Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 9.djvu/102

366 to assist his father; and in 1812 he commenced farming on his own account, by taking a lease of the farm of Wrae, in the neighbourhood of Langholm. But steady though he appears to have been at this period, so that he soon acquired the reputation of a diligent and skilful farmer, he was so unsuccessful that he lost all interest in agriculture, threw up the lease of Wrae in 1817, and commenced that precarious literary life which he continued to the close. Indeed, while he was ploughing and sowing, his thoughts were otherwise occupied; for even at the schoolboy age, he had been infected, as half of the human race generally are at that ardent season, with the love of poetry; but instead of permitting himself, like others, to be disenchanted by the solid realities and prosaic cares of life, he cherished the passion until he become irrecoverably a poet. Unhappy is such a choice when it can lead no higher than half-way up Parnassus! His boyish efforts were exhibited chiefly in songs and satires written in the Scottish dialect; and although, when his mind was more matured, he had the good sense to destroy them, it was only for the purpose of producing better in their season. In this way his first publication, "The Lonely Hearth and other Poems," was nearly ready for the press before he had quitted his farm.

It would be too much to follow each step of Knox's progress after he had committed himself to the uncertainties and mutations of authorship. His life was henceforth occupied not only in writing works which issued from the press, but others which were not so fortunate. It was not merely to poetry that he confined himself, in which case his stock, as a source of daily subsistence, would soon have failed; he also wrote largely in prose, and was happy when he could find a publisher. Such a course, sufficiently pecarious in itself, was rendered tenfold worse by those intemperate practices that had already commenced, and which such a kind of life tends not to cure, but to aggravate. Still, amidst all his aberrations, his acknowledged talents as a genuine poet, combined with his amiable temperament and conversational powers, procured him many friends among the most distinguished literary characters of the day. We have already seen the estimate that Sir Walter Scott had formed of him : to this it may be added, that Sir Walter repeatedly supplied the necessities of the unfortunate poet, by sending him ten pounds at a time. Professor Wilson also thought highly of the poetical genius of Knox, and was ever ready to befriend him. Nor must Southey, a still more fastidious critic than either Scott or Wilson, be omitted. Writing to William Knox, who had sent him a copy of one of his poetical works, he thus expresses himself: "Your little volume has been safely delivered to me by your friend, Mr. G. Macdonald, and I thank you for it. It has given me great pleasure. To paraphrase sacred poetry is the most difficult of all tasks, and it appears to me that you have been more successful in the attempt than any of your predecessors. You may probably have heard that the Bishop of Calcutta (before he was appointed to that see) was engaged in forming a collection of hymns and sacred pieces, with the hope of having them introduced into our English churches. Some of yours are so well adapted to that object that I will send out a copy of your book to him."

The principal works of Knox besides the "Lonely Hearth," which we have already mentioned, were a Christmas tale, entitled "Mariomne, or the Widower's Daughter," "A Visit to Dublin," "Songs of Israel," and the "Harp of Zion." Much of his authorship, however, was scattered over the periodicals of the day, and especially the " Literary Gazette." As a prose writer, his works are of little account, and have utterly disappeared; but the same cannot be said