Selected at length to rise to the eminent station of the Village Schoolmaster,—from the thankless office of pouring cold rudiments into heedless ears, Ritson took a poetical flight. It was among the mountains and wild scenery of Scotland that our young Homer, picking up fragments of heroic songs, and composing some fine ballad poetry, would, in his wanderings, recite them with such passionate expression, that he never failed of auditors; and found even the poor generous, when their better passions were moved. Thus he lived, like some old troubadour, by his rhymes, and his chants, and his virelays; and, after a year’s absence, our bard returned in the triumph of verse. This was the most seducing moment of life; Ritson felt himself a laureated Petrarch; but he had now quitted his untutored but feeling admirers, and the child of fancy was to mix with the everyday business of life.
At Edinburgh he studied medicine, lived by writing theses for the idle and the incompetent, and composed a poem on Medicine, till at length his hopes and his ambition conducted him to London. But the golden age of the imagination soon deserted him in his obscure apartment in the glittering metropolis. He attended the hospitals, but these were crowded by students who, if they relished the science less, loved the trade more: he published a hasty version of Homer’s Hymn to Venus, which was good enough to be praised, but not to sell; at length his fertile imagination, withering over the taskwork of literature, he resigned fame for bread; wrote the preface to Clarke’s Survey of the Lakes, compiled medical articles for the Monthly Review; and, wasting fast his ebbing spirits, he retreated to an obscure lodging at Islington, where death relieved a hopeless author, in the twenty-seventh year of his life.
The following unpolished lines were struck off at a heat in trying his pen on the back of a letter; he wrote the names of the Sister Fates, Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos—the sudden recollection of his own fate rushed on him—and thus the rhapsodist broke out:—
Thus deeply he enters into his own feelings, and abjures his errors, as he paints the utter desolation of the soul while falling into the grave opening at his feet.
The town was once amused almost every morning by a series of humorous or burlesque poems by a writer under the assumed name of Matthew Bramble—he was at that very moment one of the most moving spectacles of human melancholy I have ever witnessed.
It was one evening I saw a tall, famished, melancholy man enter a bookseller’s shop, his hat flapped over his eyes, and his whole frame evidently feeble from exhaustion and utter misery. The bookseller inquired how he proceeded in his new tragedy. “Do not talk to me about my tragedy! Do not talk to me about my tragedy! I have indeed more tragedy than I can bear at home!” was the reply, and the voice faltered as he spoke. This man was Matthew Bramble, or rather—M’Donald, the author of the tragedy of Vimonda, at that moment the writer of comic poetry—his tragedy was indeed a domestic one, in which he himself was the greatest actor amid his disconsolate family; he shortly afterwards perished. M’Donald had walked from Scotland with no other fortune than the novel of “The Independent” in one pocket, and the tragedy of “Vimonda” in the other. Yet he lived some time in all the bloom and flush of poetical confidence. Vimonda was even 78 performed several nights, but not with the success the romantic poet, among his native rocks, had conceived was to crown his anxious labours—the theatre disappointed him—and afterwards, to his feelings, all the world!
Logan had the dispositions of a poetic spirit, not cast in a common mould; with fancy he combined learning, and with eloquence philosophy.
His claims on our sympathy arise from those circumstances in his life which open the secret sources of the calamities of authors; of those minds of finer temper, who, having tamed the heat of their youth by the patient severity of study, from causes not always difficult to discover, find their favourite objects and their fondest hopes barren and neglected. It is then that the thoughtful melancholy, which constitutes so large a portion of their genius, absorbs and consumes the very faculties to which it gave birth.
Logan studied at the University of Edinburgh, was ordained in the Church of Scotland—and early distinguished as a poet by the simplicity and the tenderness of his verses, yet the philosophy of history had as deeply interested his studies. He gave two courses of lectures. I have heard from his pupils their admiration, after the lapse of many years; so striking were those lectures for having successfully applied the science of moral philosophy to the history of nations. All wished that Logan should obtain the chair of the Professorship of Universal History—but from some point of etiquette he failed in obtaining that distinguished office.