The hot reflexing of the sun Inflames the air and all. The labourers that timely rose, For heat down to their houses goes1, The callour2 wine in cave is sought, With gilded eyes and open wings, With claps of joy his breast he dings", And twenty times he crows. The dove with whistling wings so blue, The winds can fast collect, Her purple pens turn maný a hue Now noon is gone-gone is midday, The heat does slake at last, The sun descends down west away, In old Scottish poetry little attention is paid to giving plural nouns a plural verb.-2 Cool.-3 Burning.-4 Oil.-5 Beats. The rayons of the sun we see The shade of every tower and tree Great is the calm, for every where The reek1 throws up right in the air, The mavis and the philomeen2, The sterling whistles loud, The cushats on the branches green, The glomin' comes, the day is spent, The sun goes out of sight, And painted is the occident With purple sanguine bright. The scarlet nor the golden thread, Who would their beauty try, Are nothing like the colour red Smoke.-2 Thrush and nightingale.- -3 Wood-pigeons.4 A very expressive word for the note of the cushat, or woodpigeon.-5 Evening. What pleasure then to walk and see, Endlang1 a river clear, The perfect form of every tree Within the deep appear. The salmon out of cruives and creels3, Uphailed into scouts *; The bells and circles on the weills 5, O sure it were a seemly thing, The praise of God to play and sing Through all the land great is the gild Of bleating sheep, fra they be fill'd, All labourers draw hame at even, And can to others say, Thanks to the gracious God of Heaven, Quhilk sent this summer day. Along.- Places for confining fish, generally placed in the dam of a river.- -3 Baskets. Small boats or yawls.—5 Wells. Throng.-7 Who. BORN 1558.-DIED ABOUT 1600. THOMAS NASH was born at Lowenstoffe in Suffolk, was bred at Cambridge, and closed a calamitous life of authorship at the age of forty-two. Dr. Beloe1 has given a list of his works, and Mr. D'Israelio an account of his shifts and miseries. Adversity seems to have whetted his genius, as his most tolerable verses are those which describe his own despair; and in the midst of his woes, he exposed to just derision the profound fooleries of the astrologer Harvey, who, in the year 1582, had thrown the whole kingdom into consternation by his predictions of the probable effects of the junction of Jupiter and Saturn. Drayton, in his Epistle of Poets and Poesy, says of him— Sharply satyric was he, and that way He went, since that his being to this day, From the allusion which he makes in the following quotation to Sir P. Sydney's compassion, before the introduction of the following lines, it may be conjectured that he had experienced the bounty of that noble character. 1 Anecdotes of Scarce Books.-2 Calamities of Authors. DESPAIR OF A POOR SCHOLAR. FROM PIERCE PENNILESS. WHY is't damnation to despair and die, Ah, worthless wit! to train me to this woe: Forgive me, God, although I curse my birth, Without redress complains my careless verse, |