The alder-tree shading the minnow pool—there is a real piece of Lowland scenery brought from the outer world for the first time into poetry. These are but a few samples of the scenery of Scottish rural life with which “The Gentle Shepherd” abounds. Burns, who lived in the generation that followed Ramsay, and always looks back to him as one of his chief forerunners and masters in the poetic art, fixes on Ramsay’s delineations of Nature as one of his chief characteristics. Burns asks, Is there none of the moderns who will rival the Greeks in pastoral poetry?— “Yes! there is ane; a Scottish callan— There’s ane; come forrit, honest Allan! Thou need na jouk behint the hallan, A chiel sae clever; The teeth o’ Time may gnaw Tantallan, But thou’s forever! “Thou paints auld Nature to the nines, In thy sweet Caledonian lines; Nae gowden stream thro’ myrtles twines, Where Philomel, While nightly breezes sweep the vines, Her griefs will tell! “In gowany glens thy burnie strays, Where bonnie lasses bleach their claes; Or trots by hazelly shaws and braes Wi’ hawthorns gray, Where blackbirds join the shepherd’s lays At close o’ day.” It may well be that when we turn to Scottish poetry the burns and braes should sing and shine through almost every song. For there is no feature in which Scottish scenery more differs from English than in the clear and living northern burns, compared with the dead drumlie ditches called brooks in the Midland Counties. THOMSON.