Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 2.djvu/49



These were the last verses finished by the author. His strength was wasted gradually away, and he died on the 6th of July, 1767, in the 21st year of his age. What he might have accomplished had longer years been assigned to him, it were needless to conjecture; but of all the sons of genius cut off by an early death, there is none whose fate excites so tender a regret. His claims to admiration are great without any counteracting circumstance. "Nothing," says Lord Craig, after a brief allusion to the leading facts of Bruce's life,—"Nothing, methinks, has more the power of awakening benevolence than the consideration of genius thus depressed by situation, suffered to pine in obscurity, and sometimes, as in the case of this unfortunate young man, to perish, it may be, for want of those comforts and conveniences which might have fostered a delicacy of frame or of mind ill calculated to bear the hardships which poverty lays on both. For my own part, I never pass the place (a little hamlet skirted with old ash-trees, about two miles on this side of Kinross) where Michael Bruce resided—I never look on his dwelling (a small thatched house distinguished from the cottages of the other inhabitants only by a sashed window at the end, instead of a lattice, fringed with a honeysuckle plant which the poor youth had trained around it)—I never find myself in that spot but I stop my horse involuntarily, and looking on the window, which the honeysuckle has now almost covered, in the dream of