Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition/James Grahame

GRAHAME, James (1765-1811), author of The Sabbath and other poems, was born at Glasgow, April 22, 1765. His father was a successful lawyer, and, by a very common error, he conceived that no other profession could be so suitable or so advantageous for his son. James, dutiful, and shrinking from opposition, as he did all through life, obeyed the parental wish, and after completing his literary course at the university of his native city, went in 1784 to Edinburgh where he studied law, first to qualify himself for the business of writer to the signet, and subsequently for the Scottish bar, of which he was elected a member in 1795. His inclinations, however, were all for retirement and literature; and finally, when he had reached the mature age of forty-four, he took orders in the English Church, and became curate first at Shipton, Gloucestershire, and then at Sedgefield in the county of Durham. He did not long enjoy an office which he adorned by his pious and eloquent ministrations. Ill health compelled him to try the renovating effects of his native air, but he died shortly after his return, September 14, 1811. The works of Grahame consist of a dramatic poem Mary Queen of Scots (published in 1801), The Sabbath (1804), British Georgics (1804), The Birds of Scotland (1806), and Poems on the Abolition of the Slave Trade (1810). His principal work is The Sabbath a sacred and descriptive poem in blank verse, characterized by a fine vein of tender and devotional feeling, and by the happy delineation of Scottish scenery. He is the Cowper of Scotland, but wants CoAvper s mastery of versification and easy idiomatic vigour of style. The blank verse of Grahame is often hard and constrained, though at times it swells out into periods of striking imagery and prophet-like earnestness. His descrip tion of the solemn stillness and unbroken calm of "the hallowed day " in the rural districts of Scotland, and of the Scottish Sabbath preachings among the hills in times of persecution, when " The scattered few would meet in some deep dell By rocks o er-canopied," are finished pictures that will never fade from our poetry. In his Georgics he tried the wider field of rural occupations and manners, and produced some pleasing daguerreotypes of nature, for he was a careful as well as loving student, but descended too much into minute and undignified detail. In the notes to his poems he expresses manly and enlight ened views on popular education, the criminal law, and other public questions. He was emphatically a friend of humanity a philanthropist as well as a poet.