Note 20 — STUDENT LIFE IN SCOTLAND.
Reading edition
Dr M‘Crie’s Life of Melville, vol. ii. p. 445. It is with hesitation that any one who has benefited by this work will express a difference of opinion from its author. But it seems to me that Dr M‘Crie has been led by his admiration for Andrew Melville to rate too highly an exercise in which he excelled. The writing of modern Latin poetry, however valuable as a part of grammatical education, has, in truth, never been an effort of imagination or fancy; and its products, when most successful, have never produced the effect of genuine poetry on the mind of the reader.