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362 Those that linve means and able freen's Just for to pay the patron, They will succeed if they can read As well as an old matron. Old sermons they will read them fine ; When they hold up their face They point their finger to the line For fear they lose the place. But these new gospel readers a', Though few may come to hear them, ^'et they the stipend weel can draw, And that "s the thing will cheer them.

Such was the poet of Glenlivetj and so did he sing. Several years before the close of his days came in 1871, his wandering journeys had entirely ceased^ and with their cessation the era of ballad literature of the kind he represented came to an end in Scotland. Neither his interest in public affairs nor his rhyming propensities, however, failed to the last; for in the very year before he died we find the old man of seventy-eight inditing versified epistles to his most favoured correspondent, referring to the ' Irish Kirk,' then about to undergo disestablishment^ and expressing good wishes for 'the working classes/ all much in the old strain, but with an added feeling of pensive resignation at the thought that he too must quit this scene, for The longest life rolls gently on, And all seems but a dream. As his correspondence shows, the Glenlivet poet was intensely self-conscious, and carried with him at all times a due sense of the burden of his vocation. But while he held in proper contempt the class of rivals who simply sang ballads composed by other people. and even went the length of believing that if he had kept copies of all his ballads and published them in volume form he might have made himself 'indepen- dent,' he was not unwilling to admit his own deficiencies on the purely literary side. It is Wilson the ornithologist, I think, who tells a story of a ' local poet ' encountered by him during his early chapman (lays, and with whom he hoped to spend an hour in congenial talk. On being asked how he liked Shake- speai-e, Wilson's new friend asked where he lived and what his occupation was. And thereafter, when some of the immortal dramatist's poems had been submitted to him, he failed to see that they quite equalled his own compositions. John Milne acknowledged the just fame of both Milton and Shakespeare, to say nothing of Homer, and his lack of ' classical ' learning was a frequent theme of lamentation. Upon that, indeed, he laid so much stress, that he would probably have been inclined to modify the maxim which speaks of poets being born and not made, to the extent of causing it to read that while they are born in the rough-hewn state, the divinity that ought to come in to shape them is the rules of syntax. In defence of his muse and her products as they were, he says : —

As for the critics, ruin seize them ; For me, I do not try to please them ; A faultless piece none e'er did see ; There "s none that is from faults quite free. The like of me has little knowledge — I never was at any college, And for want of English grammar Little wonder though 1 stammer. William Alexander.