'Let these sad strains to lighter sounds give place! Bid thy brisk viol warble measures gay!

For see! recall'd by thy resistless lay,

Once more the Brownie* shews his honest face.
Hail, from thy wanderings long, my much-lov'd sprite!
Thou friend, thou lover of the lowly, hail!
Tell, in what realms thou sport'st thy merry night,
Trail'st the long mop, or whirl'st the mimic flail.
Where dost thou deck the much-disorder'd hall,
While the tir'd damsel in Elysium sleeps,
With early voice to drowsy workmen call,
Or lull the dame while mirth his vigils keeps?
'Twas thus, in Caledonia's domes, 'tis said,

Thou play'dst the kindly task in years of yore:
At last, in luckless hour, some erring maid
Spread in thy nightly cell of viands store:

Ne'er was thy form beheld among their mountains more.*

*The Brownie formed a class of beings, distinct in habit and He was disposition from the freakish and mischievous elves. meagre, shaggy, and wild in his appearance. Thus, Cleland, in his satire against the Highlanders, compares them to

'Faunes, or brownies, if ye will,

Or satyres come from Atlas hill.'

'In the day time, he lurked in remote recesses of the old houses which he delighted to haunt; and, in the night, sedulously employed himself in discharging any laborious task which he thought might be acceptable to the family, to whose service he had devoted himself. But, although, like Milton's lubber fiend, he loves to stretch himself by the fire,* he does not drudge from the hope of recom. pense. On the contrary, so delicate is his attachment, that the offer of reward, but particularly of food, infallibly occasions his disappearance for ever.

*-how the drudging goblin sweat,

To earn the cream bowl, duly set!

When in one night, ere glimpse of morn,
His shadowy flail had thrash'd the corn,

That ten day-lab'rers could not end;

Then lies him down the lubber fiend;

And, stretch'd out at the chimney's length,
Basks at the fire his airy strength;
And, crop-full, out of doors he flings,
Ere the first cock his matin rings.'

L'Allegro.

'Then wake, (for well thou canst,) that wondrous lay,
How, while around the thoughtless matrons sleep,
Soft o'er the floor the treacherous fairies creep,
And bear the smiling infant far away;

How starts the nurse, when, for her lovely child,
She sees at dawn a gaping idiot stare!
O snatch the innocent from demons wild,
And save the parents fond from fell despair!
In a deep cave the trusty menials wait,

When from their hilly dens, at midnight's hour,
Forth rush the airy elves in mimic state,

And o'er the moonlight heath with swiftness scour,
In glittering arms the little horsemen shine;
Last, on a milk-white steed, with targe of gold,
A fay of might appears, whose arms entwine

The lost, lamented child; the shepherds bold*

The unconscious infant tear from his unhallow'd hold.

"When the menials in a Scottish family protracted their vigils around the kitchen fire, Brownie, weary of being excluded from the midnight hearth, sometimes appeared at the door, seemed to watch their departure, and thus admonish them-Gang a' to your beds, sirs, and dinna put out the wee grieshoch (embers.)'

It seems no improbable conjecture, that the brownie is a legitimate descendant of the Lar Familiaris of the ancients.

* For an account of the Fairy superstition, see the Introduction to the 'Tale of Tamlane,' in that elegant work called Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, vol. ii. p. 174, second edition.

SELECT POEMS

OF

EDWARD MOORE.

WITH

A LIFE OF THE AUTHOR,

FROM CHALMERS.

LIFE OF E. MOORE.

EDWARD MOORE was the grandson of the re

verend John Moore, of Devonshire, one of the ejected nonconformists, who died Aug. 23, 1717, leaving two sons in the dissenting ministry. Of these, Thomas, the father of our poet, removed to Abingdon in Berkshire, where he died in 1721, and where Edward was born March 22, 1711-12, and for some time brought up under the care of his uncle. He was afterwards placed at the school of East Orchard in Dorsetshire, where he probably received no higher education than would qualify him for trade.

For some years he followed the business of a linen-draper, both in London and in Ireland, but with so little success that he became disgusted with his occupation, and, as he informs us in his preface, "more from necessity than inclination," began to encounter the vicissitudes of a literary life. His first attempts were of the poetical kind, which still preserve his name among the minor poets of his country. In 1744, he published his Fables for the Female Sex, which were so favour