Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 1.djvu/160

 at what time he began to be engaged in business on his own account, or whether he spent his youth in business or not. Judging, however, as the world is apt to judge, we should suppose, from his taste for poetry, and his having been a writer of verses himself, that he was at least no zealous applicant to any commercial pursuit. Two poems of his, written before the age of twenty-three, are full of ardent though conceited affection towards some fair mistress, whom he describes in the most extravagantly complimentary terms. It is also to be supposed that, at this age, even though obliged to seek some amusement during a time of necessary seclusion, he could not have found the means to collect, or the taste to execute, such a mass of poetry as that which bears his name, if he had not previously been almost entirely abandoned to this particular pursuit. At the same time, there is some reason to suppose that he was not altogether an idle young man, given up to vain fancies, from the two first lines of his valedictory address at the end of his collection:

Of the transaction on which the whole fame of George Bannatyne rests, we give the following interesting account from the Memoir just quoted:—

"It is seldom that the toils of the amanuensis are in themselves interesting or that, even while enjoying the advantages of the poor scribe's labour, we are disposed to allow him the merit of more than mere mechanical drudgery. But in the compilation of George Bannatyne's manuscript, there are particulars which rivet our attention on the writer, and raise him from a humble copyist into a national benefactor.

"Bannatyne's Manuscript is in a folio form, containing upwards of eight hundred pages, very neatly and closely written, and designed, as has been supposed, to be sent to the press. The labour of compiling so rich a collection was undertaken by the author during the time of pestilence, in the year 1568, when the dread of infection compelled men to forsake their usual employments, which could not be conducted without admitting the ordinary promiscuous intercourse between man and his kindred men.

"In this dreadful period, when hundreds, finding themselves surrounded by danger and death, renounced all care save that of selfish precaution for their own safety, and all thoughts save apprehensions of infection, George Bannatyne had the courageous energy to form and execute the plan of saving the literature of a whole nation; and, undisturbed by the universal mourning for the dead, and general fears of the living, to devote himself to the task of collecting and recording the triumphs of human genius;—thus, amid the wreck of all that was mortal, employing himself in preserving the lays by which immortality is at once given to others, and obtained for the writer himself. His task, he informs us, had its difficulties; for he complains that he had, even in his time, to contend with the disadvantage of copies old, maimed, and mutilated, and which long before our day must, but for this faithful transcriber, have perished entirely. The very labour of procuring the originals of the works which he transcribed, must have been attended with much trouble and some risk, at a time when all the usual intercourse of life was suspended, and when we can conceive that even so simple a circumstance as the borrowing and lending a book of ballads, was accompanied with some doubt and apprehension, and that probably the suspected volume was subjected to fumigation, and the precautions used in quarantine.