Rous. Here and there we may find in it the remains of an earlier and more classical time: its version of the hundredth Psalm, for instance, with its quaintly-turned but stately octo-syllabic stanzas, was written nearly a hundred years earlier than most of the others, by William Keith, a Scottish contemporary of Beza and Buchanan, and one of the translators of the Geneva Bible. But we find little else that is Scotch in it; the Church to which, in the previous age, the author of the most elegant version of the Psalms ever given to the world had belonged, had now––notwithstanding the exertions of its Zachary Boyds––to import its poetry. In the following century, the Church shared in the general literature of the time. She missed, and but barely missed, having one of its greatest poets to herself––the poet Thomson––who at least carried on his studies so far with a view to her ministry, as to commence delivering his probationary discourses. We fear, however, he would have made but an indolent minister; and that, though his occasional sermons, judging from the hymn which concludes 304 the Seasons, might have been singularly fine ones, they would have been marvellously few, and very often repeated. The greatest poet that did actually arise within the Church during the century was Thomson’s contemporary, Robert Blair,––a man who was not an idle minister, and who, unlike his cousin Hugh, belonged to the evangelical side. The author of the Grave was one of the bosom friends of Colonel Gardiner, and a valued correspondent of Doddridge and Watts. Curiously enough, though the great merit of his piece has been acknowledged by critics such as Southey, it has been regarded as an imitation of the Night Thoughts of Young. ‘Blair’s Grave,’ says Southey in his Life of Cowper, ‘is the only poem I can call to mind which has been composed in imitation of the Night Thoughts;’ and though Campbell himself steered clear of the error, we find it introduced in a note, as supplementary to the information regarding Blair given in his Essay on English Poetry by his editor, Mr. Cunningham. It is demonstrable, however, that the Scotchman could not have been the imitator. As shown by a letter in the Doddridge collection, which bears date more than a twelvemonth previous to that of the publication of even the first book of the Night Thoughts, Blair, after stating that his poem, then in the hands of Isaac Watts, had been offered without success to two London publishers, states further, that the greater part of it had been written previous to the year 1731, ere he had yet entered the ministry; whereas the first book of Young’s poem was not published until the year 1744. Poetry such as that of Blair is never the result of imitation: its verbal happinesses are at least as great as those of the Night Thoughts themselves, and its power and earnestness considerably greater. ‘The eighteenth century,’ says Thomas Campbell, ‘has produced few specimens of blank verse of so powerful and simple a character as that of the Grave. It is a popular poem, not merely because it is religious, but because its 305 language and imagery are free, natural, and picturesque. The latest editor of the poets has, with singularly bad taste, noted some of the author’s most nervous and expressive phrases as vulgarisms, among which he reckons that of friendship, the “solder of society.” Blair may be a homely, and even a gloomy poet, in the eye of fastidious criticism; but there is a masculine and pronounced character even in his gloom and homeliness, that keeps it most distinctly apart from either dulness or vulgarity. His style pleases us like the powerful expression of a countenance without regular beauty.’ Such is the judgment on Blair––destined, in all appearance, to be a final one––of a writer who was at once the most catholic of critics and the most polished of poets. There succeeded to the author of the Grave, a group of poets of the Church, of whom the Church has not been greatly in the habit of boasting. Of Home, by a curious chance the successor of Blair in his parish, little need be said. He produced one good play and five enormously bad ones; and his connection with the Church was very much an accident, and soon dissolved. Blacklock, too, was as much a curiosity as a poet; and, save for his blindness, would scarce have been very celebrated in even his own day. Nor was Ogilvie, though more favourably regarded by Johnson than most of his Scottish contemporaries, other than a mediocre poet. He is the author, however, of a very respectable paraphrase––the sixty-second––of all his works the one that promises to live longest; and we find the productions of several other poets of the Church similarly preserved, whose other writings have died. And yet the group of Scottish literati that produced our paraphrases, if looking simply to literary accomplishment––we do not demand genius––must be regarded as a very remarkable one, when we consider that the greater number of the individuals which composed it were all at one time the ministers of a single Church, and that one of the smallest. We know 306 of no Church, either in Britain or elsewhere, that could now command such a committee as that which sat, at the bidding of the General Assembly, considerably more than sixty years ago, to prepare the ‘Translations and Paraphrases.’ Of the sixty-eight pieces of which the collection is composed, thirty are the work of Scottish ministers; and the groundwork of most of the others, furnished in large part by the previously existing writings of Watts and Doddridge, has been greatly improved, in at least the composition, by the emendations of Morrison and Logan. With all its faults, we know of no other collection equal to it as a whole. The meretricious stanzas of Brady and Tate are inanity itself in comparison. True, the later Blair, though always sensible, was ofttimes quite heavy enough in the pieces given to him to render––more so than in his prose; though, even when first introduced to that, Cowper could exclaim, not a little to the chagrin of those who regarded it as perfection of writing: ‘Oh, the sterility of that man’s fancy! if, indeed, he has any such faculty belonging to him. Dr. Blair has such a brain as Shakespeare somewhere describes, “dry as the remainder biscuit after a voyage.’” But the fancy that Blair wanted, poor Logan had; and the man who too severely criticises his flowing and elegant paraphrases would do well to beware of the memories of his children. A poet whose pieces cannot be forgotten may laugh at the critics. Altogether, our ‘Translations and Paraphrases’ are highly creditable to the literary taste and ability of the Church during the latter half of the last century; and it serves to show how very much matters changed in this respect in about forty years, that while in the earlier period the men fitted for such work were all to be found within the pale of the Church’s ministry, at a later time, when the late Principal Baird set himself, with the sanction of the General Assembly, to devise means for adding to the collection, and 307 for revising our metrical version of the Psalms, he had to look for assistance almost exclusively to poets outside the precincts of even its membership.

And yet, even at this later time, the Church had its true poets––poets who, though, according to Wordsworth, they ‘wanted the accomplishment of verse,’ were of larger calibre and greater depth than their predecessors. Chalmers had already produced his Astronomical Discourses, and poor Edward Irving had begun to electrify his London audiences with the richly antique imagination and fiery fervour of his singularly vigorous orations. Stewart of Cromarty, too, though but comparatively little known, was rising, in his quiet parish church, into flights of genuine though unmeasured poetry, of an altitude to which minor poets, in their nicely rounded stanzas, never attain. Nor is the race yet extinct. Jeffrey used to remark, that he found more true feeling in the prose of Jeremy Taylor than in the works of all the second-class British poets put together; and those who would now wish to acquaint themselves with the higher and more spirit-rousing poetry of our Church, would have to seek it within earshot of the pulpits of Bruce, of Guthrie, and of James Hamilton. Still, however, it ever affords us pleasure to find it in the more conventional form of classic and harmonious verse. A Church that possesses her poets gives at least earnest in the fact that she is not falling beneath the literature of her age; and much on this account, but more, we think, from their great intrinsic merit, have we been gratified by the perusal of a volume of poems which has just issued from the press under the name of one of our younger Free Church ministers, the Rev. James D. Burns. We are greatly mistaken if Mr. Burns be not a genuine poet, skilled, as becomes a scholar and a student of classic lore, in giving to his verse the true artistic form, but not the less born to inherit the ‘vision and the faculty’ which cannot be acquired. Most men of great talent have 308 their poetic age: it is very much restricted, however, to the first five years of full bodily development, also particularly then a sterner and more prosaic mood follows. But recollections of the time survive; and it is mainly through the medium of these recollections that in the colder periods the feelings and visions of the poets continue to be appreciated and felt. It was said of Thomson the poet by Samuel Johnson, that he could not look at two candles burning other than poetically. The phrase was employed in conversation by old Johnson; but it must have been the experience of young Johnson, derived from a time long gone by, that suggested it. It is characteristic of the poetic age, that objects which in later life become commonplace in the mind, are then surrounded as if by a halo of poetic feeling. The candles were, no doubt, an extreme illustration; but there is scarce any object in nature, and there are very few in art, especially if etherealized by the adjuncts of antiquity or association, that are not capable of being thus, as it were, embathed in sentiment. With the true poet, the ability of investing every object with a poetic atmosphere remains undiminished throughout life; and we find it strikingly manifested in the volume before us. In almost every line in some of the pieces we find a distinct bit of picture steeped in poetic feeling. The following piece, peculiarly appropriate to the present time, we adduce as an illustration of our meaning:––

This is surely genuine poetry both in form and matter; as just in its thinking as it is vivid in its imagery and classic in its language. The vein of strong sense which runs through all the poetry of Mr. Burns, and imparts to it 310 solidity and coherency, is, we think, not less admirable than the poetry itself, and is, we are sure, quite as little common. Let the reader mark how freely the thoughts arise in the following very exquisite little piece, written in Madeira, and suggested by the distant view of the neighbouring island of Porto Santo, one of the first colonized by the Portuguese adventurers of the fifteenth century. Columbus married a daughter of Bartolomeo Perestrillo, the first governor of the island, and after his marriage lived in it for some time with his father-in-law. And on this foundation Mr. Burns founds his poem:––

There runs throughout Mr. Burns’s volume a rich vein of scriptural imagery and allusion, and much oriental description––rather quiet, however, than gorgeous––that bears in its unexaggerated sobriety the impress of truth. From a weakness of chest and general delicate health, Mr. Burns has had to spend not a few of his winters abroad, under climatal influences of a more genial character than those of his own country; and hence the truthfulness of his descriptions of scenes which few of our native poets ever see, and a corresponding amount of variety in his verse. But we have exhausted our space, and have given only very meagre samples of this delightful volume, and a very inadequate judgment on its merits. But we refer our readers to the volume itself, as one well fitted to grow upon their regards; and meanwhile conclude with the following exquisite landscape,––no bad specimen of that ability of word-painting which is ever so certain a mark of the true poet:––

November 8, 1854.