When reason yields to passion's wild alarms,
And the whole state of man is up in arms,
What but a critic could condemn the player
For pausing here, when cool sense pauses there?
Whilst, working from the heart, the fire I trace,
And mark it strongly flaming to the face;
Whilst in each sound I hear the very man,
I can't catch words, and pity those who can.
Let wits, like spiders, from the tortured brain
Fine-draw the critic-web with curious pain;
The gods-a kindness I with thanks must pay-
Have form'd me of a coarser kind of clay;
Nor stung with envy, nor with spleen diseased,
A poor dull creature, still with Nature pleased;
Hence to thy praises, Garrick, I agree,

And, pleased with Nature must be pleased with thee. - The Rosciad.

SCOTLAND AND THE SCOTCH.

Two boys, whose birth, beyond all question, springs
From great and glorious, though forgotten kings,
Shepherds of Scottish lineage, born and bred
On the same bleak and barren mountain's head,
By niggard nature doom'd on the same rocks
To spin out life, and starve themselves and flocks,
Fresh as the morning, which enrobed in mist,
The mountain's top with usual dulness kiss'd,
Jockey and Sawney to their labors rose;
Soon clad I ween, where nature needs no clothes;
Where, from their youth enured to winter skies,
Dress and her vain refinements they despise.

Jockey, whose manly high-boned cheeks to crown,
With freckles spotted flamed the golden down,
With meikle art could on the bag-pipes play,
E'en from the rising to the setting day;
Sawney as long without remorse could bawl
Home's madrigals, and ditties from Fingal.

Far as the eye could reach, no tree was seen,
Earth, clad in russet, scorn'd the lively green :
The plague of locusts they secure defy,
For in three hours a grasshopper must die:

VOL. VI.-4

No living thing, whate'er its food, feasts there,
But the chameleon, who can feast on air.
No birds, except as birds of passage, flew ;
No bee was known to hum, no dove to coo:
No streams, as amber smooth, as amber clear,
Were seen to glide, or heard to warble here :
Rebellion's spring, which through the country ran,
Furnished with bitter draughts the steady clan;
No flowers embalm'd the air, but one white rose,
Which, on the tenth of June, by instinct blows:
By instinct blows at morn, and when the shades
Of drizzly eve prevail, by instinct fades.

One, and but one poor solitary cave,
Too sparing of her favors, nature gave;
That one alone (hard tax on Scottish pride!)
Shelter at once for man and beast supplied.
Their snares without entangling briars spread,
And thistles arm'd against the invader's head,
Stood in close ranks, all entrance to oppose;
Thistles now held more precious than the rose.
All creatures which, on nature's earliest plan,
Were form'd to loathe and to be loathed by man.
Which owed their birth to nastiness and spite,
Deadly to touch, and hateful to the sight:
Creatures, which when admitted in the ark
Their saviour shunn'd and rankled in the dark,
Found place within marking her noisome road
With poison's trail, here crawl'd the bloated toad:
There webs were spread of more than common size,
And half-starved spiders prey'd on half-starved flies:
In quest of food, efts strove in vain to crawl;
Slugs, pinch'd with hunger, smear'd the slimy wall:
The cave around with hissing serpents rung;
On the damp roof unhealthy vapor hung;
And Famine, by her children always known,
As proud as poor, here fix'd her native throne.

-The Prophecy of Famine.

CIBBER, COLLEY, an English actor and dramatist, born at London, England, November 6, 1671; died there, December 12, 1757. His father, Caius Cibber, acquired a large fortune as a carver in wood and stone. The son, having received a good education, became infatuated with the stage and joined a company of actors. In 1711 he became one of the patentees and manager of Drury Lane Theatre. About 1731 he was named laureate, and formally retired from the theatre, though he occasionally appeared upon the stage, the last time being in 1745, when, at the age of seventy-four, he enacted the part of Panulph in a drama of his own entitled Papal Tyranny. Cibber wrote several comedies, the best of which are Love's Last Shift and The Careless Husband. When verging upon threescore and ten he put forth the Apology for My Life, which presents a curious picture of the manners of the day, and has been several times. reprinted. The version of Shakespeare's Richard the Third which kept possession of the stage for at least a century was the production of Colley Cibber. He is best known, after all, by the mention made of him by Pope in The Dunciad, and by Johnson, as recorded by Boswell; and by a single short poem. The place of Cibber's interment has been a subject of considerable controversy. Dr. Doran, in his Annals of the Stage, says that he

"was carried to sleep with kings and queens in Westminster Abbey;" but Lawrence Hutton says that here the Doctor is not to be relied on, for that "Cibber certainly was not buried in the Abbey." In proof of this contention, Hutton quotes as follows from a private letter received in 1883 from the vicar of the parish of St. Paul: "Colley Cibber and his father and mother were buried in the vault of the old Danish church. When the church was removed, the coffins were all removed carefully into the crypt under the apse, and then bricked up. So the bodies are still there. The Danish consul was with me when I moved the bodies. The coffins had perished except the bottoms. I carefully removed them myself personally, and laid them side by side at the back of the crypt, and covered them with earth." The Danish church here mentioned stood in Wellclose Square, in what is now St. George Street. It was built in 1696, by Cibber's father, by order of the King of Denmark, for the use of such of his subjects as might visit London. It was taken down in 1868, and upon its foundations were built St. Paul's Schools.

Cibber was a lively and amusing writer. His Careless Husband is still deservedly a favorite; and his Apology for My Life is one of the most entertaining autobiographies in the English language.

"MY FIRST ERROR."

The unskillful openness, or, in plain terms, the indiscretion I have always acted with from my youth, has drawn more ill-will towards me, than men of worse morals and more wit might have met with. My ignorance and

want of jealousy of mankind has been so strong, that it is with reluctance I even yet believe any person I am acquainted with can be capable of envy, malice, or ingratitude. And to show you what a mortification it was to me, in my very boyish days, to find myself mistaken, give me leave to tell you a school story. A great boy, near the head taller than myself, in some wrangle at play had insulted me; upon which I was foolhardy enough to give him a box on the ear. The blow was soon returned with another; that brought me under him, and at his mercy. Another lad, whom I really loved, and thought a good-natured one, cried out with some warmth to my antagonist, while I was down: "Beat him! beat him soundly!" This so amazed me, that I lost all my spirits to resist, and burst into tears. When the fray was over, I took my friend aside and asked him how he came to be so earnestly against me; to which, with some gloating confusion, he replied: "Because you are always jeering and making a jest of me to every boy in the school." Many a mischief have I brought upon myself by the same folly in riper life. Whatever reason I had to reproach my companion's declaring against me, I had none to wonder at it, while I was so often hurting him. Thus I deserved his enmity by my not having sense enough to know I had hurt him; and he hated me because he had not sense enough to know that I never intended to hurt him.-From The Apology.

"MY DISCRETION."

Let me give you another instance of my discretion, more desperate than that of preferring the stage to any other views of life. One might think that the madness of breaking from the advice and care of parents, to turn Player, could not easily be exceeded. But what think you, sir, of-Matrimony? which, before I was two-and-twenty, I actually committed, when I had but twenty pounds a year, which my father had assured to me, and twenty shillings a week from my theatrical labors, to maintain, as I then thought, the happiest young couple that ever took a leap in the dark! If, after this, to complete my fortune, I turned Poet too, this last folly, indeed, had something a better excuse-necessity. Had it never been