solitaire

—musing amid midnight churchyards—stumbling over bones—and returning home to light his lamp, inserted in a gaping skull, and to write out his gloomy cogitations. This is very far from being his real character. He was more frequently seen wandering amidst the flowery nooks of summer, with a microscope in his hand; or, on his way home from his pastoral visitations, stopping to analyse the fungi and the mosses which met him on his path; or musing above the long liquid lapse of some wayside stream, down which were floating the red leaves of autumn; or turning a telescope of his own construction aloft to the gleaming host of heaven. In his mode of spending his time, as well as in some of the stern features of his genius, he resembled Crabbe, who, believing that every weed was a flower, spent much of his time amidst the fields and on the sea-shores; who extracted delight out of the meanest fungus, even as he extracted poetry out of the humblest characters; and whose life, like Blair's, was a harmless dream.

After spending seven years of studious solitude, he, in 1738, married his relation, Isabella Law, daughter of Mr Law of Elvingston, who had been professor of moral philosophy in the University of Edinburgh, and whose death, which had happened ten years before, he had mourned in some rather lame verses, which our readers will find in this edition. Her brother was the sheriff-depute of East Lothian. She is described as a lady of great beauty and amiable manners, and succeeded in making the poet very happy. She bore him five sons and one daughter. Of these, Robert arose, through various gradations of honour at the Scottish bar, to be President of the Court of Session, and died in 1811. He was a man of massive and powerful intellect. It is, we think, in

Peter's Letters

that Lockhart gives a glowing portraiture of President Blair's remarkable powers. He had not the genius or "hairbrained sentimental trace" of his father, but had inherited that clear, stern understanding, and that profound insight into men and manners, which are met with in every page of

The Grave.

Of this poem the author had, we said, drawn a first outline when a youth in Edinburgh. This he completed after his settlement at Athelstaneford; and, about the year 1742, he began to make arrangements for its publication. He had, probably through his neighbour, the celebrated Colonel Gardiner, who fell at the battle of Prestonpans, become acquainted with Isaac Watts, who paid him, he says in one of his letters, "many civilities." To him he forwarded the MS. of his poem. Dr Watts, with characteristic candour and good taste, admired it, and offered it to two different London booksellers, both of whom, however, declined to publish it, expressing a doubt whether any person living three hundred miles from town could write so as to be acceptable to the fashionable and the polite! No poetry at that time went down except imitations of Pope. Blair got back his MS., and, nothing daunted, sent it to Philip Doddridge, who was also an intimate of Colonel Gardiner's, requesting his opinion, which appears to have been as favourable as that of Dr Watts. At length it was published in London in the year 1743, and reprinted at Edinburgh in 1747, a year after its author's death.

Between that event and the appearance of his poem, nothing remarkable occurred. The success of his work must have shed additional sweetness into a cup which was rich before. "His tastes," says one of his biographers, "were elegant and domestic. Books and flowers seem to have been the only rivals in his thoughts. His rambles were from his fireside to his garden; and, although the only record of his genius is of a gloomy character, it is evident that his habits and life contributed to render him cheerful and happy." At last that awful chasm, the terrors, grandeurs, and moral lessons of which he had so powerfully sung, opened its jaws to receive him, and the Grave crowned its laureate with its cold and earthy crown. He was seized with fever, caught probably in the exercise of his pastoral functions, and expired on the 4th of February 1746, at the early age of forty-seven, when his body and mind were both in full vigour, and when, speaking after the manner of men, yet greater works than

The Grave

were before him. He left his wife, who lived till 1774, and five children behind him. His body reposes in the church-yard of Athelstaneford, without a monument, and with nothing but the initials K.B. to mark the spot.