Scotland. There have been Scottish poets before and since Burns who have been bred in poverty and distress, and in whose lives the flowers of poetry have bloomed amid the most depressing and uncongenial circumstances. There have been crofters, shepherds, farm laborers, tailors, weavers, and shoemakers, servant lassies and old wives, who have given expression to their feelings in verse and song, with more or less skill and success, and testified to the strength of the national genius which has made Scotland so peculiarly the land of song, and filled the lower bed of bracken and furze in which the higher and rarer flowers of Scottish minstrelsy have stood preeminent. And the history of the minor Scottish poets is full of the homely pathos of unrequited toil, of pinching poverty, and of hopeless struggles with life, redeemed by honest virtue, patience, and thrift, or clouded with still deeper misfortune, and absolutely and irredeemably wrecked by dissipation and improvidence. But upon none, in whom the divine spark of genius existed, did the burdens of life fall more heavily than upon William Thom, or the tragedies of existence reach a blacker depth of misery. The story has been told by himself in The Rhymes and Recollections of a Handloom Weaver, his only volume, in nervous and vigorous prose, bearing traits of the declamatory style of Ebenezer Elliot and the radical writers of his school, but marked by native originality and strength. It has more than a personal value, as illustrating the condition of the life of factory hands in Scotland, when machines had multiplied to the complete degradation of labor, and when it was simply a question with the mill owners of extracting the largest amount of work for the smallest wages from the operatives, and before the government had interfered to regulate the hours of labor within endurable limits, and secure some of the conditions of health to the mill hands. A more appalling picture of hopeless poverty and starvation, and physical and moral degradation, has never been given in the annals of the civilized world, and of its truth there is abundant evidence in the writings of contemporary workingmen in England and Scotland, and in the testimony which led to the passage of the Factory Regulation acts by the English Parliament.