His volume of verse under the title of _Poems Written in the Leisure Hours of a Journeyman Mason_ issued slowly in 1829 from the press, and its appearance in the disillusionising medium of black and white convinced him that after all his true vocation was not to be found in poetry, for many lines which had appeared as tolerable, if not more, to the writer in the process of composition were now robbed of their charm by commission to print. Indeed, at no time does his versification rise beyond fluent description. It lacks body and form, and was really in his case nothing but a sort of rudimentary stratum on which he was to rear a very strong and powerful prose style. He was lacking in ear, and he confessed to an organ that recognised with difficulty the difference of the bagpipe and the big drum. The critics were not very partial to the venture. The tone of the majority was that of the _Quarterly_ upon Keats, and the autocrats of poetical merit declared that he was safer with his chisel than on Parnassus. One little oasis, however, in the desert of depreciation did manage to reach him in a letter, through his friend Forsyth of Elgin, from Thomas Pringle of Roxburgh who had seen the book. In early days the poet had been a clerk in the Register House of Edinburgh, where his _Scenes of Teviotdale_ had secured him an introduction to Scott, who extended to him the same ready support which he had bestowed on Leyden. By his influence he was appointed editor of _Blackwood's Magazine_, and later on emigrated with a party of relatives to the Cape, where his unsparing denunciations of the colonial policy in its treatment of the natives, and his advocacy of what would now be called the anti-Rhodes party brought him into complications with the officials in Downing Street and the colonial authorities. Poor Pringle!--among the one-song writers, the singers of the one lilt that rises out of a mass of now forgotten verse, his name is high, and he has won for himself an abiding niche in the hearts of his countrymen by his _Emigrant's Lament_, where he touches with a faultless hand the scenery of 'bonnie Teviotdale and Cheviot mountains blue.'