The first half of the year 1794 was a more than usually unhappy time with Burns. It was almost entirely songless. Instead of poetry, we hear of political dissatisfaction, excessive drinking-bouts, quarrels, and self-reproach. This was the time when our country was at war with the French Republic—a war which Burns bitterly disliked, but his employment under Government forced him to set "a seal on his lips as to those unlucky politics." A regiment of soldiers was quartered in the town of Dumfries, and to Burns's eye the sight of their red coats was so offensive, that he would not go down the plain-stones lest he should meet "the epauletted puppies," who thronged the street. One of these epauletted puppies, whom he so disliked, found occasion to pull Burns up rather smartly. The poet, when in his cups, had in the hearing of a certain captain proposed as a toast, "May our (p. 162) success in the present war be equal to the justice of our cause." The soldier called him to account—a duel seemed imminent, and Burns had next day to write an apologetic letter, in order to avoid the risk of ruin. About the same time he was involved, through intemperance, in another and more painful quarrel. It has been already noticed that at Woodley Park he was a continual guest. With Mrs. Riddel, who was both beautiful and witty, he carried on a kind of poetic flirtation. Mr. Walter Riddel, the host, was wont to press his guests to deeper potations than were usual even in those hard-drinking days. One evening, when the guests had sat till they were inflamed with wine, they entered the drawing-room, and Burns in some way grossly insulted the fair hostess. Next day he wrote a letter of the most abject and extravagant penitence. This, however, Mr. and Mrs. Riddel did not think fit to accept. Stung by this rebuff, Burns recoiled at once to the opposite extreme of feeling, and penned a grossly scurrilous monody on "a lady famed for her caprice." This he followed up by other lampoons, full of "coarse rancour against a lady, who had showed him many kindnesses." The Laird of Friars Carse and his lady naturally sided with their relatives, and grew cold to their old friend of Ellisland. While this coldness lasted, Mr. Riddel, of Friars Carse, died in the spring-time, and the poet, remembering his friend's worth and former kindness, wrote a sonnet over him—not one of his best or most natural performances, yet showing the return of his better heart. During the same spring we hear of Burns going to the house of one of the neighbouring gentry, and dining there, not with the rest of the party, but, by his own choice, it would seem, with the housekeeper in her room, and joining the gentlemen in the dining-room, after the (p. 163) ladies had retired. He was now, it seems, more disliked by ladies than by men,—a change since those Edinburgh days, when the highest dames of the land had spoken so rapturously of the charm of his conversation.

Amid the gloom of this unhappy time (1791), Burns turned to his old Edinburgh friend, Alexander Cunningham, and poured forth this passionate and well-known complaint:—"Canst thou minister to a mind diseased? Canst thou speak peace and rest to a soul tossed on a sea of troubles, without one friendly star to guide her course, and dreading that the next surge may overwhelm her? Of late, a number of domestic vexations, and some pecuniary share in the ruin of these cursed times,—losses which, though trifling, were what I could ill bear,—have so irritated me, that my feelings at times could only be envied by a reprobate spirit listening to the sentence that dooms it to perdition.—Are you deep in the language of consolation? I have exhausted in reflection every topic of comfort. A heart at ease would have been charmed with my sentiments and reasonings; but as to myself, I was like Judas Iscariot preaching the Gospel.... Still there are two great pillars that bear us up amid the wreck of misfortune and misery. The one is composed of a certain noble, stubborn something in man, known by the names of Courage, Fortitude, Magnanimity. The other is made up of those feelings and sentiments which, however the sceptic may deny them, or the enthusiast may disfigure them, are yet, I am convinced, original and component parts of the human soul, those senses of the mind—if I may be allowed the expression—which connect us with, and link us to those awful obscure realities—an all-powerful and equally beneficent God, and a world to come, beyond death and the grave. The first gives the nerve of combat, while a ray of hope (p. 164) beams on the field: the last pours the balm of comfort into the wounds which time can never cure."

This remarkable, or, as Lockhart calls it, noble letter was written on February 25, 1794. It was probably a few months later, perhaps in May of the same year, while Burns was still under this depression, that there occurred an affecting incident, which has been preserved by Lockhart. Mr. David McCulloch, of Ardwell, told Lockhart, "that he was seldom more grieved, than when, riding into Dumfries one fine summer's evening, to attend a country ball, he saw Burns walking alone, on the shady side of the principal street of the town, while the opposite part was gay with successive groups of gentlemen and ladies, all drawn together for the festivities of the night, not one of whom seemed willing to recognize the poet. The horseman dismounted, and joined Burns, who, on his proposing to him to cross the street, said, 'Nay, nay, my young friend, that's all over now,' and quoted, after a pause, some verses of Lady Grizzell Baillie's pathetic ballad:—

His bonnet stood ance fu' fair on his brow, His auld ane looked better than mony ane's new; But now he lets 't wear ony way it will hing, And caste himsell dowie upon the corn-bing.

O, were we young, as we ance hae been, We suld hae been galloping down on yon green, And linking it owre the lily-white lea,— And werena my heart light, I wad die.

"It was little in Burns's character to let his feelings on certain subjects escape in this fashion. He immediately after citing these verses assumed the sprightliness of his most pleasing manner; and taking his young friend home with him, entertained him very (p. 165) agreeably until the hour of the ball arrived, with a bowl of his usual potation, and Bonnie Jean's singing of some verses which he had recently composed."

In June we find him expressing to Mrs. Dunlop the earliest hint that he felt his health declining. "I am afraid," he says, "that I am about to suffer for the follies of my youth. My medical friends threaten me with flying gout; but I trust they are mistaken." And again, a few months later, we find him, when writing to the same friend, recurring to the same apprehensions. Vexation and disappointment within, and excesses, if not continual, yet too frequent, from without, had for long been undermining his naturally strong but nervously sensitive frame, and those symptoms were now making themselves felt, which were soon to lay him in an early grave. As the autumn drew on, his singing powers revived, and till the close of the year he kept pouring into Thomson a stream of songs, some of the highest stamp, and hardly one without a touch such as only the genuine singer can give.

The letters, too, to Thomson, with which he accompanies his gifts, are full of suggestive thoughts on song, hints most precious to all who care for such matters. For the forgotten singers of his native land he is full of sympathy. "By the way," he writes to Thomson, "are you not vexed to think that those men of genius, for such they certainly were, who composed our fine Scottish lyrics, should be unknown?"

Many of the songs of that autumn were, as usual, love-ditties; but when the poet could forget the lint-white locks of Chloris, of which kind of stuff there is more than enough, he would write as good songs on other and manlier subjects. Two of these, written, the one in (p. 166) November, 1794, the other in January, 1795, belong to the latter order, and are worthy of careful regard, not only for their excellence as songs, but also as illustrations of the poet's mood of mind at the time when he composed them.

The first is this,—-

Contented wi' little, and cantie wi' mair, Whene'er I forgather wi' sorrow and care, I gie them a skelp as they're creepin' alang, Wi' a cog o' gude swats, and an auld Scottish sang.

I whyles claw the elbow o' troublesome thought; But man is a soger, and life is a faught; My mirth and gude humour are coin in my pouch, And my Freedom's my lairdship nae monarch dare touch.

A towmond o' trouble, should that be my fa', A night o' gude fellowship sowthers it a'; When at the blythe end o' our journey at last, Wha the deil ever thinks o' the road he has past?

Blind Chance, let her snapper and stoyte on her way; Be't to me, be't frae me, e'en let the jade gae: Come Ease, or come Travail, come Pleasure or Pain, My warst word is—Welcome, and welcome again.

This song gives Burns's idea of himself, and of his struggle with the world, when he could look on both from the placid, rather than the despondent side. He regarded it as a true picture of himself; for, when a good miniature of him had been done, he wrote to Thomson that he wished a vignette from it to be prefixed to this song, that, in his own words, "the portrait of my face, and the picture of my mind may go down the stream of time together." Burns had more moods of mind than most men, and this was, we may hope, no unfrequent one with him. But if we would reach the truth, we probably ought to strike a balance (p. 167) between the spirit of this song and the dark moods depicted in some of those letters already quoted.

The other song of the same time is the well-known A Man's a Man for a' that. This powerful song speaks out in his best style a sentiment that through all his life had been dear to the heart of Burns. It has been quoted, they say, by Beranger in France, and by Goethe in Germany, and is the word which springs up in the mind of all foreigners when they think of Burns. It was inspired, no doubt, by his keen sense of social oppression, quickened to white heat by influences that had lately come from France, and by what he had suffered for his sympathy with that cause. It has since become the watchword of all who fancy that they have secured less, and others more, of this world's goods, than their respective merit deserves. Stronger words he never wrote.

The rank is but the guinea's stamp, The man's the gowd for a' that.

That is a word for all time. Yet perhaps it might have been wished that so noble a song had not been marred by any touch of social bitterness. A lord, no doubt, may be a "birkie" and a "coof," but may not a ploughman be so too? This great song Burns wrote on the first day of 1795.

Towards the end of 1794, and in the opening of 1795, the panic which had filled the land in 1792, from the doings of the French republicans, and their sympathizers in this country, began to abate; and the blast of Government displeasure, which for a time had beaten heavily on Burns, seemed to have blown over. He writes to Mrs. Dunlop on the 29th of December, 1794. "My political sins seem to be (p. 168) forgiven me," and as a proof of it he mentions that during the illness of his superior officer, he had been appointed to act as supervisor—a duty which he discharged for about two months. In the same letter he sends to that good lady his usual kindly greeting for the coming year, and concludes thus:—"What a transient business is life! Very lately I was a boy; but t' other day I was a young man; and I already begin to feel the rigid fibre and stiffening joints of old age coming fast o'er my frame. With all the follies of youth, and, I fear, a few vices of manhood, still I congratulate myself on having had, in early days, religion strongly impressed on my mind." Burns always keeps his most serious thoughts for this good lady. Herself religious, she no doubt tried to keep the truths of religion before the poet's mind. And he naturally was drawn out to reply in a tone more unreserved than when he wrote to most others.

In February of the ensuing year, 1795, his duties as supervisor led him to what he describes as the "unfortunate, wicked little village" of Ecclefechan in Annandale. The night after he arrived, there fell the heaviest snowstorm known in Scotland within living memory. When people awoke next morning they found the snow up to the windows of the second story of their houses. In the hollow of Campsie hills it lay to the depth of from eighty to a hundred feet, and it had not disappeared from the streets of Edinburgh on the king's birthday, the 4th of June. Storm-stayed at Ecclefechan, Burns indulged in deep potations and in song-writing. Probably he imputed to the place that with which his own conscience reproached himself. Currie, who was a native of Ecclefechan, much offended, says, "The poet must have been tipsy indeed to abuse sweet Ecclefechan at this rate." It was also the birthplace of the (p. 169) poet's friend Nicol, and of a greater than he. On the 4th of December in the very year on which Burns visited it, Mr. Thomas Carlyle was born in that village. Shortly after his visit, the poet beat his brains to find a rhyme for Ecclefechan, and to twist it into a song.

In March of the same year we find him again joining in local politics, and writing electioneering ballads for Heron of Heron, the Whig candidate for the Stewartry of Kirkcudbright, against the nominee of the Earl of Galloway, against whom and his family Burns seems to have harboured some peculiar enmity.

Mr. Heron won the election, and Burns wrote to him about his own prospects:—"The moment I am appointed supervisor, in the common routine I may be nominated on the collectors' list; and this is always a business of purely political patronage. A collectorship varies much, from better than 200l. to near 1000l. a year. A life of literary leisure, with a decent competency, is the summit of my wishes."

The hope here expressed was not destined to be fulfilled. It required some years for its realization, and the years allotted to Burns were now nearly numbered. The prospect which he here dwells on may, however, have helped to lighten his mental gloom during the last year of his life. For one year of activity there certainly was, between the time when the cloud of political displeasure against him disappeared towards the end of 1794, and the time when his health finally gave way in the autumn of 1795, during which, to judge by his letters, he indulged much less in outbursts of social discontent. One proof of this is seen in the following fact. In the spring of 1795, a volunteer corps was raised in Dumfries, to defend the country, while the (p. 170) regular army was engaged abroad, in war with France. Many of the Dumfries Whigs, and among them Burns's friends, Syme and Dr. Maxwell, enrolled themselves in the corps, in order to prove their loyalty and patriotism, on which some suspicions had previously been cast. Burns too offered himself, and was received into the corps. Allan Cunningham remembered the appearance of the regiment, "their odd but not ungraceful dress; white kerseymere breeches and waistcoat; short blue coat, faced with red; and round hat, surmounted by a bearskin, like the helmets of the Horse Guards." He remembered the poet too, as he showed among them, "his very swarthy face, his ploughman stoop, his large dark eyes, and his awkwardness in handling his arms." But if he could not handle his musket deftly, he could do what none else in that or any other corps could, he could sing a patriotic stave which thrilled the hearts not only of his comrades, but every Briton from Land's-end to Johnny Groat's.

This is one of the verses:—

The kettle o' the kirk and state Perhaps a clout may fail in't; But deil a foreign tinkler loan Shall ever ca' a nail in't. Our fathers' blade the kettle bought, And wha wad dare to spoil it; By heavens! the sacrilegious dog Shall fuel be to boil it! By heavens; the sacrilegious dog Shall fuel be to boil it!

This song flew throughout the land, hit the taste of the country-people everywhere, and is said to have done much to change the feelings of those who were disaffected. Much blame has been cast upon the Tory (p. 171) Ministry, then in power, for not having offered a pension to Burns. It was not, it is said, that they did not know of him, or that they disregarded his existence. For Mr. Addington, afterwards Lord Sidmouth, we have seen, deeply felt his genius, acknowledged it in verse, and is said to have urged his claims upon the Government. Mr. Pitt, soon after the poet's death, is reported to have said of Burns's poetry, at the table of Lord Liverpool, "I can think of no verse since Shakespeare's, that has so much the appearance of coming sweetly from nature." It is on Mr. Dundas, however, at that time one of the Ministry, and the autocrat of all Scottish affairs, that the heaviest weight of blame has fallen. But perhaps this is not altogether deserved. There is the greatest difference between a literary man, who holds his political opinions in private, but refrains from mingling in party politics, and one who zealously espouses one side, and employs his literary power in promoting it. He threw himself into every electioneering business with his whole heart, wrote, while he might have been better employed, electioneering ballads of little merit, in which he lauded Whig men and theories, and lampooned, often scurrilously, the supporters of Dundas. No doubt it would have been magnanimous in the men then in power to have overlooked all these things, and, condoning the politics, to have rewarded the poetry of Burns. And it were to be wished that such magnanimity were more common among public men. But we do not see it practised even at the present day, any more than it was in the time of Burns.

During the first half of 1795 the poet had gone on with his accustomed duties, and, during the intervals of business, kept sending to Thomson the songs he from time to time composed.

His professional prospects seemed at this time to be brightening, (p. 172) for about the middle of May, 1795, his staunch friend, Mr. Graham of Fintray, would seem to have revived an earlier project of having him transferred to a post in Leith, with easy duty and an income of nearly 200l. a year. This project could not at the time be carried out; but that it should have been thought of proves that political offences of the past were beginning to be forgotten. During this same year there were symptoms that the respectable persons who had for some time frowned on him, were willing to relent. A combination of causes, his politics, the Riddel quarrel, and his own many imprudences, had kept him under a cloud. And this disfavour of the well-to-do had not increased his self-respect or made him more careful about the company he kept. Disgust with the world had made him reckless and defiant. But with the opening of 1795, the Riddels were reconciled to him, and received him once more into their good graces, and others, their friends, probably followed their example.

But the time was drawing near, when the smiles or the frowns of the Dumfries magnates would be alike indifferent to him. There has been more than enough of discussion among the biographers of Burns, as to how far he really deteriorated in himself during those Dumfries years, as to the extent and the causes of the social discredit into which he fell, and as to the charge that he took to low company. His early biographers, Currie, Walker, Heron drew the picture somewhat darkly; Lockhart and Cunningham have endeavoured to lighten the depth of the shadows. Chambers has laboured to give the facts impartially, has faithfully placed the lights and the shadows side by side, and has summed up the whole subject in an appendix on The Reputation (p. 173) of Burns in his Later Years, to which I would refer any who desire to see this painful subject minutely handled. Whatever extenuations or excuses may be alleged, all must allow that his course in Dumfries was on the whole a downward one, and must concur, however reluctantly, in the conclusion at which Lockhart, while decrying the severe judgments of Currie, Heron, and others, is forced by truth to come, that "the untimely death of Burns was, it is too probable, hastened by his own intemperances and imprudences." To inquire minutely, what was the extent of those intemperances, and what the nature of those imprudences, is a subject which can little profit any one, and on which one has no heart to enter. If the general statement of fact be true, the minute details are better left to the kindly oblivion, which, but for too prying curiosity, would by this time have overtaken them.

Dissipated his life for some years certainly had been—deeply disreputable many asserted it to be. Others, however, there were who took a more lenient view of him. Findlater, his superior in the Excise, used to assert, that no officer under him was more regular in his public duties. Mr. Gray, then teacher of Dumfries school, has left it on record, that no parent he knew watched more carefully over his children's education—that he had often found the poet in his home explaining to his eldest boy passages of the English poets from Shakespeare to Gray, and that the benefit of the father's instructions was apparent in the excellence of the son's daily school performances. This brighter side of the picture, however, is not irreconcilable with that darker one. For Burns's whole character was a compound of the most discordant and contradictory elements. Dr. Chambers has well shown that he who at one hour was the douce sober Mr. Burns, in (p. 174) the next was changed to the maddest of Bacchanals: now he was glowing with the most generous sentiments, now sinking to the very opposite extreme.

One of the last visits paid to him by any friend from a distance would seem to have been by Professor Walker, although the date of it is somewhat uncertain. Eight years had passed since the Professor had parted with Burns at Blair Castle, after the poet's happy visit there. In the account which the Professor has left of his two days' interview with Burns at Dumfries, there are traces of disappointment with the change which the intervening years had wrought. It has been alleged that prolonged residence in England had made the Professor fastidious, and more easily shocked with rusticity and coarseness. However this may be, he found Burns, as he thought, not improved, but more dictatorial, more free in his potations, more coarse and gross in his talk, than when he had formerly known him.

For some time past there had not been wanting symptoms to show that the poet's strength was already past its prime. In June, 1794, he had, as we have seen, told Mrs. Dunlop that he had been in poor health, and was afraid he was beginning to suffer for the follies of his youth. His physicians threatened him, he said, with flying gout, but he trusted they were mistaken. In the spring of 1795, he said to one who called on him, that he was beginning to feel as if he were soon to be an old man. Still he went about all his usual employments. But during the latter part of that year his health seems to have suddenly declined. For some considerable time he was confined to a sick-bed. Dr. Currie, who was likely to be well informed, states that this illness lasted from October, 1795, till the following January. No (p. 175) details of his malady are given, and little more is known of his condition at this time, except what he himself has given in a letter to Mrs. Dunlop, and in a rhymed epistle to one of his brother Excisemen.

At the close of the year he must have felt that, owing to his prolonged sickness, his funds were getting low. Else he would not have penned to his friend, Collector Mitchell, the following request:—

Friend of the Poet, tried and leal, Wha, wanting thee, might beg or steal; Alake, alake, the meikle deil Wi' a' his witches Are at it, skelpin'! jig and reel, In my poor pouches.

I modestly fu fain wad hint it, That one pound one, I sairly want it; If wi' the hizzie down ye sent it, It would be kind; And while my heart wi' life-blood dunted, I'd bear't in mind.

* * * * *

POSTSCRIPT.

Ye've heard this while how I've been licket And by fell death was nearly nicket: Grim loun! he gat me by the fecket, And sair me sheuk; But by gude luck I lap a wicket, And turn'd a neuk.

But by that health, I've got a share o't, And by that life, I'm promised mair o't, My heal and weel I'll take a care o't A tentier way; Then fareweel folly, hide and hair o't, For ance and aye.

It was, alas! too late now to bid farewell to folly, even if he (p. 176) could have done so indeed. With the opening of the year 1796, he somewhat revived, and the prudent resolve of his sickness disappeared with the first prospect of returning health. Chambers thus records a fact which the local tradition of Dumfries confirms:—"Early in the month of January, when his health was in the course of improvement, Burns tarried to a late hour at a jovial party in the Globe tavern. Before returning home, he unluckily remained for some time in the open air, and, overpowered by the effects of the liquor he had drunk, fell asleep.... A fatal chill penetrated his bones; he reached home with the seeds of a rheumatic fever already in possession of his weakened frame. In this little accident, and not in the pressure of poverty or disrepute, or wounded feelings or a broken heart, truly lay the determining cause of the sadly shortened days of our national poet."

How long this new access of extreme illness confined him seems uncertain. Currie says for about a week; Chambers surmises a longer time. Mr. Scott Douglas says, that from the close of January till the month of April, he seems to have moved about with some hope of permanent improvement. But if he had such a hope, it was destined not to be fulfilled. Writing on the 31st of January, 1796, to Mrs. Dunlop, the trusted friend of so many confidences, this is the account he gives of himself:—

"I have lately drunk deep of the cup of affliction. The autumn robbed me of my only daughter and darling child, and that at a distance, too, and so rapidly as to put it out of my power to pay the last duties to her. I had scarcely begun to recover from that shock, when I became myself the victim of a most severe rheumatic fever, and long the (p. 177) die spun doubtful; until, after many weeks of a sick-bed, it seems to have turned up life, and I am beginning to crawl across my room, and once indeed have been before my own door in the street." In these words Burns would seem to have put his two attacks together, as though they were but one prolonged illness.

It was about this time that, happening to meet a neighbour in the street, the poet talked with her seriously of his health, and said among other things this: "I find that a man may live like a fool, but he will scarcely die like one." As from time to time he appeared on the street during the early months of 1796, others of his old acquaintance were struck by the sight of a tall man of slovenly appearance and sickly aspect, whom a second look showed to be Burns, and that he was dying. Yet in that February there were still some flutters of song, one of which was, Hey for the Lass wi' a Tocher, written in answer to Thomson's beseeching inquiry if he was never to hear from him again. Another was a rhymed epistle, in which he answers the inquiries of the colonel of his Volunteer Corps after his health.

From about the middle of April, Burns seldom left his room, and for a great part of each day was confined to bed. May came—a beautiful May—and it was hoped that its genial influences might revive him. But while young Jeffrey was writing, "It is the finest weather in the world—the whole country is covered with green and blossoms; and the sun shines perpetually through a light east wind," Burns was shivering at every breath of the breeze. At this crisis his faithful wife was laid aside, unable to attend him. But a young neighbour, Jessie Lewars, sister of a brother exciseman, came to their house, assisted in (p. 178) all household work, and ministered to the dying poet. She was at this time only a girl, but she lived to be a wife and mother, and to see an honoured old age. Whenever we think of the last days of the poet, it is well to remember one who did so much to smooth his dying pillow.

Burns himself was deeply grateful, and his gratitude as usual found vent in song. But the old manner still clung to him. Even then he could not express his gratitude to his young benefactress without assuming the tone of a fancied lover. Two songs in this strain he addressed to Jessie Lewars. Of the second of these it is told, that one morning the poet said to her that if she would play to him any favourite tune, for which she desired to have new words, he would do his best to meet her wish. She sat down at the piano, and played over several times the air of an old song beginning thus:—

The robin cam to the wren's nest, And keekit in, and keekit in.

As soon as Burns had taken in the melody, he set to, and in a few minutes composed these beautiful words, the second of the songs which he addressed to Jessie:—

Oh! wert thou in the cauld blast, On yonder lea, on yonder lea, My plaidie to the angry airt, I'd shelter thee, I'd shelter thee. Or did misfortune's bitter storms Around thee blaw, around thee blaw, Thy bield should be my bosom, To share it a', to share it a.'

Or were I in the wildest waste, (p. 179) Sae black and bare, sae black and bare, The desert were a paradise, If thou wert there, if thou wert there: Or were I monarch o' the globe, Wi' thee to reign, wi' thee to reign, The brightest jewel in my crown Wad be my queen, wad be my queen.

Mendelssohn is said to have so much admired this song, that he composed for it what Chambers pronounces an air of exquisite pathos.

June came, but brought no improvement, rather rapid decline of health. On the 4th of July (1796) he wrote to Johnson, "Many a merry meeting this publication (the Museum) has given us, and possibly it may give us more, though, alas, I fear it. This protracting, slow consuming illness, will, I doubt much, my ever dear friend, arrest my sun before he has reached his middle career, and will turn over the poet to far more important concerns than studying the brilliancy of wit or the pathos of sentiment." On the day on which he wrote these words, he left Dumfries for a lonely place called Brow on the Solway shore, to try the effects of sea-bathing. He went alone, for his wife was unable to accompany him. While he was at Brow, his former friend, Mrs. Walter Riddel, to whom, after their estrangement, he had been reconciled, happened to be staying for the benefit of her health in the neighbourhood. She asked Burns to dine with her, and sent her carriage to bring him to her house. This is part of the account she gives of that interview:—

"I was struck with his appearance on entering the room. The stamp of death was imprinted on his features. He seemed already touching the brink of eternity. His first salutation was. 'Well, madam, have (p. 180) you any commands for the other world?' I replied that it seemed a doubtful case, which of us should be there soonest, and that I hoped he would yet live to write my epitaph. He looked in my face with an air of great kindness, and expressed his concern at seeing me look so ill, with his accustomed sensibility.... We had a long and serious conversation about his present situation, and the approaching termination of all his earthly prospects. He spoke of his death without any of the ostentation of philosophy, but with firmness as well as feeling, as an event likely to happen very soon, and which gave him concern chiefly from leaving his four children so young and unprotected, and his wife hourly expecting a fifth. He mentioned, with seeming pride and satisfaction, the promising genius of his eldest son, and the flattering marks of approbation he had received from his teachers, and dwelt particularly on his hopes of that boy's future conduct and merit. His anxiety for his family seemed to hang heavy on him, and the more perhaps from the reflection that he had not done them all the justice he was so well qualified to do. Passing from this subject, he showed great concern about the care of his literary fame, and particularly the publication of his posthumous works. He said he was well aware that his death would create some noise, and that every scrap of his writing would be revived against him to the injury of his future reputation; that his letters and verses written with unguarded and improper freedom, and which he earnestly wished to have buried in oblivion, would be handed about by idle vanity or malevolence, when no dread of his resentment would restrain them, or prevent the censures of shrill-tongued malice, or the insidious sarcasms of envy, from pouring forth all their venom to blast his fame.

"He lamented that he had written many epigrams on persons against (p. 181) whom he entertained no enmity, and whose characters he would be sorry to wound; and many indifferent poetical pieces, which he feared would now, with all their imperfections on their head, be thrust upon the world. On this account he deeply regretted having deferred to put his papers in a state of arrangement, as he was now incapable of the exertion.... The conversation," she adds, "was kept up with great evenness and animation on his side. I had seldom seen his mind greater or more collected. There was frequently a considerable degree of vivacity in his sallies, and they would probably have had a greater share, had not the concern and dejection I could not disguise damped the spirit of pleasantry he seemed not unwilling to indulge.

"We parted about sunset on the evening of that day (the 5th July, 1796), the next day I saw him again, and we parted to meet no more!"

It is not wonderful that Burns should have felt some anxiety about the literary legacy he was leaving to mankind. Not about his best poems; these, he must have known, would take care of themselves. Yet even among the poems which he had published with his name, were some, "which dying" he well might "wish to blot." There lay among his papers letters too, and other "fallings from him," which he no doubt would have desired to suppress, but of which, if they have not all been made public, enough have appeared to justify his fears of that idle vanity, if not malevolence, which after his death, would rake up every scrap he had written, uncaring how it might injure his good name, or affect future generations of his admirers. No poet perhaps has suffered more from the indiscriminate and unscrupulous curiosity of editors, (p. 182) catering too greedily for the public, than Burns has done.

Besides anxieties of this kind, he, during those last days, had to bear another burden of care that pressed even more closely home. To pain of body, absence from his wife and children, and haunting anxiety on their account, was added the pressure of some small debts and the fear of want. By the rules of the Excise, his full salary would not be allowed him during his illness; and though the Board agreed to continue Burns in his full pay, he never knew this in time to be comforted by it. With his small income diminished, how could he meet the increased expenditure caused by sickness? We have seen how at the beginning of the year he had written to his friend Mitchell to ask the loan of a guinea. One or two letters, asking for the payment of some old debts due to him by a former companion, still remain. During his stay at Brow, on the 12th of July, he wrote to Thomson the following memorable letter:—

"After all my boasted independence, curst necessity compels me to implore you for five pounds. A cruel scoundrel of a haberdasher, to whom I owe an account, taking it into his head that I am dying, has commenced a process, and will infallibly put me into jail. Do, for God's sake, send that sum, and that by return of post. Forgive me this earnestness, but the horrors of a jail have made me half distracted. I do not ask all this gratuitously; for, upon returning health, I hereby promise and engage to furnish you with five pounds' worth of the neatest song-genius you have seen. I tried my hand on Rothemurchie this morning. The measure is so difficult that it is impossible to infuse much genius into the lines. They are on the other side. Forgive, forgive me!"

And on the other side was written Burns's last song beginning, (p. 183) "Fairest maid, on Devon banks." Was it native feeling, or inveterate habit, that made him that morning revert to the happier days he had seen on the banks of Devon, and sing a last song to one of the two beauties he had there admired? Chambers thinks it was to Charlotte Hamilton, the latest editor refers it to Peggy Chalmers.

Thomson at once sent the sum asked for. He has been much, but not justly, blamed for not having sent a much larger sum, and indeed for not having repaid the poet for his songs long before. Against such charges it is enough to reply that when Thomson had formerly volunteered some money to Burns in return for his songs, the indignant poet told him that if he ever again thought of such a thing, their intercourse must thenceforth cease. And for the smallness of the sum sent, it should be remembered that Thomson was himself a poor man, and had not at this time made anything by his Collection of Songs, and never did make much beyond repayment of his large outlay.

On the same day on which Burns wrote thus to Thomson, he wrote another letter in much the same terms to his cousin, Mr. James Burnes, of Montrose, asking him to assist him with ten pounds, which was at once sent by his relative, who, though not a rich, was a generous-hearted man.

There was still a third letter written on that 12th of July (1796) from Brow. Of Mrs. Dunlop, who had for some months ceased her correspondence with him, the poet takes this affecting farewell:—"I have written you so often, without receiving any answer, that I would not trouble you again but for the circumstances in which I am. (p. 184) An illness which has long hung about me, in all probability will speedily send me beyond that 'bourn whence no traveller returns.' Your friendship, with which for many years you honoured me, was a friendship dearest to my soul. Your conversation, and especially your correspondence, were at once highly entertaining and instructive. With what pleasure did I use to break up the seal! The remembrance yet adds one pulse more to my poor palpitating heart. Farewell!"

On the 14th he wrote to his wife, saying that though the sea-bathing had eased his pains, it had not done anything to restore his health. The following anecdote of him at this time has been preserved:—"A night or two before Burns left Brow, he drank tea with Mrs. Craig, widow of the minister of Ruthwell. His altered appearance excited much silent sympathy; and the evening being beautiful, and the sun shining brightly through the casement, Miss Craig (afterwards Mrs. Henry Duncan) was afraid the light might be too much for him, and rose to let down the window-blinds. Burns immediately guessed what she meant, and regarding the young lady with a look of great benignity, said, 'Thank you, my dear, for your kind attention; but oh! let him shine; he will not shine long for me.'"

On the 18th July he left Brow, and returned to Dumfries in a small spring cart. When he alighted, the onlookers saw that he was hardly able to stand, and observed that he walked with tottering steps to his door. Those who saw him enter his house, knew by his appearance that he would never again cross that threshold alive. When the news spread in Dumfries that Burns had returned from Brow and was dying, the whole town was deeply moved. Allan Cunningham, who was present, thus describes what he saw:—"The anxiety of the people, high and low, (p. 185) was very great. Wherever two or three were together, their talk was of Burns, and of him alone. They spoke of his history, of his person, and of his works; of his witty sayings, and sarcastic replies, and of his too early fate, with much enthusiasm, and sometimes with deep feeling. All that he had done, and all that they had hoped he would accomplish, were talked of. Half-a-dozen of them stopped Dr. Maxwell in the street, and said, 'How is Burns, sir?' He shook his head, saying, 'He cannot be worse,' and passed on to be subjected to similar inquiries farther up the way. I heard one of a group inquire, with much simplicity, 'Who do you think will be our poet now?'"

During the three or four days between his return from Brow and the end, his mind, when not roused by conversation, wandered in delirium. Yet when friends drew near his bed, sallies of his old wit would for a moment return. To a brother volunteer who came to see him he said, with a smile, "John, don't let the awkward squad fire over me." His wife was unable to attend him; and four helpless children wandered from room to room gazing on their unhappy parents. All the while, Jessie Lewars was ministering to the helpless and to the dying one, and doing what kindness could do to relieve their suffering. On the fourth day after his return, the 21st of July, Burns sank into his last sleep. His children stood around his bed, and his eldest son remembered long afterwards all the circumstances of that sad hour.

The news that Burns was dead, sounded through all Scotland like a knell announcing a great national bereavement. Men woke up to feel the greatness of the gift which in him had been vouchsafed to their generation, and which had met, on the whole, with so poor a reception. Self-reproach mingled with the universal sorrow, as (p. 186) men asked themselves whether they might not have done more to cherish and prolong that rarely gifted life.

Of course there was a great public funeral, in which the men of Dumfries and the neighbourhood, high and low, appeared as mourners, and soldiers and volunteers with colours, muffled drums, and arms reversed, not very appropriately mingled in the procession. At the very time when they were laying her husband in his grave, Mrs. Burns gave birth to his posthumous son. He was called Maxwell, after the physician who attended his father, but he died in infancy. The spot where the poet was laid was in a comer of St. Michael's churchyard, and the grave remained for a time unmarked by any monument. After some years his wife placed over it a plain, unpretending stone, inscribed with his name and age, and with the names of his two boys, who were buried in the same place. Well had it been, if he had been allowed to rest undisturbed in this grave where his family had laid him. But well-meaning, though ignorant, officiousness would not suffer it to be so. Nearly twenty years after the poet's death, a huge, cumbrous, unsightly mausoleum was, by public subscription, erected at a little distance from his original resting-place. This structure was adorned with an ungraceful figure in marble, representing, "The muse of Coila finding the poet at the plough, and throwing her inspiring mantle over him." To this was added a long, rambling epitaph in tawdry Latin, as though any inscription which scholars could devise could equal the simple name of Robert Burns. When the new structure was completed, on the 19th September, 1815, his grave was opened, and men for a moment gazed with awe on the form of Burns, seemingly as entire as on the (p. 187) day when first it was laid in the grave. But as soon as they began to raise it, the whole body crumbled to dust, leaving only the head and bones. These relics they bore to the mausoleum, which had been prepared for their reception. But not even yet was the poet's dust to be allowed to rest in peace. When his widow died, in March, 1834, the mausoleum was opened, that she might be laid by her husband's side. Some craniologists of Dumfries were then permitted, in the name of so-called science, to desecrate his dust with their inhuman outrage. At the dead of night, between the 31st of March and the 1st of April, these men laid their profane fingers on the skull of Burns, "tried their hats upon it, and found them all too little;" applied their compasses, registered the size of the so-called organs, and "satisfied themselves that Burns had capacity enough to compose Tam o' Shanter, The Cotter's Saturday Night, and To Mary in Heaven." This done, they laid the head once again in the hallowed ground, where, let us hope, it will be disturbed no more. The mausoleum, unsightly though it is, has become a place of pilgrimage whither yearly crowds of travellers resort from the ends of the earth, to gaze on the resting-place of Scotland's peasant poet, and thence to pass to that other consecrated place within ruined Dryburgh, where lies the dust of a kindred spirit by his own Tweed.



CHAPTER VIII. (p. 188)

CHARACTER, POEMS, SONGS.

If this narrative has in any way succeeded in giving the lights and the shadows of Burns's life, little comment need now be added. The reader will, it is hoped, gather from the brief record of facts here presented, a better impression of the man as he was, in his strength and in his weakness, than from any attempt which might have been made to bring his various qualities together into a moral portrait. Those who wish to see a comment on his character, at once wise and tender, should turn to Mr. Carlyle's famous essay on Burns.

What estimate is to be formed of Burns—not as a poet, but as a man—is a question that will long be asked, and will be variously answered, according to the principles men hold, and the temperament they are of. Men of the world will regard him in one way, worshippers of genius in another; and there are many whom the judgments of neither of these will satisfy. One thing is plain to every one; it is the contradiction between the noble gifts he had and the actual life he lived, which make his career the painful tragedy it was. When, however, we look more closely into the original outfit of the man, we seem in some sort to see how this came to be.

Given a being born into the world with a noble nature, endowments (p. 189) of head and heart beyond any of his time, wide-ranging sympathies, intellectual force of the strongest man, sensibility as of the tenderest woman, possessed also by a keen sense of right and wrong which he had brought from a pure home—place all these high gifts on the one side, and over against them a lower nature, fierce and turbulent, filling him with wild passions which were hard to restrain and fatal to indulge—and between these two opposing natures, a weak and irresolute will, which could overhear the voice of conscience, but had no strength to obey it; launch such a man on such a world as this, and it is but too plain what the end will be. From earliest manhood till the close, flesh and spirit were waging within him interminable war, and who shall say which had the victory? Among his countrymen there are many who are so captivated with his brilliant gifts and his genial temperament, that they will not listen to any hint at the deep defects which marred them. Some would even go so far as to claim honour for him, not only as Scotland's greatest poet, but as one of the best men she has produced. Those who thus try to canonize Burns are no true friends to his memory. They do but challenge the counter-verdict, and force men to recall facts which, if they cannot forget, they would fain leave in silence. These moral defects it is ours to know; it is not ours to judge him who had them.

While some would claim for Burns a niche among Scotland's saints, others would give him rank as one of her religious teachers. This claim, if not so absurd as the other, is hardly more tenable. The religion described by Burns in The Cotter's Saturday Night is, it should be remembered, his father's faith, not his own. The fundamental truths of natural religion, faith in God and in immortality, amid (p. 190) sore trials of heart, he no doubt clung to, and has forcibly expressed. But there is nothing in his poems or in his letters which goes beyond sincere deism—nothing which is in any way distinctively Christian.

Even were his teaching of religion much fuller than it is, one essential thing is still wanting. Before men can accept any one as a religious teacher, they not unreasonably expect that his practice should in some measure bear out his teaching. It was not as an authority on such matters that Burns ever regarded himself. In his Bard's Epitaph, composed ten years before his death, he took a far truer and humbler measure of himself than any of his critics or panegyrists have done:—-

The poor inhabitant below Was quick to learn and wise to know, And keenly felt the friendly glow And softer flame; But thoughtless folly laid him low, And stained his name.

Reader, attend!—whether thy soul Soars fancy's flight beyond the pole, Or darkling grubs this earthly hole, In low pursuit; Know, prudent, cautious self-control Is wisdom's root.

"A confession," says Wordsworth, "at once devout, poetical, and human—a history in the shape of a prophecy."

Leaving the details of his personal story, and—

Each unquiet theme, Where gentlest judgments may misdeem,

it is a great relief to turn to the bequest that he has left to (p. 191) the world in his poetry. How often has one been tempted to wish that we had known as little of the actual career of Burns as we do of the life of Shakespeare, or even of Homer, and had been left to read his mind and character only by the light of his works! That poetry, though a fragmentary, is still a faithful transcript of what was best in the man; and though his stream of song contains some sediment we could wish away, yet as a whole, how vividly, clearly, sunnily it flows, how far the good preponderates over the evil.

What that good is, must now be briefly said. To take his earliest productions first, his poems as distinct from his songs. Almost all the best of these are, with the one notable exception of Tam O' Shanter, contained in the Kilmarnock edition. A few pieces actually composed before he went to Edinburgh were included in later editions, but, after leaving Mossgiel he never seriously addressed himself to any form of poetry but song-writing. The Kilmarnock volume contains poems descriptive of peasant life and manners, epistles in verse generally to rhyming brethren, a few lyrics on personal feelings, or on incidents like those of the mouse and the daisy, and three songs. In these, the form, the metre, the style and language, even that which is known as Burns's peculiar stanza, all belong to the traditional forms of his country's poetry, and from earlier bards had been handed down to Burns by his two immediate forerunners, Ramsay and Fergusson. To these two he felt himself indebted, and for them he always expresses a somewhat exaggerated admiration. Nothing can more show Burns's inherent power than to compare his poems with even the best of those which he accepted as models. The old framework and metres which his country supplied, he took; asked no other, no better, and into (p. 192) those old bottles poured new wine of his own, and such wine! What, then, is the peculiar flavour of this new poetic wine of Burns' poetry? At the basis of all his power lay absolute truthfulness, intense reality, truthfulness to the objects which he saw, truthfulness to himself as the seer of them. This is what Wordsworth recognized as Burns's leading characteristic. He who acknowledged few masters, owned Burns as his master in this respect when he speaks of him—

Whose light I hailed when first it shone, And showed my youth, How verse may build a princely throne On humble truth.

Here was a man, a son of toil, looking out on the world from his cottage, on society low and high and on nature homely or beautiful, with the clearest eye, the most piercing insight, and the warmest heart; touching life at a hundred points, seeing to the core all the sterling worth, nor less the pretence and hollowness of the men he met, the humour, the drollery, the pathos, and the sorrow of human existence; and expressing what he saw, not in the stock phrases of books, but in his own vernacular, the language of his fireside, with a directness, a force, a vitality that tingled to the finger tips, and forced the phrases of his peasant dialect into literature, and made them for ever classical. Large sympathy, generous enthusiasm, reckless abandonment, fierce indignation, melting compassion, rare flashes of moral insight, all are there. Everywhere you see the strong intellect made alive, and driven home to the mark, by the fervid heart behind it. And if the sight of the world's inequalities, and some natural repining at his own obscure lot, mingled from the beginning, as (p. 193) has been said, "some bitternesses of earthly spleen and passion with the workings of his inspiration, and if these in the end ate deep into the great heart they had long tormented," who that has not known his experience may venture too strongly to condemn him?

This prevailing truthfulness of nature and of vision manifested itself in many ways. First. In the strength of it, he interpreted the lives, thoughts, feelings, manners of the Scottish peasantry to whom he belonged, as they had never been interpreted before, and never can be again. Take the poem which stands first in the Kilmarnock edition. The Cotter's Dog, and the Laird's Dog, are, as has been often said, for all their moralizing, true dogs in all their ways. Yet through these, while not ceasing to be dogs, the poet represents the whole contrast between the Cotters' lives, and their Lairds'. This old controversy, which is ever new, between rich and poor, has never been set forth with more humour and power. No doubt it is done from the peasant's point of view. The virtues and hardships of the poor have full justice done to them; the prosperity of the rich, with its accompanying follies and faults, is not spared, perhaps it is exaggerated. The whole is represented with an inimitably graphic hand, and just when the caustic wit is beginning to get too biting, the edge of it is turned by a touch of kindlier humour. The poor dog speaks of

Some gentle master, Wha, aiblins thrang a-parliamentin, For Britain's guid his saul indentin—

Then Caesar, the rich man's dog, replies,—

Haith, lad, ye little ken about it: For Britain's guid!—guid faith! I doubt it. Say rather, gaun as Premiers lead him, (p. 194) An' saying aye or no's they bid him: At operas an' plays parading, Mortgaging, gambling, masquerading! Or, may be, in a frolic daft, To Hague or Calais takes a waft, To make a tour an' tak a whirl, To learn bon ton, an' see the worl'. Then, at Vienna or Versailles, He rives his father's auld entails; Or by Madrid he takes the rout, To thrum guitars and fecht wi' nowt.

* * * * *

For Britain's guid! for her destruction! Wi' dissipation, feud an' faction.

Then exclaims Luath, the poor man's dog,—

Hech, man! dear sirs! is that the gate They waste sae many a braw estate! Are we sae foughten and harass'd For gear to gang that gate at last?

And yet he allows, that for all that

—— Thae frank, rantin', ramblin' billies, Fient haet o' them's ill-hearted fellows.

"Mark the power of that one word, 'nowt,'" said the late Thomas Aird. "If the poet had said that our young fellows went to Spain to fight with bulls, there would have been some dignity in the thing, but think of his going all that way 'to fecht wi' nowt.' It was felt at once to be ridiculous. That one word conveyed at once a statement of the folly, and a sarcastic rebuke of the folly."

Or turn to the poem of Halloween. Here he has sketched the Ayrshire peasantry as they appeared in their hours of merriment—painted with a few vivid strokes a dozen distinct pictures of country lads and (p. 195) lasses, sires and dames, and at the same time preserved for ever the remembrance of antique customs and superstitious observances, which even in Burns's day were beginning to fade, and have now all but disappeared.

Or again, take The auld Farmer's New-year-morning Salutation to his auld Mare. In this homely, but most kindly humorous poem, you have the whole toiling life of a ploughman and his horse, done off in two or three touches, and the elements of what may seem a commonplace, but was to Burns a most vivid, experience, are made to live for ever. For a piece of good graphic Scotch, see how he describes the sturdy old mare in the plough setting her face to the furzy braes.

Thou never braing't, an' fetch't, and fliskit, But thy auld tail thou wad hae whiskit, An spread abreed thy weel-fill'd brisket, Wi' pith an' pow'r, Till spritty knowes wad rair't and riskit, An' slypet owre.

To paraphrase this, "Thou didst never fret, or plunge and kick, but thou wouldest have whisked thy old tail, and spread abroad thy large chest, with pith and power, till hillocks, where the earth was filled with tough-rooted plants, would have given forth a cracking sound, and the clods fallen gently over." The latter part of this paraphrase is taken from Chambers. What pure English words could have rendered these things as compactly and graphically?

Of The Cotter's Saturday Night it is hardly needful to speak. As a work of art, it is by no means at Burns's highest level. The metre was not native to him. It contains some lines that are feeble, whole stanzas that are heavy. But as Lockhart has said, in words already quoted, there is none of his poems that does such justice to the (p. 196) better nature that was originally in him. It shows how Burns could reverence the old national piety, however little he may have been able to practise it. It is the more valuable for this, that it is almost the only poem in which either of our two great national poets has described Scottish character on the side of that grave, deep, though undemonstrative reverence, which has been an intrinsic element in it.

No wonder the peasantry of Scotland have loved Burns as perhaps never people loved a poet. He not only sympathized with the wants, the trials, the joys and sorrows of their obscure lot, but he interpreted these to themselves, and interpreted them to others, and this too in their own language made musical, and glorified by genius. He made the poorest ploughman proud of his station and his toil, since Robbie Burns had shared and had sung them. He awoke a sympathy for them in many a heart that otherwise would never have known it. In looking up to him, the Scottish people have seen an impersonation of themselves on a large scale—of themselves, both in their virtues and in their vices.

Secondly, Burns in his poetry was not only the interpreter of Scotland's peasantry, he was the restorer of her nationality. When he appeared, the spirit of Scotland was at a low ebb. The fatigue that followed a century of religious strife, the extinction of her parliament, the stern suppression of the Jacobite risings, the removal of all symbols of her royalty and nationality, had all but quenched the ancient spirit. Englishmen despised Scotchmen, and Scotchmen seemed ashamed of themselves and of their country. A race of literary men had sprang up in Edinburgh who, as to national feeling, were entirely colourless, Scotchmen in nothing except their dwelling-place. The (p. 197) thing they most dreaded was to be convicted of a Scotticism. Among these learned cosmopolitans in walked Burns, who with the instinct of genius chose for his subject that Scottish life which they ignored, and for his vehicle that vernacular which they despised, and who, touching the springs of long-forgotten emotions, brought back on the hearts of his countrymen a tide of patriotic feeling to which they had long been strangers.

At first it was only his native Ayrshire he hoped to illustrate, to shed upon the streams of Ayr and Doon, the power of Yarrow, and Teviot, and Tweed. But his patriotism was not merely local; the traditions of Wallace haunted him like a passion, the wanderings of Bruce he hoped to dramatize. His well-known words about the Thistle have been already quoted. They express what was one of his strongest aspirations. And though he accomplished but a small part of what he once hoped to do, yet we owe it to him first of all that "the old kingdom" has not wholly sunk into a province. If Scotchmen to-day love and cherish their country with a pride unknown to their ancestors of the last century, if strangers of all countries look on Scotland as a land of romance, this we owe in great measure to Burns, who first turned the tide, which Scott afterwards carried to full flood. All that Scotland had done and suffered, her romantic history, the manhood of her people, the beauty of her scenery, would have disappeared in modern commonplace and manufacturing ugliness, if she had been left without her two "sacred poets."

Thirdly. Burns's sympathies and thoughts were not confined to class nor country; they had something more catholic in them, they reached to universal man. Few as were his opportunities of knowing the (p. 198) characters of statesmen and politicians, yet with what "random shots o' countra wit" did he hit off the public men of his time! In his address to King George III. on his birthday, how gay yet caustic is the satire, how trenchant his stroke! The elder, and the younger Pitt, "yon ill-tongued tinkler Charlie Fox," as he irreverently calls him—if Burns had sat for years in Parliament, he could scarcely have known them better. Every one of the Scottish M.P.'s of the time, from—

That slee auld-farran chiel Dundas

to—

That glib-gabbit Highland baron The Laird o' Graham,

and—

Erskine a spunkie Norlan billie,

—he has touched their characters as truly as if they had all been his own familiars. But of his intuitive knowledge of men of all ranks, there is no need to speak, for every line he writes attests it. Of his fetches of moral wisdom something has already been said. He would not have been a Scotchman, if he had not been a moralizer; but then his moralizings are not platitudes, but truths winged with wit and wisdom. He had, as we have seen, his limitations—his bias to overvalue one order of qualities, and to disparage others. Some pleading of his own cause and that of men of his own temperament, some disparagement of the severer, less-impulsive virtues, it is easy to discern in him. Yet, allowing all this, what flashes of moral insight, piercing to the quick! what random sayings flung forth, that have become proverbs in all lands—"mottoes of the heart"!

Such are— (p. 199)

O wad some Power the giftie gie us, To see oursel as ithers see us: It wad frae mony a blunder free us, An' foolish notion;

Or the much-quoted—

Facts are chiels that winna ding And downa be disputed;

Or—

The heart ay's the part ay That makes us right or wrang.

Who on the text, "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone," ever preached such a sermon as Burns in his Address to the unco Guid? and in his epistle of advice to a young friend, what wisdom! what incisive aphorisms! In passages like these scattered throughout his writings, and in some single poems, he has passed beyond all bonds of place and nationality, and spoken home to the universal human heart.

And here we may note that in that awakening to the sense of human brotherhood, the oneness of human nature, which began towards the end of last century, and which found utterance through Cowper first of the English poets, there has been no voice in literature, then or since, which has proclaimed it more tellingly than Burns. And then his humanity was not confined to man, it overflowed to his lower fellow-creatures. His lines about the pet ewe, the worn-out mare, the field-mouse, the wounded hare, have long been household words. In this tenderness towards animals we see another point of likeness between him and Cowper.

Fourthly. For all aspects of the natural world he has the same (p. 200) clear eye, the same open heart that he has for man. His love of nature is intense, but very simple and direct, no subtilizings, nor refinings about it, nor any of that nature-worship which soon after his time came in. Quite unconsciously, as a child might, he goes into the outward world for refreshment, for enjoyment, for sympathy. Everywhere in his poetry, nature comes in, not so much as a being independent of man, but as the background of his pictures of life and human character. How true his perceptions of her features are, how pure and transparent the feeling she awakens in him! Take only two examples. Here is the well-known way he describes the burn in his Halloween—

Whyles owre a linn the burnie plays, As thro' the glen it wimpl't; Whyles round a rocky scaur it strays, Whyles in a wiel it dimpl't; Whyles glitter'd to the nightly rays, Wi' bickerin', dancin' dazzle: Whyles cookit underneath the brass, Below the spreading hazel, Unseen that night.

Was ever burn so naturally, yet picturesquely described? The next verse can hardly be omitted—

Amang the brachens on the brae, Between her an' the moon, The deil, or else an outler quey, Gat up an' gae a croon: Poor Leezie's heart maist lap the hool; Near lav'rock height she jumpit; But miss'd a fit, an' in the pool Out-owre the lugs she plumpit, Wi' a plunge that night

"Maist lap the hool," what condensation in that Scotch phrase! (p. 201) The hool is the pod of a pea—poor Lizzie's heart almost leapt out of its encasing sheath.

Or look at this other picture:—

Upon a simmer Sunday morn, When Nature's face is fair, I walked forth to view the corn, And snuff the caller air. The risin' sun owre Galston muirs Wi' glorious light was glintin; The hares were hirplin down the furrs, The lav'rocks they were chantin Fu' sweet that day.

I have noted only some of the excellences of Burns's poetry, which far outnumber its blemishes. Of these last it is unnecessary to speak; they are too obvious, and whatever is gross, readers can of themselves pass by.

Burns's most considerable poems, as distinct from his songs, were almost all written before he went to Edinburgh. There is, however, one memorable exception. Tam o' Shanter, as we have seen, belongs to Ellisland days. Most of his earlier poems were entirely realistic, a transcript of the men and women and scenes he had seen and known, only lifted a very little off the earth, only very slightly idealized. But in Tam o' Shanter he had let loose his powers upon the materials of past experiences, and out of them he shaped a tale which was a pure imaginative creation. In no other instance, except perhaps in The Jolly Beggars, had he done this; and in that cantata, if the genius is equal, the materials are so coarse, and the sentiment so gross, as to make it, for all its dramatic power, decidedly offensive. It is strange what very opposite judgments have been formed of the intrinsic merit of Tam o' Shanter. Mr. Carlyle thinks that it might have (p. 202) been written "all but quite as well by a man, who, in place of genius, had only possessed talent; that it is act so much a poem, as a piece of sparkling rhetoric; the heart of the story still lies hard and dead." On the other hand, Sir Walter Scott has recorded this verdict: "In the inimitable tale of Tam o' Shanter, Burns has left us sufficient evidence of his abilities to combine the ludicrous with the awful and even the horrible. No poet, with the exception of Shakespeare, ever possessed the power of exciting the most varied and discordant emotions with such rapid transitions. His humorous description of death in the poem on Dr. Hornbrook, borders on the terrific; and the witches' dance in the Kirk of Alloway is at once ludicrous and horrible." Sir Walter, I believe, is right, and the world has sided with him in his judgment about Tam o' Shanter. Nowhere in British literature, out of Shakespeare, is there to be found so much of the power of which Scott speaks—that of combining in rapid transition almost contradictory emotions—if we except perhaps one of Scott's own highest creations, the tale of Wandering Willie, in Redgauntlet.

On the songs of Burns a volume might be written, but a few sentences must here suffice. It is in his songs that his soul comes out fullest, freest, brightest; it is as a song-writer that his fame has spread widest, and will longest last. Mr. Carlyle, not in his essay, which does full justice to Burns's songs, but in some more recent work, has said something like this, "Our Scottish son of thunder had, for want of a better, to pour his lightning through the narrow cranny of Scottish song—the narrowest cranny ever vouchsafed to any son of thunder."—The narrowest, it may be, but the most effective, if a man desires to come close to his fellow-men, soul to soul. Of all forms of literature the genuine song is the most penetrating, and the most (p. 203) to be remembered; and in this kind Burns is the supreme master. To make him this, two things combined. First, there was the great background of national melody and antique verse, coming down to him from remote ages, and sounding through his heart from childhood. He was cradled in a very atmosphere of melody, else he never could have sung so well. No one knew better than he did, or would have owned more feelingly, how much he owed to the old forgotten song-writers of his country, dead for ages before he lived, and lying in their unknown graves all Scotland over. From his boyhood he had studied eagerly the old tunes, and the old words where there were such, that had come down to him from the past, treasured every scrap of antique air and verse, conned and crooned them over till he had them by heart. This was the one form of literature that he had entirely mastered. And from the first he had laid it down as a rule, that the one way to catch the inspiration, and rise to the true fervour of song, was, as he phrased it, "to sowth the tune over and over," till the words came spontaneously. The words of his own songs were inspired by pre-existing tunes, not composed first, and set to music afterwards. But all this love and study of the ancient songs and outward melody would have gone for nothing, but for the second element, that is the inward melody born in the poet's deepest heart, which received into itself the whole body of national song; and then when it had passed through his soul, sent it forth ennobled and glorified by his own genius.

That which fitted him to do this was the peculiar intensity of his nature, the fervid heart, the trembling sensibility, the headlong passion, all thrilling through an intellect strong and keen beyond (p. 204) that of other men. How mysterious to reflect that the same qualities on their emotional side made him the great songster of the world, and on their practical side drove him to ruin! The first word which Burns composed was a song in praise of his partner on the harvest-rig; the last utterance he breathed in verse was also a song—a faint remembrance of some former affection. Between these two he composed from two to three hundred. It might be wished perhaps that he had written fewer, especially fewer love songs; never composed under pressure, and only when his heart was so full he could not help singing. This is the condition on which alone the highest order of songs is born. Probably from thirty to forty songs of Burns could be named which come up to this highest standard. No other Scottish song-writer could show above four or five of the same quality. Of his songs one main characteristic is that their subjects, the substance they lay hold of, belongs to what is most permanent in humanity, those primary affections, those permanent relations of life which cannot change while man's nature is what it is. In this they are wholly unlike those songs which seize on the changing aspects of society. As the phases of social life change, these are forgotten. But no time can superannuate the subjects which Burns has sung; they are rooted in the primary strata, which are steadfast. Then as the subjects are primary, so the feeling with which Burns regards them is primary too—that is, he gives us the first spontaneous gush—the first throb of his heart, and that a most strong, simple, manly heart. The feeling is not turned over in the reflective faculty, and there artistically shaped,—not subtilized and refined away till it has lost its power and freshness; but given at first hand, as it comes warm from within. When he is (p. 205) at his best you seem to hear the whole song warbling through his spirit, naturally as a bird's. The whole subject is wrapped in an element of music, till it is penetrated and transfigured by it. No one else has so much of the native lilt in him. When his mind was at the white heat, it is wonderful how quickly he struck off some of his most perfect songs. And yet he could, when it was required, go back upon them, and retouch them line by line, as we saw him doing in Ye Banks and Braes. In the best of them the outward form is as perfect as the inward music is all-pervading, and the two are in complete harmony.

To mention a few instances in which he has given their ultimate and consummate expression to fundamental human emotions, four songs may be mentioned, in each of which a different phase of love has been rendered for all time—

Of a' the airts the wind can blaw,

Ye flowery banks o' bonnie Doon,

Go fetch to me a pint o' wine;

and that other, in which the calm depth of long-wedded and happy love utters itself, so blithely yet pathetically,—

John Anderson, my Jo, John.

Then for comic humour of courtship, there is—

Duncan Gray cam here to woo.

For that contented spirit which, while feeling life's troubles, yet keeps "aye a heart aboon them a'," we have—

Contented wi' little, and cantie wi' mair.

For friendship rooted in the past, there is— (p. 206)

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,

even if we credit antiquity with some of the verses.

For wild and reckless daring, mingled with a dash of finer feeling, there is Macpherson's Farewell. For patriotic heroism—

Scots wha hae wi' Wallace bled;

and for personal independence, and sturdy, if self-asserting, manhood—

A man's a man for a' that.

These are but a few of the many permanent emotions to which Burns has given such consummate expression, as will stand for all time.

In no mention of his songs should that be forgotten which is so greatly to the honour of Burns. He was emphatically the purifier of Scottish song. There are some poems he has left, there are also a few among his songs, which we could wish that he had never written. But we who inherit Scottish song as he left it, can hardly imagine how much he did to purify and elevate our national melodies. To see what he has done in this way, we have but to compare Burns's songs with the collection of Scottish songs published by David Herd, in 1769, a few years before Burns appeared. A genuine poet, who knew well what he spoke of, the late Thomas Aird, has said, "Those old Scottish melodies, sweet and strong though they were, strong and sweet, were, all the more for their very strength and sweetness, a moral plague, from the indecent words to which many of them had long been set. How was the plague to be stayed? All the preachers in the land could not divorce the grossness from the music. The only way was to put (p. 207) something better in its stead. This inestimable something better Burns gave us."

So purified and ennobled by Burns, these songs embody human emotion in its most condensed and sweetest essence. They appeal to all ranks, they touch all ages, they cheer toil-worn men under every clime. Wherever the English tongue is heard, beneath the suns of India, amid African deserts, on the western prairies of America, among the squatters of Australia, whenever men of British blood would give vent to their deepest, kindliest, most genial feelings, it is to the songs of Burns they spontaneously turn, and find in them at once a perfect utterance, and a fresh tie of brotherhood. It is this which forms Burns's most enduring claim on the world's gratitude.



INDEX (p. 209)

Adair, Dr., 76. Addington, Mr., 69-70, 144, 171. Address to the Deil, 23. Address to the Unco Guid, 58, 199. Aiken, Robert, 29. Ainslie, Mr., 60, 72, 91. Aird, Thomas, 194. Alison, Rev. A., 128-129. Alloway Kirk, 121; Kirkyard, 16. Alloway Mill, school at, 5. A Man's a Man for a' that, 167. Armour, Jean, 26-27, 62-63, 83-84, 85-88, 141, 160. Armour, Mr., 26, 33, 83-84, 96. Athole, Duchess of, 65. Athole, Duke of, 67. Auld Lang Syne, 206. Auld Lights, The, 18. Ayr, river, 27.

Banks o' Doon, 123-124, 161, 205. Bard's Epitaph, the, 190. Begbie, Ellison, 12. Begg, Mrs. (Burns's sister), 25, 62. Belches of Invermay, The, 75. Birks of Invermay, The, 75. Blacklock, Dr., 38, 48-49, 104. Blair Castle, 65, 67. Blair, Dr. H., 38, 44, 48, 50-51, 56-57. Bonnie Peggie Alison, 12. Brigs of Ayr, 58. Brow, 179, 184. Brown, Agnes (Burns's mother), 3. Bruar Water, Humble Petition of, 66-67. Bruce, Mrs., of Clackmannan, 77-78. Bruce, Robert, 78, 157. Burnes, James (Burns's cousin), 183. Burness (or Burnes), William (Burns's father), 2-3, 6-7, 14-15. Burns, Gilbert, 5, 9-12, 26, 36, 85, 99-100. Burns, Mrs. See Armour, Jean. Burns, Robert, biographies of, 1; birth, 2; parentage, 2-3, 6-7, 14-15; successive homes: Mount Oliphant, 4-9, Lochlea, 9-15, Mossgiel, 15, 20, 22, 24; school-days, 5-7; household reading, 6-7; early love affairs, 8-10, 12, 26-30; youthful dissipation, 10, 13-15; Burns as a farmer, 15-16, 20-21, 95, 98-99, 132-133; religious controversy, 17-20; poetic aspirations, 21; two prolific years, 22-26; Jean Armour, 26, 27; resolves to emigrate, 27, 30, 32, 34; Kilmarnock edition of the poems published, 30-34; literary earnings, 32, 58-59, 85, 152; immediate popularity, 33-34, 37, 39; his manners, 36; first winter in Edinburgh, 42-59; literary and legal lights, 44-46; the lion of the season, 48-57; his appearance, 49-50, 118, 170; tavern life, 57-58; second edition of the poems, 58-59; Border and Highland tours, 60, 63-78; Burns's descriptions of scenery, 71-72; disappointing poetic fruits, 73; knighted by Mrs. Bruce, 78; second winter in Edinburgh, 79-93; reasons for his stay, 79; hypochondria and despondency, 81; Mrs. M'Lehose, 82-84; appointment in the excise, 84; marriage, 85-88; change in the attitude of Edinburgh society, 89-90; some reasons for it, 90-92; life at Ellisland, 94-134; Burns's farm, 95; discomfort and despondency, 96-97; happiest period of his life, 99, 102; house at Ellisland, 101-102; as an exciseman, 105-106; restlessness and discontent, 113, 115-116; Tam o' Shanter, 120-122; dramatic aspirations, 126; gives up his farm, 133; migration to Dumfries, 135; downward course, 138, 162, 164, 172; social discredit, 139, 173; politics, 139, 142-149, 161, 168-169, 171; friendship with the Liddels, 140, 162, 179-180; Mrs. M'Lehose reappears, 140-141; relations with Johnson and Thomson, 150-154, 159; excursion into Galloway, 156-157; an unhappy time, 161-164; declining health, 165, 174; joins the volunteers, 169-170; last illness, 176-179; poverty and anxiety, 180-184; death, 185; Burns's grave, 186-187; character, 188, 189. As a poet: satires, 19-20, 31-32, epistles, 23, pure landscape not his forte, 71, 72, at his best in the Scottish dialect, 73, 151, tenderness towards animals, 106-108, 179, Bacchanalian songs, 110-112, Burns in the hour of inspiration, 121-122, elegies, 123, circumstance and mental habits forbade long poems, 126, love songs, 140-141, 160-161, in the act of composition, 159-160, piercing insight and large sympathy, 192, truthfulness of nature, 193, caustic wit, 193, the interpreter of Scotland's peasantry, 196, the restorer of her nationality, 196-197, catholicity, 197-198, intense love of nature, 200, Burns as a song-writer, 202-206.

Campbell, Mary. See Highland Mary. Carlyle, Thomas, 17, 54, 129, 131-132, 156-157, 169, 202. Cathcart, Miss, 66. Chalmers, Margaret, 80-81, 84, 87, 183. Chambers, Dr., 11, 27, 39 et passim. Clarinda. See M'Lehose, Mrs. Clark, William, 117-118. Commonplace Book, Burns's, 55-56, 115. Cotter's Saturday Night, The, 20, 23, 25, 37, 70, 195. Cowper, 47, 48. Craig, Mrs., 184. Creech, Mr., 56-59, 79, 85, 153. Crochallan Club, The, 58, 61, 63, 91. Cruikshank, Mr., 78. Cunningham, Alexander, 163. Cunningham, Allan, 75, 89, 96, 97, 125, 133 et passim. Currie, Dr., 174.

Daer, Lord, 35, 156. Dalrymple, Mr., 46. Dalswinton, 94. Davidson, John (Souter Johnnie), 122. Death and Dr. Hornbook, 23, 58, 70. Death of Poor Mailie, The, 9. Deil's awa' wi' the Exciseman, The, 145. Despondency, Ode to, 31. Don, Lady Harriet, 127. Doon, Brig of, 2, 3, 4. Dumfries, Burns's life at, 135-154; social condition of, 136. Dundas, Mr. Henry, 67, 92, 143, 171. Dunlop, Mrs., 34, 36-37, 96; letters to, 54, 86, 89, 96, 100, 109, 113, 114, 149, 165, 169, 174, 175, 183.

Ecclefechan, 168-169. Edinburgh, Burns's first winter in, 42-59; tavern life in, 57-58; second winter in, 79-93. Eglinton, Lord, 58. Ellisland, 56, 61, 80, 85, 89, 94-134. Epistles, Burns's, 23-24. Erskine, H., 45-46. Erskine of Mar, Mr., 148. Essay on Taste, Alison's, 128-129.

Farmer's Address to his Mare, 23, 108, 195. Ferguson, Dr. Adam, 48, 53. Fergusson, the poet, 44, 191. French Revolution, Burns's sympathy with, 144-146, 157.

Galloway, Burns's tour in, 155-156. "Geddes, Jenny," 128. Glencairn, Lady, 104. Glencairn, Lord, 46, 56, 123. Globe Tavern, the, 116, 128, 137-138, 176. Gordon Castle, 68-69. Gordon, Duchess of, 46, 69. Gordon, Duke of, 68. Gow, Neil, 73-74. Graham, Douglas (Tam o' Shanter), 122. Graham, Mrs., 66. Graham of Balnagown, 66. Graham of Fintray, Mr., 67, 84, 103, 120, 147, 172. Greenfield, Mr., 56-57. Grose, Captain, 108-109, 120-121.

Halloween, 23, 194, 200. Hamilton, Charlotte, 80-81, 183. Hamilton, Gavin, 19, 30, 76, 80. Hazlitt, 12. Heron of Heron, 169. Heron Robert, 33, 57, 58. Hemans, Mrs., 157. Highland Mary, 27-31, 34, 112-113. Highland Mary, Lament for, 27, 31-32, 113. Holy Fair, The, 19-20, 25, 31. Holy Willie's Prayer, 19, 31. Hume, David, 44.

Irvine, 13-14, 26, 41.

Jacobitism, Burns's, 142-143. Jeffrey, 52, 177. John Anderson my Jo, 114. Johnson, Dr., 45. Johnson's Museum, 73, 75, 114, 150-151. Johnson, the engraver, 73, 150, 179. Jolly Beggars, The, 23, 25, 126, 201. Justice of Peace (Langhorne's), 53.

Kilmarnock edition of the poems, 30-33, 191. Kirkoswald, 10, 13, 122. Kirk's Alarm, The, 109.

Land o' Cakes, 108-109. Lass of Cessnock Water, The, 12. Laurie, Dr., 38, 48. Lewars, Jessie, 178, 185. Lewars, Mr., 105. Lochlea, 9-15. Lockhart, Mr., 20, 27, 48, 62, 67, 87, 127, 145. Lounger, The, 45, 47.

M'Culloch, David, 164. Mackenzie, H., 45, 48. M'Lehose, Mrs., 82-85, 140-141. Macpherson's Farewell, 71. Mary in Heaven, 73, 112, 114, 120, 161. Mary Morrison, 11-12. Masterton, Allan, 110. Mauchline, 15, 62, 99. Maxwell, Provost, 115. Mendelssohn, 179. Miller of Dalswinton, Mr., 85, 95, 98, 133. Milton, 55, 63. Mitchell, Collector, 175, 182. Monboddo, Lord, 45, 48. Moore, Dr., 72, 125. Mossgiel, 15, 20, 22, 24, 38, 61. Mountain Daisy, The, 23, 36. Mount Oliphant, 4-9. Mouse, To a, 23, 108. Murdoch, Burns's tutor, 5-7. My Nannie, O, 9, 11.

"Nell, Handsome," 7-9. New Lights, 18-19, 34, 109. "Nicht wi' Burns," a, 130-131. Nicol, Mr., 61, 63, 66, 68-70, 72, 91. North, Christopher, 42.

Of a' the airts, 161. Oh, wert thou in the cauld blast, 178. Ordination, The, 19, 25, 58.

Paine, Tom, 146. Pindar, Peter, 152. Poems, Kilmarnock edition, 30-33, 191; second edition, 58-59. Politics, Burns's part in, 139, 142-149, 161, 169, 171. Prentice, Mr., 42. Punch-bowl, Burns's, 96, 131-132.

Ramsay, Allan, 21, 23, 44, 75, 191. Ramsay of Ochtertyre, 119, 125. Rankine, Epistle to John, 16. Richmond, John, 43. Riddel, Mrs. W., 141, 179-180. Riddel of Friars' Carse, 98, 162. Riddel, Walter, 139, 162. Robertson, Dr., 44-48. "Rosamond," the brig, 145. Ruin, Ode to, 31.

Samson, John, 43. Scots wha hae, 155-157, 206. Scott-Douglas, Mr., 27-28, 124. Scott, Sir W., 52, 54, 75-76, 197. Selkirk, Lord, 155. Sidmouth, Lord. See Addington, Mr. Silver Tassie, the, 114. Skinner, Bishop, 74. Smith, Adam, 45. Smith, Betty, 99, 101. Songs, Burns's, 202-205. Stewart, Dugald, 34-36, 43-44, 46, 51, 56-57. Syme, Mr., 154-155, 170.

Tam o' Shanter, 120-122, 125, 191, 201-202. Tarbolton, 10. Thomson, Geo., 126, 151-153, 156, 161, 165, 171, 177, 182-183. Tours, Border and Highland, 60-78. Twa Dogs, The, 23, 31, 70, 193, 194. Twa Herds, The, 19. Tytler, Mr. Fraser, 48.

Vision, The, 23.

Walker, Prof., 49, 51, 66, 174. Wallace, William, 21, 36, 197. Wee Vennel, the, 135, 137. Whistle, The, 111-112. Willie brewed a peck o' maut, 110-112. Wilson, John (painter), 31. Winter Night, The, 108. Wolcot, Dr. See Pindar, Peter. Woodley Park, 140, 162. Wordsworth, 71, 157-159, 190.

Printed by R. & R. Clark, Limited, Edinburgh.

THE END