Amid the more serious labours of these literary and economic lectures, it would be an agreeable relaxation to collect and edit the scattered poems, published and unpublished, of Hamilton of Bangour, the author of what Wordsworth calls the “exquisite ballad” of “The Braes o’ Yarrow,” beginning—­

    Busk ye, busk ye, my bonny, bonny bride,
      Busk ye, busk ye, my winsome marrow,
    Busk ye, busk ye, my bonny, bonny bride,
      And think no more on the Braes o’ Yarrow.

This ballad had appeared in Allan Ramsay’s Tea-Table Miscellany so long ago as 1724, and it was followed by Hamilton’s most ambitious effort, the poem “Contemplation,” in 1739, but the general public of Scotland only seem to have awakened to their merits after the poet espoused the Jacobite cause in 1745, and celebrated the victory of Prestonpans by his “Ode to the Battle of Gladsmuir”—­the name the Jacobites preferred to give the battle.  This ode, which had been set to music by M’Gibbon, became a great favourite in Jacobite households, and created so much popular interest in the author’s other works that imperfect versions of some of his unpublished poems, and even of those which were already in print, began to appear.  The author was himself an outlaw, and could not intervene.  The ode which had lifted him into popularity had at the same time driven him into exile, and he was then living with a little group of young Scotch refugees at Rouen, and completely shattered in bodily health by his three months’ hiding among the Grampians.  Under those circumstances his friends thought it advisable to forestall the pirated and imperfect collections of his poems which were in contemplation by publishing as complete and correct an edition of them as could possibly be done in the absence of the author.  And this edition was issued from the famous Foulis press in Glasgow in 1748.  In doing so they acted, as they avow in the preface, “not only without the author’s consent, but without his knowledge,” but it is absurd to call an edition published under those circumstances, as the new Dictionary of National Biography calls it, a “surreptitious edition.”  It was published by the poet’s closest personal friends as a protection for the poet’s reputation, and perhaps as a plea for his pardon.

The task of collecting and editing the poems was entrusted to Adam Smith.  We are informed of this fact by the accurate and learned David Laing, and though Laing has not imparted his authority for the information, it receives a certain circumstantial corroboration from other quarters.  We find Smith in the enjoyment of a very rapid intimacy with Hamilton during the two brief years the poet resided in Scotland between receiving the royal pardon in 1750 and flying again in 1752 from a more relentless enemy than kings—­the fatal malady of consumption, from which he died two years later at Lyons.  Sir John Dalrymple, the historian, speaks in a letter to Robert Foulis, the