character described; but all that now remains of her story forms but a mere outline for the imagination to fill up at pleasure. Her lover had been the sole heir of an ancient and affluent family; the lady herself belonged to rather a humbler sphere. He had fixed his affections upon her when almost a boy, and had succeeded in engaging hers in turn; but his parents, who saw nothing desirable in a connexion which was to add to neither the wealth nor the honours of the family, interfered, and he was sent to sea; where a disappointed attachment, preying on a naturally delicate constitution, soon converted their fears for his marriage into regret for his death. Did I not say truly that the “officer’s grave” was a simple little ballad, moulded in one of the commonest forms of invention? [Sidenote: MORRISON THE PAINTER.] Let us peruse one other grave ere we quit the burying-ground--the grave of Morrison the painter. It treats of morals, like that of “the poor lost lad,” but it enforces them after a different mode. We shall find it in the strangers’ corner, beside the graves of the two foreign seamen, whose bodies were cast upon the beach after a storm. Morrison, some sixty or seventy years ago, was a tall, thin, genteel-looking young man, who travelled the country as a portrait and miniature painter. The profession was new at the time to the north of Scotland; and the people thought highly of an artist who made likenesses that could be recognised. But they could not think more highly of him than Morrison did of himself. He was one of the class who mistake the imitative faculty for genius, and the ambition of rising in a genteel profession for that energy of talent whose efforts, with no higher object often than the mere pleasure of exertion, buoy up the possessor to his proper level among men. There was a time when Morrison’s pictures might be seen in almost every house--in little turf cottages even among halfpenny prints and broadsheet ballads; nor were instances wanting of their finding place among the paintings of a higher school:--some proprietor of the district retained an eccentric piper or gamekeeper in his establishment, or, like the baron of a former age, kept a fool, and Morrison had been employed to confer on all that was droll or picturesque in his appearance, the immortality of colour and canvas. Like the painter in the fable who pleased everybody, he drew, in his serious portraits, all his men after one model, and all his women after another; but, unlike the painter, he copied from neither Apollo nor Venus. His gentlemen had sloping shoulders and long necks, and looked exceeding grave and formidable; his ladies, on the contrary, were sweet simpering creatures, with waists almost tapering to a point, and cheeks and lips of as bright a crimson as that of the bunch of roses which they bore in their hands.