JAMES, author of The Sabbath and other poems, was a native of Glasgow, where he was born April 22, 1765. His father was a successful and prosperous legal practitioner, and, by a very common error, he conceived that no other profession could be so suitable or so advantageous for his son. James, dutiful, and shrinking from opposition, as he did all through life, obeyed the parental wish and studied law, first to qualify himself for the business of writer to the signet, and subsequently for the Scottish bar. His inclinations, however, were all for retirement and literature; and finally, when he had reached the mature age of forty-four, he took orders in the English Church, and was contented with an humble curacy in the north of England. He did not long enjoy an office which he adorned by his pious and eloquent ministrations. Ill Grammar. health compelled him to try the renovating effects of his native air and landscape ever dear to his imagination, but he died shortly after his return, September 14, 1811. The works of Grahame consist of a dramatic poem, *Mary Queen of Scots*, *The Sabbath*, *British Georgics*, *The Birds of Scotland*, and several smaller poems. His principal work is *The Sabbath*—a sacred and descriptive poem in blank verse, characterized by a fine vein of tender and devotional feeling, and by the happy delineation of Scottish scenery. He is the Cowper of Scotland, but wanting Cowper's mastery of versification and easy idiomatic vigour of style. The blank verse of Grahame is often hard and constrained, though at times it swells out into periods of striking imagery and prophet-like earnestness. His description of the solemn stillness and unbroken calm of "the hallowed day" in the rural districts of Scotland, and of the Scottish Sabbath preachings among the hills in times of persecution, when

"The scattered few would meet in some deep dell By rocks o'er-canopied,"

are finished pictures that will never fade from our poetry. In his *Georgics* he tried the wider field of rural occupations and manners, and produced some pleasing daguerreotypes of nature—for he was a careful as well as loving student—but he descends into minute and undignified detail. Cowper ventured upon the subject of manure, and his failure as to the "stercoraceous heap" should have warned Grahame from the "compost pile." Such rules of husbandry are unfitted for poetry—or at least it was given to Virgil only to render them pleasing in verse. He, indeed, as Dryden happily says, "delivers the meanest of his precepts with a kind of grandeur: he breaks the clods and tosses the dung about with an air of gracefulness." No other poet, however, has succeeded in the perilous employment. In the notes to Grahame's poems the author expresses manly and enlightened views on the subject of slavery, on popular education, the criminal law, and other public questions. He was emphatically a friend of humanity—a philanthropist as well as a poet.