Other books, less magnificent in aspect and rougher in style, are yet so full of suggestive and germinating thought, that we must liken them to quarries, surrounded it may be by thorns and briars, and precipices, but containing the richest of matter, and communicating with the very depths of the earth. Not to enter on the vexed questions connected with more celebrated poets, we may name Darwin and Dr Thomas Brown as two specimens of the building, and Robert Blair as an admirable example of the quarry. In household words and sententious truths, he yields (taking his space into consideration), not even to Young, or Pope, or Cowper, but to Shakspeare alone. His poem is a tissue of texts; many of his expressions might pass and have passed for bits of Hamlet. Take a few:-- "Friendship, mysterious cement of the soul, Sweetener of life, and solder of society." "Son of the morning, whither art thou gone? Where hast thou hid thy many-spangled head, And the majestic menace of thine eyes Felt from afar?" "Sorry pre-eminence of high descent! Above the vulgar, born to 'rot in state'." Hence, by the way, Byron's famous lines,-- "It seem'd the mockery of hell to fold The 'rottenness' of eighty years in gold." The exquisite description of beauty in the grave has been already quoted. That of the strong man dying is quite Shakspearian, and equally so is the picture commencing, "Death's shafts fly quick," particularly the passage about the sexton. How much he has compressed in the few words of the celebrated description!-- "The wind is up; hark! how it howls! methinks Till now I never heard a sound so dreary; Doors creak, and windows clap, and night's foul bird, Rook'd in the spire, screams loud." Who Blair's favourite authors were, we are not informed, but internal evidence proves him to have frequently and profitably read Shakspeare; and in terseness of description, comprehensiveness of vision, careless grandeur of execution, and short felicitous strokes of genius, he bears to him a considerable resemblance.