William Hamilton (1704–54), born probably at his father’s estate of Bangour near Uphall, Linlithgowshire, contributed to Ramsay’s “Tea-table Miscellany” (1724). He joined in the Jacobite rising of the ’45, and on its collapse escaped to Rouen, but was permitted to return in 1749 and to succeed to the family estate. He died at Lyons. The first collection of his poems was edited by Adam Smith in 1748 (fuller ed. 1760). One poem—“The Braes of Yarrow”—will never die.

Personal

  Hamilton’s mind is pictured in his verses. They are the easy and careless effusions of an elegant and a chastened taste; and the sentiments they convey are the genuine feelings of a tender and susceptible heart, which perpetually owned the dominion of some favourite mistress, but whose passion generally evaporated in song, and made no serious or permanent impression.

  The praise of elegance is all that can be given to his verses. In case any reader should be immoderately touched with sympathy for his love sufferings, it is proper to inform him, that Hamilton was thought by the fair ones of his day to be a very inconstant swain. A Scotch lady, whom he teased with his addresses, applied to Home, the author of Douglas, for advice how to get rid of them. Home advised her to affect to favour his assiduities. She did so, and they were immediately withdrawn.

The Braes of Yarrow

  Amid the generally vague verbiage of his descriptions, one effort of his genius stands out in vividness of human colouring, in depth and simplicity of feeling, and even to some extent in powerful and characteristic touches of scenery. This is a poem which owes its inspiration to the Yarrow. In fact it was suggested by the older poem of “The Dowie Dens.” It breathes the soul of the place, and it is so permeated by the spirit of its history and traditions that, when all the other writings of the author shall have fallen into oblivion, there will still be a nook in memory and a place in men’s hearts for “The Braes of Yarrow.”

  The secret of the enduring popularity of this ballad is its somewhat feminine sentiment and the sweetness of fancy it displays. That which delighted Wordsworth was the note of sincerity in reference to nature, a note rare enough then in England, but common to all the Scotch poets of the time. The poem is marred by that want of force which proved to be Hamilton’s defect in all he ever wrote.

  It stands out, one of the few genuine inheritors of the spirit of ancient folksong.

General

  The chief beauty of these “Elegies” certainly consists in their being written by a man who intimately felt the subject; for they are more the language of the heart than of the head. They have warmth, but little poetry, and Mr. Hamilton seems to have been one of those poets, who are made so by love, not by nature.

  Johnson, upon repeated occasions, while I was at Ashbourne, talked slightingly of Hamilton. He said there was no power of thinking in his verses; nothing that strikes one; nothing better than what you generally find in magazines; and that the highest praise they deserved was, that they were very well for a gentleman to hand about among his friends.

  As a first adventurer in English literature, rejecting altogether the scholastic school of poetry, Mr. Hamilton must be allowed to have obtained no ordinary success. In his language he shows nearly all the purity of a native; his diction is various and powerful, and his versification but rarely tainted with provincial errors. He delights indeed in a class of words, which though not rejected by the best English writers, have a certain insipidity which only a refined English ear, perhaps, can perceive; such as beauteous, dubious, duteous, and even melancholious! The same peculiarity may be remarked of most of the early Scottish writers in the English language.

  His first and best strains were dedicated to the lyric muse; and the most attractive feature of his poetry is its pure English style, accompanied with a somewhat ornate poetical diction. He possessed more fancy than feeling, and in this respect his amatory songs resemble those of the poets of Charles the Second’s court.

  Besides conventional lyrics of comparatively small account, Hamilton wrote various notable poems. In “Contemplation, or the Triumph of Love,” warmly praised in the “Lounger,” by Professor Richardson and Henry Mackenzie, there is much ingenuity of reflection and illustration, in rhymed octosyllabics evincing structural skill and dexterity. The translations from Greek and Latin poets—notably those from Horace—display both scholarship and metrical grace. “The Parting of Hector and Andromache,” from the first Iliad, has the distinction of being the earliest Homeric translation into English blank verse. The “Episode of the Thistle,” ingeniously explaining the remote origin of the Scottish national emblem—“the armed warrior with his host of spears”—is not without a measure of epic force and dignity. The winter piece in the third of four odes, besides its intrinsic merits, probably inspired the opening passage of the first introduction in “Marmion.” But the prominent and thoroughly individual feature of the poem is what Wordsworth, in that heading to “Yarrow Unvisited,” calls “the exquisite ballad of Hamilton.” Scott, in his introductory remarks to the “Dowie Dens of Yarrow” (Border Minstrelsy, iii. 145), says: “It will be, with many readers, the greatest recommendation of these verses, that they are supposed to have suggested to Mr. Hamilton of Bangour the modern ballad beginning,

  Hamilton seems to have had a great deal of force and passion which he deliberately repressed—perhaps thinking the age would not stand it—perhaps himself ashamed of it.