entertainments of his own, that this piece would tell well among his recitations. He introduced it into his entertainments, and soon all the town was running after John Gilpin as madly as the six gentlemen and the post-boy.

John Gilpin’s flight is followed in this volume by the flight of Tam o’ Shanter. Burns wrote “Tam o’ Shanter” at Elliesland, and himself considered it the best of all his poems. He told the story to Captain Grose, as it was current among the people in his part of the country, its scene laid almost on the spot where he was born. Captain Grose, the antiquary, who was collecting materials for his “Antiquities of Scotland,” published in 1789–91, got Burns to versify it and give it to him. The poem made its first appearance, therefore, in Captain Grose’s book. Mrs. Burns told of it that it was the work of a day. Burns was most of the day on his favourite walk by the river, where his wife and some of the children joined him in the afternoon. Mrs. Burns saw that her husband was busily engaged “crooning to himsell,” and she loitered behind with the little ones among the broom. Presently she was attracted by the poet’s strange and wild gesticulations; he seemed agonised with an ungovernable joy. He was reciting very loud. Every circumstance suggested to heighten the impression of fear in the lines following,

“By this time he was ’cross the ford Where in the snaw the chapman smoored,” etc.,

was taken from local tradition. Shanter was the real name of a farm near Kirkoswald, then occupied by a Douglas Grahame, who was much of Tam’s character, and was well content to be called by his country neighbours Tam o’ Shanter for the rest of his life, after Burns had made the name of the farm immortal.

Our selection ends with two pieces by Thomas Hood, whose “Tale of a Trumpet” is luxuriant with play of wit that has its earnest side. Hood died in 1845.

A Note upon the Game of Ombre is added, which is founded upon the description of the game in a little book—“The Court Gamester”—which instructed card-players in the reigns of the first Georges. In the “Rape of the Lock” there is a game of ombre played through to the last trick. That note will enable any reader to follow Belinda’s play. It will also enable any one who may care to do so to restore to a place among our home amusements a game which carried all before it in Queen Anne’s day, and which is really, when cleared of its gambling details, as good a domestic game for three players as cribbage or piquet is for two. My “Court Gamester,” which was in its fifth edition in 1728, after devoting its best 

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