his own request, led into the smithy, multitudes flocking around to tender him their kindest offices, or to witness the process of release; and having laid down his head upon the anvil, the smith lost no time in seizing and poising his goodly forehammer. 'Will I come sair on, minister?' exclaimed the considerate man of iron, in at the brink of the pot.

'As sair as ye like,' was the minister's answer: 'better a chap i' the chafts than die for want of breath.'

Thus permitted, the man let fall a blow, which fortunately broke the pot in pieces, without hurting the head which it enclosed, as the cookmaid breaks the shell of the lobster, without bruising the delicate food within. A few minutes of the clear air, and a glass from the gudewife's bottle, restored the unfortunate man of prayer; but, assuredly, the incident is one which will long live in the memory of the parishioners of C

THOMAS THE RHYMER.

THOMAS OF ERCILDOUN,' otherwise called 'Thomas the Rhymer,' lived during the thirteenth century at a village now called Earlstoun, in the district of Lauderdale, in Berwickshire. The house which he is said to have occupied still exists in a ruinous state, on a haugh, or piece of alluvial ground, between the village and the neighbouring river Leader. From the appearance of the building-a small Border tower, or house of defence-and from his still receiving, at Earlstoun, the popular designation of Laird Learmont, he would appear to have been, in the sense of those days, a gentleman, though probably only a small proprietor. A long metrical poem in the romance style, called Sir Tristrem, has been published by Sir Walter Scott, as a work of his composition, though it is denied to be such by Mr Park, in his edition of Warton. Whatever Thomas was in his own time, it is certain that he has ever since enjoyed the highest reputation as a

prophet. That he died before 1299, is evident from a charter in which his son grants his paternal tenement in Earlstoun to the hospital of Soutra. Yet Barbour, in the poem of The Bruce, speaks of a prophecy of Thomas the Rhymer as referring to an event that took place in 1306. From that time almost to the present, his fame has never been allowed to fall asleep. Predictions attributed to him have come into vogue at almost every remarkable period of our history since the days of Bruce. His authority was employed in this manner to countenance the views of Edward III. against Scottish independency, to favour the ambitious aims of the Duke of Albany in the minority of James V., and to sustain the spirits of the nation under the harassing invasions of Henry VIII. A small volume of rhymes ascribed to him was published by Andro Hart, at Edinburgh, in 1615; and even at the present day hardly any remarkable event ever occurs, especially of the nature of a royal death, without some rhyme of True Thomas' being either revived or created anew in reference to it, though, it must be allowed, only among the most ignorant of the people. His name and soothsaying character are known not only in the south of Scotland, where he formerly lived, but in the Highlands and remote Hebrides.

The common tradition respecting Thomas the Rhymer is, that he was carried off in early life to Fairyland, where he acquired all the knowledge which made him afterwards so famous. There is an old ballad which describes him as meeting the queen of faëry on Huntly Bank, a spot now included in the estate of Abbotsford, and as accompanying her fantastic majesty to that country, the journey to which is described with some sublimity :

O they rade on, and farther on,

And they waded through rivers aboon the knee,

And they saw neither sun nor moon,

But they heard the roaring o' the sea.

It was mirk mirk night, and there was nae stern light,
And they waded through red blude aboon the knee;

For a' the blude that's shed on earth,

Rins through the springs o' that countric.'

At the end of seven years, Thomas is said to have returned to Earlstoun, to enlighten and astonish his countrymen by his prophetic powers. His favourite place of vaticination is said to have been at the Eildon Tree, an elevated spot on the opposite bank of the Tweed. At length, as he was one day making merry with his friends at a house in Earlstoun, a person came running in, and told, with marks of fear and astonishment, that a hart and hind had left the neighbouring forest, and were composedly and slowly parading the street of the village. The Rhymer instantly rose, with the declaration that he had been long enough there, and, following the animals to the wild, was never more seen. It is alleged that he was now reclaimed by the fairy queen, in virtue of a contract entered into during his former visit to her dominions. It is highly probable that both the first and the second disappearances of Thomas were natural incidents, to which popular tradition has given an obscure and supernatural character.*

*It happens that this conjecture derives force from a particular circumstance connected with the history of the Rhymer. Sir Walter Scott concludes an account of Thomas in the Border Minstrelsy, by mentioning that the veneration paid to his dwelling-place even attached itself to a person, who, within the memory of man, chose to set up his residence in the ruins of the Rhymer's tower. The name of this person was Murray, a kind of herbalist; who, by dint of some knowledge of simples, the possession of a musical clock, an electrical machine, and a stuffed alligator, added to a supposed communication with Thomas the Rhymer, lived for many years in very good credit as a wizard.' This account, which the author seems to have taken up from popular hearsay, refers to Mr Patrick Murray, an enlightened and respectable medical practitioner, of good family connections, talents, and education, as he sufficiently proves to us by the fact of his having been on intimate terms with the elegant Earl of Marchmont. With other property, this gentleman possessed the tower of Thomas of Ercildoun, which was then a comfortable mansion, and where he pursued various studies of a philosophical kind, not very common in Scotland during the eighteenth century. He had made a considerable collection of natural objects, among which was an alligator, and, being fond of mechanical contrivances, in which he was himself an adept, he had not only a musical clock and an electrical machine, but a piece of mechanism connected with a weathercock, by which he could tell the direction of the wind without leaving his chamber. This, with the aid of his barometer, enabled him to guess at the weather as he sat in company, and no doubt served to impress

While it is unquestionable that a person named Thomas of Ercildoun, or Thomas the Rhymer, lived at Earlstoun near the close of the thirteenth century, and was respected as a person possessing the gift of vaticination, it is equally certain that a considerable number of rhymes and other expressions, of an antique and primitive character, have been handed down as supposed to be uttered by him: of some of these we deem it by no means improbable that they sprang from the source to which they are ascribed, being in some instances only such exertions of foresight as might be expected from a man of cultivated intellect, and, in others, dreamy forebodings of evil, which never have been, and probably never will be, realised. For instance, Thomas is said to have foretold that

'The waters shall wax, and the woods shall wene,
Hill and moss will be torn in,

But the banno' will ne'er be braider:'

That is, simply, agriculture shall be extended, without increasing the food of the labourer: a proposition in which, so far as individuals are concerned, we fear there is only too much truth. He also said,

At Eildon Tree, if you shall be,

A brig ower Tweed ye there may sec.'

Although, in the time of the Rhymer, there was no bridge over the Tweed, excepting that at Berwick, it might have been easy for any individual of more than usual sagacity to anticipate the erection of one near the Eildon Tree as a certain event. In fact, from that elevated spot, three or four bridges can now be seen. Upon an equally

the ignorant with an idea of his possessing supernatural powers. Such, we have been assured by a relative of Mr Murray, was the real person whom the editor of the Border Minstrelsy-meaning of course no harm, but relying upon popular tradition-has described in such opposite terms. When we find a single age, and that the latest and most enlightened, so strangely distort and mystify the character of a philosophical country surgeon, can we doubt that five hundred years have played still stranger tricks with the history and character of Thomas the Rhymer!

natural calculation of the changes produced by time, he uttered the plaintive prediction:

The hare shall kittle on my hearth-stane,

And there never will be a Laird Learmont again.'

This emphatic image of desolation is said by the people of Earlstoun to have been realised within the memory of man, and at a period long subsequent to the termination of the race of Learmont.

Of rhymes foreboding evil, one of the most remarkable is a malediction against the old persecuting family of Home of Cowdenknowes-a place in the immediate neighbourhood of Thomas's castle :

"Vengeance, vengeance!
When and where?

Upon the House of Cowdenknowes,
Now and evermair!'

This anathema, awful as the cry of blood, has been accomplished in the extinction of the family, and the transference of the property to another race. The Rhymer is also stated to have foretold the battle of Bannockburn in the following enigmatical stanza :

The burn o' breid

Shall run fou reid.'

The bread of Scotland being invariably of bannocks, the first of these lines seems designed to shadow forth the rivulet called Bannockburn. Another of his ill

boding verses was

The horse shall gang on Carrolside Brae,
Till the girth gaw his sides in twae.'

Carrolside is a small estate near Earlstoun, and the seer seems to imply that the cutting of the horse by his girth shall be the result of a general famine. A rhyme to the effect that,

Between Seton and the sea,

Mony a man shall die that day,'

is incorporated in the long, irregular, and mystical poems which were published as the prophecies of Thomas in