Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 4.djvu/266

8 songs breathe the true spirit of Scottish melody, especially his far-famed "Braes of Yarrow."

Thus in calm retirement, and in the pursuit of knowledge, his life might have passed serenely, undisturbed by the calls of ambition or the toils and alarms of war, had it not been for the ill-judged but chivalrous attempt of an adventurous prince to recover the throne of his ancestors from what was considered the grasp of an usurper. At the commencement of the insurrection of 1745, Mr Hamilton, undeterred by the attainder and exile of his brother-in-law the earl of Carnwath, for his share in the rebellion in 1715, took the side which all brave and generous men of a certain class in those days Avere apt to take; he joined the standard of prince Charles, and celebrated his first success at Prestonpans in the well-known Jacobite ode of " Gladsmuir." After the battle of Culloden, so disastrous to the prince and his followers, he fled to the mountain and the glen; and there for a time, endured much wandering and many hardships. Finally, however, he succeeded, with some others in the same proscribed situation, in escaping into France. But his exile was short. He had many friends and admirers among the adherents of king George, and through their intercession his pardon was speedily procured from government. He accordingly returned home, and resumed possession of his paternal estate. His health, however, at all times weak, by the hardships he had endured, as well as from his anxiety of mind, had now become doubly so, and required the benefit of a warmer climate. He therefore soon afterwards returned to the continent, and for the latter years of his life, took up his residence at Lyons, where a slow consumption carried him off, on the 25th March, 1754, in the fiftieth year of his age. His corpse was brought to Scotland, and interred in the Abbey church of Holyrood.

Mr Hamilton was twice married, into families of distinction, and by his first lady, a daughter of Sir James Hall of Dunglass, baronet, he had issue one son, James, who succeeded him.

Though Mr Hamilton's works do not place him among the highest class of Scottish poets, he is fully entitled to rank among those of a secondary order. What was much in his favour, certainly not in furtherance of his facility of composition, but as an advantage to his fame, is, that for a whole century previous to the time he began to write, few names of any consequence were known in Scottish poetry. From 1615 till 1715 no poet of any note except only Drummond and Stirling had appeared.

From the days of Buchanan, the only other poets we could then boast of, following the example of that leading intellect, had composed in a language utterly opposite to their own, in construction, copiousness, and facility we mean the Latin: and inferior poets as well as inferior scholars to Hamilton, in compliment to the reigning fashion, continued to use that didactic and difficult language for the expression of their sentiments. Hamilton, therefore, had much to overcome in entering the lists as an original writer in his own language, the elegance, the purity, and the freedom, though perhaps not the force nor the energy, of which he understood so well. He was convinced that the greater part, if not the whole, of those authors who preferred composing in a dead language would be utterly unknown to posterity, except perhaps to a few of the literati and the learned. But at the dawn of the eighteenth century the scholastic spell was at length broken, and Hamilton and Ramsay were among the first who gave utterance to their feelings, the one in English and the other in his native Scottish dialect; and this perhaps, even to the present day constitutes the principal cause of their fame. It may safely be asserted that in the works of Hamilton and Ramsay there is more genuine poetry, than in the works of the whole century of