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160 his request. Next morning Sir Walter appeared at Sir F. Chantrey's breakfast-table, and greeted the sculptor (who is a brother of the angle) with 'I suppose it has sometimes happened to you to catch one trout (which was all you thought of) with the fly, and another with the bobber. I have done so, and I think I shall land them both. Don't you think Cunningham would like very well to have cadetships for two of those fine lads?' 'To be sure he would,' said Chantrey, 'and if you'll secure the commissions, I'll make the outfit easy.' Great was the joy in Allan's household on this double good news; but I should add, that before the thing was done he had to thank another benefactor. Lord Melville, after all, went out of the Board of Control before he had been able to fulfil his promise; but his successor, Lord Ellenborough, on hearing the circumstances of the case, desired Cunningham to set his mind at rest; and both his young men are now prospering in the India service."

By being thus established in Chantrey's employ, and having a salary sufficient for his wants, Allan Cunningham was released from the necessity of an entire dependence on authorship, as well as from the extreme precariousness with which it is generally accompanied, especially in London. He did not, however, on that account relapse into the free and easy life of a mere dilettanti writer. On the contrary, these advantages seem only to have stimulated him to further exertion, so that, to the very end of his days, he was not only a diligent, laborious student, but a continually improving author. Mention has already been made of the wild exuberance that characterized his earliest efforts in poetry. Hogg, whose sentiments on this head we have already seen, with equal justice characterizes its after progress. " Mr. Cunningham's style of poetry is greatly changed of late for the better. I have never seen any style improved so much. It is free of all that crudeness and mannerism that once marked it so decidedly. He is now uniformly lively, serious, descriptive, or pathetic, as he changes his subject; but formerly he jumbled all these together, as in a boiling caldron, and when once he began, it was impossible to calculate where or when he was going to end." Scott, who will be reckoned a higher authority, is still louder in praise of Cunningham, and declared that some of his songs, especially that of "It's hame, and it's hame," were equal to Burns. But although his fame commenced with his poetry, and will ultimately rest mainly upon it, he was a still more voluminous prose writer, and in a variety of departments, as the following list of his chief works will sufficiently show:—

"Sir Marmaduke Maxwell," a drama. This production Cunningham designed for the stage, and sent it in M.S., in 1820, to Sir Walter Scott for his perusal and approbation. But the judgment formed of it was, that it was a beautiful dramatic poem rather than a play, and therefore better fitted for the closet than the stage. In this opinion every reader of "Sir Marmaduke Maxwell" will coincide, more especially when he takes into account the complexity of the plot, and the capricious manner in which the interest is shifted.

"Paul Jones," a novel; "Sir Michael Scott," a novel. Although Cunningham had repressed the wildness of his imagination in poetry, it still worked madly within him, and evidently required a safety-valve after being denied its legitimate outlet. No one can be doubtful of the fact who peruses these novels; for not only do they drive truth into utter fiction, but fiction itself into the all but unimaginable. This is especially the case with the last of these works, in which the extravagant dreams of the Pythagorean or the Bramin are utterly out heroded. Hence, notwithstanding the beautiful ideas and profusion