words, desire his compliments to be given, implies he must have forgotten both the purity of his language, and the etiquette of his station. But the kind of message-the vile buffoonery and clumsy conceit of it-really evinces a degree of vulgarity and affectation in the inventor, which can only be equalled by the profound ignorance which it shows of the King's taste and character. Not content with this, however, our author must needs put into the mouth of his present Majesty, a speech, which, if not so absurd, is quite in the same taste, and, we will venture to assert, quite as credible as the former. 'He was heard (it seems) to ex'press himself one day before a dozen of gentlemen of both nations, with the greatest warmth, as follows." I have always re'garded the attachment of the Scots to the Pretender-I beg your 'pardon, gentlemen-to prince Charles Stuart I mean-as a lesson 'to me whom to trust in the hour of need." Really this is too much. Mr. Hogg must have been either grossly gulled, or he has exercised his own fancy. When did any one-much less any one of a family remarkable for knowledge of etiquette, even beyond other royal personages-ever talk of Prince Charles Stuart? We shall next hear, we suppose, of Duke Frederick Guelph. These are not triflesthey demonstrate that some one's fancy has been at work; and, to the eye of a person who knows such matters, they do as incontestably disclose the hand of the fabricator, as false Scotch would betray to a countryman of Mr. Hogg, the imposture of any one who should put into his mouth bad verses fabricated in London. But the present king is charged with a greater indecorum in one respect, than even that imputed to his venerable parent. Why, we desire to know, should he trust those who pertinaciously resisted, endeayoured to destroy, and continued successfully to ridicule his whole family, rather than those who uniformly defended them, and whose attachment was at least as steady, though somewhat more successful, than the hostility of the other party? The King, we again assert, is incapable of such a low species of flattery; and one in which the part was so clumsily overdone, as to apologize to a dozen gentlemen of both nations,' for using the ordinary word Pretender. That he should ever have happened in his whole life to be in such a society (partly English, too, be it observed) as should not make the speech in question a most fulsome and inappropriate compliment, we think quite beyond all probability. After such specimens as those we have now given, the reader will wonder the less at Mr. Hogg's concluding, by making the whole family Jacobites in direct terms. This feat he performs in the following fashion. Captain Stuart of Invernahoyle's singular remark was not, it seems, quite without foundation. A gentleman, in a large company, gibed him for holding the king's commission, while, at the same time, he was a professed Jacobite. "So I well may," answered he, "in imitation of my master: the king himself is a 'Jacobite." The gentleman shook his head, and remarked, that the thing was impossible. "By G-," said Stuart, "but I tell 'you he is, and every son that he has. There is not one of them 'who (if he had lived in my brave father's days) would not to a certainty have been hanged." pp. x. xi. We can excuse the simplicity-the bon-homie, to use a word not easily translated-which could make this good old Centurion swallow and retail such nonsense. But Mr. Hogg's silliness is of a more dull cast; and it is mixed up with such practical heresies as these-Now, when the horrors of the Catholic religion have ceased to oppress the minds of men, there is but one way of thinking ' on the rights of the Stuarts throughout the realm.' Whereby he means, if the passage has any sense at all, that the only objection to the family was their religion, or rather the hatred unreasonably felt of it in England, and that their right would now be universally admitted if they were still in the field. Truly this writer knows little of either the past or present state of the country.-Do the despotic principles of the Stuarts go for nothing? Did he never hear of the statutes which proclaim the political delinquencies of the Stuarts, and the Liturgy, in which all England still returns thanks for being secured from arbitrary power as well as from Popery? But to argue with such writers is waste of time;-we only notice their follies, because a fashion seems of late to have been springing up of treating the grievous and unpardonable faults of the Stuarts more gently than is consistent with a due sense of the obligations we owe to the great men who drove them from the country which they had misgoverned. Mr. Hogg carries this a step further, and helps to cast imputations on the memory of those founders of a liberty which he either cannot appreciate, because his principles are slavish, or sets little account upon, because its history-its adventures-will not serve to work up into middling poems, and 'Tales' calculated to lengthen and sadden a 'Winter's Evening.' The plan of this work, its politics apart, is an extremely laudable one. Many of the Jacobite Songs are worthy of a better cause; and, indeed, its romantic features were far from being ill adapted to poetry. Certain it is, that if the sound principles lay entirely on one side, the good poetry was exclusively the lot of the other; and more tame and spiritless productions cannot well be conceived than those of the Whig bards, whose effusions have been subjoined by Mr. Hogg to his Jacobite Relics,-for the purpose, it should seem, of showing their inferiority, rather than with the candid intention of hearing both sides. It is not pronouncing too harsh a sentence on these to affirm, that they rise but little above the average merit of the collections frequently made of the squibs in use at contested elections among our English neighbours-from whose pens, indeed, our national partialities are somewhat soothed to find that all those rhymes have proceeded. Of all the Whig songs,' says the editor, there is not one that I can trace to be of Scottish ' original.' 6 The Jacobite muse is very differently endowed; though we will confess that her warblings have somewhat disappointed us. Not that we deny the merit of many of them; but because the proportion of insipid, middling, and positively bad is far greater than we had expected. This may no doubt be owing to the compiler's taste, which is evidently of a coarse and vulgar description. He has certainly had the means of discovering all the relics of value which exist; and few have probably perished in the short period that has elapsed since they were composed. Voluminous collections were open to his researches in the hands of all good Jacobites. Besides innumerable contributors of detached songs, he mentions eleven of those stores; and, at length, they poured in upon him so profuse that he actually grew terrified when he heard of a MS. volume.' It adds greatly to the value of the collection, that the music of each air is given; and copious notes are subjoined, containing remarks and extracts-the former not always very happy or very elegant-the latter generally from books in common use; but, upon the whole, conveying a great deal of the information requisite to illustrate the text. These notes are, in bulk, exactly equal to the text; and the Appendix, beside the whig effusions already mentioned, gives a number of Jacobite songs, the airs of which he could not discover. This class is inferior in merit, generally speaking, to the other, and comprises several English songs. The first song in the volume is that famous one, The King shall enjoy his own again,' which is said to have produced such marvellous effects in favour of the Royal cause during half of the seventeenth century, and, during a great part of the eighteenth, to have animated their falling hopes. It is altogether English, and possesses no kind of poetical merit. Probably the words of the burthen, and the air, may have been the cause of its success. the notes upon it, Mr. Hogg makes mention of a Dr. Walker who happened to be overseer of the market at Ipswich in Suffolk, on 'account of giving false evidence at an assize held there.' (p. 155.) In other words, he stood in the pillory for perjury. Now, if Mr. Hogg thinks to make himself popular by imitating some of the bad and bald jokes of Walter Scott's notes, we must whisper to him that it was in spite, and not in consequence of such things, that the Minstrel's fame waxed great. The third and fourth songs are in ridicule and vituperation of Leslie's Marches-to Scotland and to Marston Moor. Of the former, Mr. Hogg says, 'It is the most perfect thing of the kind to be found in that or any other age; In and, wild as some of the expressions are, must be viewed as a 'great curiosity. It is the very essence of sarcasm and derision, ' and possesses a spirit and energy for which we may look in vain 'in any other song existing.' Sure we are, these remarks are any thing rather than either perfect, or spirited, or even a curiosity' -except it be for containing at once a specimen of the bathos and the hyperbole. A good notion of the taste of the editor may however be gathered from it. We therefore subjoin two verses of the piece he thus extols-premising that the second is so much coarser than even these, as to preclude our inserting it;-for, of the Jacobite muse, it may be said, as was once observed of her Jacobin 'sister-though she may have the mille ornatus, the mille decen'ter habet is quite another matter.' 'March!-march!-pinks of election, Why the devil don't you march onward in order? Ere the blue bonnets come over the Border. 6 You shall preach, you shall pray, you shall teach night and day, Down with the kirk and its whilliebaleery! And the kist fu' o' whistles, that maks sic a cleary ; Jockey shall wear the hood, Jenny the sark of God 6 For codpiece and petticoat, dishclout and daidle.' pp. 5-7. This extract has brought us at once to the cardinal defect of Mr. Hogg, as the editor of a selection. He praises almost indiscriminately, and he wants delicacy almost entirely. Thus he describes, in one note, a poem on George the First's arrival in England, and public entry into his capital, as having more humour of the kind than any thing he ever saw ;' as 'being a high treat;' an old poem of sterling rough humour,' and so forth; yet, from the six or seven pages of it which he gives as a sample, we should be disposed to think it one of those rough diamonds, (as they are termed,) the roughness of which is admitted-the value uncertain; a remark applicable to the men, as well as the verses, which are frequently so designated. It is dull, flat, and extremely indelicate. Of the coarseness we dare not give specimens; let these lines suffice to show forth its other merits. 'Next these a Presbyterian Shot-man, In state affairs a very hot man, Elated, but when danger's near,' &c. p. 277. We should fatigue our readers were we only to make references to the instances of this editor's gross and coarse taste, with which this volume abounds. Some songs and prose quotations seem, indeed, selected for no other merits than their vulgar ribaldry. Why else, for instance, is the passage from the mock funeral oration on Hugh Peters given at p. 257? Not surely to display the editor's acquaintance with history, which is so great that he stops to inform his readers who Hugh Peters was, and speaks of him as a person wholly unknown. But another principle of selection is much more apparent throughout the book. The text is filled with songs, and the notes with extracts, the only merit of which is their virulent abuse of the Hanoverian or Constitutional party, or, as they are generally denominated, the Whigs. And, as the old Whigs of the Covenant are vilified under the same name, Mr. Hogg manifestly indulges in the insertion of attacks upon them, with the hope that the great body of persons now known by that denomination may share the odium or the ridicule scattered by those obsolete lampoons. We must pass over the vile and filthy attacks upon George I. and his favourites, because we cannot, without offence to all propriety, cite them; but, as a specimen of the rancour which dictates Mr. Hogg's selections, we would refer to the several songs against Bishop Burnet, which are utterly destitute of either poetry or wit, and do not even pretend to be of Scotch origin. In scurrility and barefaced falsehood, however, they make ample amends for all their other defects; whereof take one instance. The Bishop is not only represented as having had a spice of every vice,' but his greediness of gold is particularly specified. In the notes on these pieces, Mr. Hogg says not a word to contradict this notorious untruth; though, with singular ignorance of the subject, he does say that he was always a moderate man.' Dr. King, in his Memoirs, (and he was a stanch Jacobite,) while he truly represents him as a furious party man, and easily imposed upon,' adds, that he was a better pastor than any man who is now seated on the bench of bishops;' and praises him for his exemplary disinterestedness and carelessness of gain, which was so great that he only left his children their mother's fortune, deeming it criminal to save a farthing of his Episcopal revenues. After this the reader will be the less surprised to learn, that the Duke of Marlborough is represented in one song, as as difficult to be rescued from hell as the Bishop; and that King William is celebrated in another for his cowardice in battle. One excellent song' is dedicated to the abuse of the celebrated Archibald, Earl of Argyle, who fell a victim, in 1685, to the most atrocious and perfidious tyranny that ever cursed any modern nation. The following is the concluding stanza. "Thus having yielded up baith his sword and durk, · |