of his song and the measured dash of his oars; and when the winds are abroad, we may see them travelling black over the water before they wave the branches that spread over our heads. Many of the poet’s happiest moments were passed in the solitude of this retreat; and from the experience derived in it, though one of the most benevolent of men, and at times one of the most sociable, whenever he wished to be happy he sought to be alone. In going to church every Sabbath, instead of following the public road, he used invariably to strike across the beach and walk by the edge of the sea; and, on reaching the churchyard, he always retired into some solitary corner, to ponder in silence among the graves. To a person of so serious a cast, a life of solitude and self-examination cannot be a happy, unless it be a blameless one; and Johnie o’ the Shore was one of the rigidly just. Like the Pharisees of old, he tithed mint, and anise, and cumin; but, unlike the Pharisees, he did not neglect the weightier matters of the law. It is recorded of him, that on descending one evening from his hillock, he saw his only cow browsing on the grass-plot of a neighbour, and that, after having her milked as usual, he despatched his sister with the milk to the owner of the grass. Ninety years ago, the press had not found its way into the north of Scotland, and the people were unacquainted with the scheme of publishing by subscription. And so the writings of Johnie o’ the Shore, like those of the ancients before the invention of printing, existed only in manuscript; and, like them too, they have suffered from the Goths. A closely written fragment of about eighty pages, which once composed part of a bulky quarto volume, is now all that survives of his works, though at his death they formed of themselves a little library. One of the volumes, written wholly in prose, and which minutely detailed, it is said, all the incidents of his life, with his thoughts on God and heaven, the world and himself, fell into the hands of a distant relative who resided somewhere in Easter-Ross. It must have been no small curiosity in its way, and for some time I was flattered by the hope that it still existed and might be recovered; but I have come to find that it has shared the fate of all his other volumes. The existing fragment is now in my possession. It bears date 1743, and is occupied mostly with hymns, catechisms, and prayers. His models for the hymns seem to have been furnished by our Scotch version of the Psalms; his catechisms were formed, some on the catechisms of Craig and the Palatine, and some on that of the Assembly Divines; his prayers remind me of those which are still to be heard in the churches of our northern parishes on “the day of the men.” Some of his larger poems are alphabetical acrostics;--the first line of the first stanza of each beginning with the letter A, and the first line in the last with the letter Z. Most of them, however--and the fact is a singular one, for