34 NETHER LOCHABER. 



connected by purling rivulets, were for weeks together arid and 

 waterless as the course of an ancient lava stream. As you wandered 

 among the hills you could set your fusee alight on a stone in a 

 torrent bed over which in ordinary summers rolls a volume of 

 foaming waters. The demand for beer wherever you went was in 

 these circumstances something wonderful ; and at times, on the 

 arrival of coach or steamer with its load of panting tourists, the 

 bawling from husky throats for a supply an instant and copious 

 supply of the delicious liquid was sufficiently amusing. One of 

 the happiest illustrations of the proverbial close treading of the 

 ridiculous on the heels of the sublime, and the wafer-like thinness 

 of the partition that divides the sentimental from the absurd, was 

 Dr. Johnson's celebrated parody on the quasi-sentimental style of 

 poetry so much in vogue in his latter years and sooth to say too 

 much in vogue in our day as well a style as unlike the school of 

 Pope as you can well imagine, and the very antipodes of the sturdily 

 masculine and didactic strains which Johnson, an intellectual 

 giant- for there were giants in these days alone accounted true 

 poetry : 



" Hermit hoar, in solemn cell, 



Wearing out life's evening grey, 

 Smite thy bosom, sage, and tell 



What is bliss ? and which the way ? 



' ' Thus I spoke ; and speaking sighed ; 

 Scarce repressed the starting tear ; 

 When the smiling sage replied, 



' Come, my lad, and drink some beer ! ' " 



And very well hit off, you will confess ; an arrow shot from an 

 Ulysses' bow at the puling whimperers of a namby-pamby senti- 

 mentalism that they miscalled poetry ; but if we dared for the 

 nonce to take these lines in a more serious and literal sense than 

 their author intended, we should say that in such hot and parching 

 weather as we have recently had, and are still having, there is more 



