The influence of Watts was felt in Scotland, and among the first whom it reached there was Ralph Erskine. This seems to have been after the publication of Erskine's _Gospel Sonnets_, which appeared in 1732, five years before he joined his brother Ebenezer in the Secession Church. The _Gospel Sonnets_ became, as some have said, a "people's classic"; but there is in them very little which belongs to the category of hymnody. More than nineteen-twentieths of this very curious book are occupied with what are, in fact, theological treatises and catechisms, mystical meditations on Christ as a bridegroom or husband, and spiritual enigmas, paradoxes, and antithetical conceits, versified, it is true, but of a quality of which such lines as-- "Faith's certain by fiducial arts, Sense by its evidential facts," may be taken as a sample. The grains of poetry scattered through this large mass of Calvinistic divinity are very few; yet in one short passage of seven stanzas ("O send me down a draught of love"), the fire burns with a brightness so remarkable as to justify a strong feeling of regret that the gift which this writer evidently had in him was not more often cultivated. Another passage, not so well sustained, but of considerable beauty (part of the last piece under the title "The believer's soliloquy"), became afterwards, in the hands of John Berridge, the foundation of a very striking hymn ("O happy saints, who walk in light"). After his secession, Ralph Erskine published two paraphrases of the "Song of Solomon," and a number of other "Scripture songs," paraphrased, in like manner, from the Old and New Testaments. In these the influence of Watts became very apparent, not only by a change in the writer's general style, but by the direct appropriation of no small quantity of matter from Dr Watts's hymns, with variations which were not always improvements. His paraphrases of I Cor. i. 24; Gal. vi. 14; Heb. vi. 17-19; Rev. v. 11, 12, vii. 10-17, and xii. 7-12 are little else than Watts transformed. One of these (Rev. vii. 10-17) is interesting as a variation and improvement, intermediate between the original and the form which it ultimately assumed as the 66th "Paraphrase" of the Church of Scotland, of Watts's "What happy men or angels these," and "These glorious minds, how bright they shine." No one can compare it with its ultimate product, "How bright these glorious spirits shine," without perceiving that William Cameron followed Erskine, and only added finish and grace to his work,--both excelling Watts, in this instance, in simplicity as well as in conciseness. Scottish paraphrases.