Enhance the bliss his scanty fund supplies.
Dear is that shed to which his soul conforms,
And dear that hill which lifts him to the storms, etc.,
and with the even more familiar lines of the same poem, commencing with
The shuddering tenant of the frigid zone.
The attention of Prof. Blackie and other literary and patriotic Scotchmen has been called to the following communication addressed by Mr. J. A. Neale to Notes and Queries: A somewhat extensive study of English literature has revealed to me many instances of imitation and plagiarism; but I have never met with a more remarkable example than this afforded by the following epitaph, published in an old edition of “Camden’s Remains,” and a poem by Burns entitled “The Joyful Widower.” I give the epitaph and the poem in full.
One, to show the good opinion he had of his wife’s soul departed, who in her lifetime was a notorious shrew, writes upon her this epitaph:
We lived near one-and-twenty year
As man and wife together:
I could not stay her longer here,