and for this simple and best of all reasons, that you have never written, as far as the public is concerned, any lines at all. You may be a sound-headed lawyer, a calculating merchant, an honest shopkeeper, or, what is still more commendable, because more rare, an honest judge. You may sole shoes or make greatcoats to a nicety--fabricate chairs, or nails, or pins, or periwigs, to a thought; but you are no enthusiast. Do you see that poor maniac, who is just receiving a visit from his mother in his cell, whose eyes are turned up in wild uproar to the roof of his dungeon, and who, in the damp icicles, is apostrophising sun, moon, and stars, Venus, Jupiter, and Aldubaran? That emaciated form of scarcely twenty years of age, which a weeping mother clasps, and whom a frenzied son convulsively strains to his bare and fleshless breast--that is Ferguson, the poet, the prince of enthusiasts--he at whose genius Burns lighted that torch which has filled the world with light. Do you mark that form sitting amongst the sands of Syracuse? The city is taken by the Roman armies. The enemy are within the walls; pillage and murder are the order of the hour. But what is that to him?--he is only an enthusiast. The soldier has challenged him to surrender; his sword is uplifted, and the challenge is repeated. He heeds it not; the sword descends--and the greatest mathematician, the most complete enthusiast, which the world has ever seen, lies before you, a gashed and mangled corpse. The world--its wonders, its atoms, its various formations!--the laws--the eternal laws of its construction and form!--there is one who sung sweetly--oh, how divinely! There is one who sung sublimely--yes, as one overpowered with the spirit of Him who said, "Let there be light, and there was light;" but the cord which was overstrained is snapped, and the bow is unstrung; the pressure upon the delicate fibres of the brain has been too much, and the building of God has given way. Poor Lucretius! the disease of which thou didst expire was "enthusiasm." But it is time to shift the scene--to resort to that exquisite happiness, and extensive benefit to society, which enthusiasm is calculated to produce. Poetry is the language of nature. All languages originated in poetry; the ballad is the mother of all living and dead books. Whether it be repeated in the shape of Fescenine catches on the banks of the Tiber, of glorious epic on those of the Scamander, of chivalrous narrative by the rapid Rhone or sweet Liger--whether it employ the time and the enthusiastic efforts of the bard, the troubadour, the harper, or the minstrel--whether it resound through the recesses of Pindus, of Arcady, or of Yarrow--still, still the ballad presents the first germ of literature. What are the earlier pages of Livy's "History" but popular ballads, connected and narratived? What the history of our own Scotland--of her Bruces, and Wallaces, and all her many and valorous achievements--but ballads? And