54 FAMOUS SCOTS 



drum. The critics were not very partial to the venture 

 The tone of the majority was that of the Quarterly upon 

 Keats, and the autocrats of poetical merit declared that 

 he was safer with his chisel than on Parnassus. One 

 little oasis, however, in the desert of depreciation did 

 manage to reach him in a letter, through his friend 

 Forsyth of Elgin, from Thomas Pringle of Roxburgh 

 who had seen the book. In early days the poet had 

 been a clerk in the Register House of Edinburgh, 

 where his Scenes of Teviotdale had secured him an 

 introduction to Scott, who extended to him the same 

 ready support which he had bestowed on Leyden. By 

 his influence he was appointed editor of Blackwootfs 

 Magazine^ and later on emigrated with a party of rela- 

 tives to the Cape, where his unsparing denunciations of 

 the colonial policy in its treatment of the natives, and 

 his advocacy of what would now be called the anti- 

 Rhodes party brought him into complications with the 

 officials in Downing Street and the colonial authorities. 

 Poor Pringle ! among the one-song writers, the singers 

 of the one lilt that rises out of a mass of now forgotten 

 verse, his name is high, and he has won for himself an 

 abiding niche in the hearts of his countrymen by his 

 Emigrant's Lament^ where he touches with a faultless 

 hand the scenery of 'bonnie Teviotdale and Cheviot 

 mountains blue/ 



The volume of verses was not without its more 

 immediate results in a local circle. It brought him 

 under the notice of Sir Thomas Dick Lauder of 



