when the wheel of fortune turned up one of her brightest spokes. As I sat pondering on my luckless lot, a slender fair-haired girl of fourteen, the daughter of a respectable and opulent farmer, came gliding like a sylph to my side, and, with a manner conscious and sly, said, that her father and her mother were gone to a bridal, and that her elder sister, Bess, desired my company to curds and cream, and to help her to while away the fore night. Now her sister was one of the merriest and rosiest girls in the district; had a dancing foot and a fine ankle, and a voice which lent a grace to old songs which the best of your theatrical quaverers fail to impart. I need not say that her invitation charmed me: I lavished ribbons, as well as thanks, on the bearer of this pleasing news, and passed my hand over her long and curling hair, saying, " An thou be spared, some lad will sigh at his supper for thee yet." She set out a fair chin and a white bosom to the motion of my hand, and seemed perfectly aware, though young now, that she would be older in summer. She tripped to the door, and looking back with an archness of manner, and a roguish glance of her eye, said, "Ye might have done waur than given me a kiss to carry to my sister, and ane to myself for carrying it," and uttering a loud laugh as she saw me rise to follow, away she bounded as light and graceful as a woodland fairy. An old beggar woman looked after her as she fled, and shook her crutch at her: "Ah, thou young wanton, I heard thy words: they who learn young learn fair, and it's worse to keep the kitten frae the kirn than the auld cat; but see what it all comes to; a lamiter's crutch and an awmous-powk: nought will be a warning!" and the old woman groaned bitterly as she halted along at the memory of merrier days. I was true to tryste, and turned my steps to the farmer's residence a little after twilight; the windows were gleaming with light, and the din of merriment resounded far and wide. My fairy messenger met me at the door, and standing on tiptoe, whispered in my ear, "Come away, ye have been lang looked for: there's naebody here but Jock Gordon of Goosedub, Rab Robson of Rowantree-burn, and Davie Wilson of Ballacraig; ye ken all the rest except the young laird of Moorbirn and his cousin, whom men call Daunering John." I entered, and found my knowledge was much more limited than the girl imagined; the farmer's hall was filled with strange faces, for three parishes round had each sent its contribution of youthful flesh and blood. Ten came east, and ten came west, And ten came rowing o'er the water; There's twa and thirty wooing at her. But if the heroine of Tintock-top rivaled bonnie Bess in the amount of her wooers, I question if she excelled her in the native tact and good management with which she kept in subordination so many fiery and intractable dispositions. We were all seated round a large table, at the head of which the maiden herself presided, distributing her glances among her admirers with an equal and a judicious diligence. Curds and cream, and tea, were in succession handed round; she partook of both, uniting in her own person the pastoral taste of the mountains with the refinement of the vales: songs were sung; she assisted in the strain, and her voice was sweet and delightful; and thus the evening hours flew by. But amid all this show of harmony and good fellowship, an experienced eye might observe, by the clouding brow and restrained joy of many, that the breeze of love which blew so soft and so balmy would soon burst out into tempest and storm. It is certainly a hazardous policy in such matters to collect a number of admirers face to face: in the silent darkness of a solitary tryste, the lover imagines himself the sole, or at least, the favoured admirer, and after breathing a brief vow, and tasting the joy of a half yielded kiss, he returns home, leaving his mistress to the nocturnal hardihood and superior address of a more artful lover. But seated with your rivals at your side, your jealousy of affection rises in arms against your peace, and you begin to sum up the hours you have been blessed in her company, and to multiply them by the number of her admirers, conceding in despair a Conversation began at last to flag, and silence ensued. "For my own part," said an upland shepherd, "I came here for an hour of quiet joy in a dark nook, the darker the better, but here's nought but an assembly of fools from the four winds of heaven, bending their darkening brows at one another, and a young lass sitting to count the strokes they strike, and to reckon every bruised brow a sure sign of her influence among men. Deil have me if I like it ; so let short peace and long strife be among ye; and for you, my bonnie dame, the less ye make sport of honest hearts, the less sport will evil hearts make of you, and so I leave you:" and away he strode, whistling manfully the tune of the gallant Graemes in token of defiance. "Let him go, the rough footed moorcock that can clap his wings but never crow," said a plowman from the vale of Ae; "the smell of tar and tainted mutton is diminished since his departure." This was touching on a perilous theme, --- the old feud which exists between the pastoral and agricultural districts. "I would advise ye lads," said a youth of moorland descent, "to eat well of wether-mutton and moorcocks afore ye speak lightly of aught that's bred among mosses; ye may need all your strength to maintain unguarded words. Lord, if my cousin of Blackhagg were here, he would make ye eat your own words though every one were as ill to swallow as a pound of hiplock wool." The incensed tiller of the holms of Ae started to his feet, his utterance nearly choaked with rage: "Rise, ye moorland coof, ye twofooted tender of fourfooted brutes, lacking as much in sense as ye lack in number of limbs; rise this precious moment, else I'll give ye the blow where ye sit." The man of the moors was not slow in attempting to rise; the brawny arm of a brother shepherd, which clutched his gorget with a grasp equal to the tethering of a bull, alone retarded his rising. "Let him alone, I say, Sandie; just let him alone," said the shepherd; "be civil at a douce man's hearth before his weelfaured daughter: ye ken the auld say; be the saint in the hall and the devil on the greensward; meaning nae doubt that we should carry our mischief out of doors: I'll stretch him as straight as one of his own furrows before an hour blow by, and on the same place too, the lilly lea." The wrath of the was turned on this husbandman doughty auxiliary, and having a divided aim, it burnt fiercely between them without harming either. Meantime, other tongues took part in the commotion: parochial nick-names, and family failings, and personal defects, were bandied from side to side, with all the keenness of rustic wit, and the malice of rivalry, while, on the whole, the maiden sat and looked as one would on a fire burning too fiercely to be quenched. It was not my wish to distinguish myself in this strife of tongues, and therefore I sat still, maintaining an expression of face which I hoped would carry me quietly through this stormy tide of contention.- I was only deceiving myself." And ye'll sit mute and motionless there, and hear the bonnie green hills of Annandale turned, by the malice of man's wit, into moudie-tammocks,” said a shepherd to me; “up and speak, for I have spoken till I'm as hoarse as a raven; or rise and fight; if ye have not a tongue in your head, ye may have a soul in your body." All turned their eyes on me at this address, and the uproar subsided for a time to hear my answer to this singular appeal. "A soul in his body," shouted a rustic, in a tone which implied something like a suspicion of my right to the spark immortal, “Have ye not heard the scoffing sang that's ringing from side to side of the country? I wonder the subject of such verses presumed to show his face among sponsible folk." And to my utter shame and confusion of face, he proceeded to chaunt the following rude verse, looking all the while on me with an eye sparkling with scorn and derision: O have ye not heard of John Ochiltree? As the verse ended, a laugh burst out which made the roof shake over our heads, to show how fickle men's passions are, and the mortification I was doomed to endure. To be the subject of ludicrous rhymes is to have an infection about one equal to the plague. My fellow suitors shunned me, and the capricious maiden herself assumed an air so haughty and decided that I saw my cause was cureless. All this was witnessed by one who sympathised in my sufferings, and whose ready wit suggested an instant remedy. The milkiness of my nature had already given way to the accumulating reproach; I had started to my feet, and taken one stride towards my rhyming persecutor with a clenched fist, and a face burning in anger, when the young girl who brought me the invitation to this unlucky tryste uttered a scream, and holding up her hand, laid her ear to the floor like one listening intensely. We all stood mute and motionless: she darted to the door with the rapidity of light, returned in a moment half-breathless, and exclaimed in a voice of seeming despair, "Oh! Bess, Bess, what will become of ye, here's Hazelbank; here's our ain father coming up the road. If he sees what I see, he'll turn Solway, be it for him or against him." Like a brood of chickens when the hawk descends, so started, so fluttered, and so flew in all directions this meeting of rivals; the door seemed far too narrow for escape. Seven bounded over the stack-yard dyke, and three leaped over a quickset hedge six feet high; two ran down the middle of a corn-field, with half the dogs of the place pursuing them; and two, who were strangers, in the haste of escape, fairly leaped into a pond, or small lake, and made good their retreat by swimming to the op posite side. In one minute the clamorous hall of Hazelbank was as mute as a kirk at midnight. As I hastened to retreat with the others, a white hand twitched me cunningly by the sleeve, and pulled me aside into a little closet, where two very warm and ripe lips whispered close in my ear, "Let the gowks flee, they know not the goose's quack from the eagle's cry; my father's far from home:"-and shutting the chamber door as she spoke, my bonnie and cunning messenger added:-" My sister Bess is in her grand moods this night; she carries her head o'er high, and winna speak to ye, for the foolery of that silly sang. A pretty thing, to lose a weelfaured lad for the sake of an idle rhime: sae bide with me; I am almost as tall as Bess is; and I'll be fifteen at midsummer." "And now," said this representative of the rustic name of Ochiltree, "I shall stay my narrative; feeling something of the distress of a traveler who comes to the shedlans of sundry roads, and knows not which one to elect; for the adventures which befel me were manifold, and seem in my sight all alike curious and important. But I cannot expect douce greyheaded folk will listen to the idle tales of youthful times. I might have made far more imposing stores of my misadventures among the maidens; for they are not unsusceptible of poetical embellishment; but I despise fictions, and laugh at "the idly feigned poetic pains" of metre ballad makers; I abide by the old proverb, "truth tells aye best." "Truth tells aye best indeed," re-echoed an ancient dame, as she sat by the hall-fire," and yet, idle fictions, and the embellishments,-I think that's the word ye used,-of a poetic fancy, seem to flow off as glibly as the current of truth itself. 152 A Hermitage. Ah! thou auld-farrand ane, dost thou think to pass off the pleasant inventions of thy own fertile brain for the well-known tales of thy early courtship? Ah, my lad, "—and she eyed him with a look where humour and seriousness seemed striving for mastery," ye are kenned where ye least hope it; far kenned and noted is thy name, as the rhymemaker said of Satan. And so ye say, you are John Ochiltree, and suffered in your youth from maiden's scorn and minstrel's sang? A bonnie tale indeed! D'ye think I don't know the merry goodman of Dootagen, Simon Rodan by name, whom I have known since he was the height of a pint-stoup. More by token, he plundered my plum-trees when he was a boy, and climbed in at my chamber windows afore the beard was on his chin, and all to wooe three of my servant maidens and my own cousin, bonnie Jeanie Carruthers.— Scorned by the lasses indeed! Mickle scorn have they endured for thee. Ah! thou flatterer, and bonnie tale teller. Many a good advice hast thou received from the parish minister and elders in full session assembled. A lad, the like of Simon Rodan, with all the failings he had, was not to be seen in seven hours' riding. -A straighter, or a more taper leg never set its foot in a black leather shoe; and it's not much the worse o' the wear yet." And thus ends the Second Tale or Lyddal Cross. A HERMITAGE. WHOSE is this humble dwelling-place, Well! he hath peace within, and rest, Nothing he wants: -he nothing cares Nor joy, nor sorrow, enter here; bed; This dwelling is a Hermit's cave, Sheffield, 1821. J. M. ON THE ELGIN MARBLES. THE ILISSUS. Who to the life an exact piece would make, Each judgment of his eye and motion of his hand. THE true lesson to be learnt by our students and professors from the Elgin marbles, is the one which the ingenious and honest Cowley has expressed in the above spirited lines. The great secret is to recur at every step to nature -To learn Her manner, and with rapture taste her style. It is evident to any one who views these admirable remains of Antiquity (nay, it is acknowledged by our artists themselves, in despite of all the melancholy sophistry which they have been taught or have been teaching others for half a century) that the chief excellence of the figures depends on their having been copied from nature, and not from imagination. The communication of art with nature is here everywhere immediate, entire, palpable. The artist gives himself no fastidious airs of superiority over what he sees. He has not arrived at that stage of his progress described at much length in Sir Joshua Reynolds's Discourses, in which having served out his apprenticeship to nature, he can set up for himself in opposition to her. According to the old Greek form of drawing up the indentures in this case, we apprehend they were to last for life. At least, we can compare these Marbles to nothing but human figures petrified: they have every appearance of absolute fac-similes or casts taken from nature. The details are those of nature; the masses are those of nature; the forms are from nature; the action is from nature; the whole is from nature. Let any one, for instance, look at the leg of the Ilissus or River-God, which is bent under him-let him observe the swell and undulation of the calf, the inter-texture of the muscles, the distinction and union of all the parts, VOL. V. and the effect of action every where impressed on the external form, as if the very marble were a flexible substance, and contained the various springs of life and motion within itself, and he will own that art and nature are here the same thing. It is the same in the back of the Theseus, in the thighs and knees, and in all that remains unimpaired of these two noble figures. It is not the same in the cast (which was shown at Lord Elgin's) of the famous Torso by Michael Angelo, the style of which that artist appears to have imitated too well. There every muscle has obviously the greatest prominence and force given to it of which it is capable in itself, not of which it is capable in connexion with others. This fragment is an accumulation of mighty parts, without that play and re-action of each part upon the rest, without that "alternate action and repose which Sir Thomas Lawrence speaks of as characteristic of the Theseus and the Ilissus, and which are as inseparable from nature as waves from the sea. The learned, however, here make a distinction, and suppose that the truth of nature is, in the Elgin Marbles, combined with ideal forms. If by ideal forms they mean fine natural forms, we have nothing to object; but if they mean that the sculptors of the Theseus and the Ilissus got the forms out of their own heads, and then tacked the truth of nature to them, we can only say, "Let them look again, let them look again." We consider the Elgin Marbles as a demonstration of the impossibility of separating art from nature, without a proportionable loss at every remove. The utter absence of all setness of appearance proves that they were done as studies from actual mo N |