the rose, it was at least something to have been near the rose—and his host was proud of him, as he was proud of his haunch of verrison, his claret, his silver epergne. Burns's good things circulated with the wine; his wit gave a new relish to the fruit, and kindled an unwonted splendour in the brains of his listeners. Then strangers, passing through Dumfries, were naturally anxious to see the poet whose reputation had travelled so far. They invited him to the inns in which they were living, Burns consented, frequently the revel was loud and late, and when he rose - after the sun sometimes—he paid his share of the lawing with “a slice of his constitution." In his younger days he had been subjected to public rebuke by the Rev. Mr. Auld; but since his marriage he seems to have been irreproachable in the matter of conjugal fidelity. During, however, an unfortunate absence of his wife in Ayrshire he contracted a discreditable liaison, which resulted in the birth of a daughter. Mrs. Burns seems neither to have reproached nor complained; she adopted the child, and brought it up in the same cradle with her own infant. If for his fault he had been subjected to domestic annoyance, he might have taken refuge in pride, and haughtily repelled reproaches; but his wife's forgiveness allowed him to broodand with what bitterness we can guess-over his misconduct. Doubtless the evil in his career at Dumfries has been exaggerated. Burns's position was full of peril --he was subjected to temptations which did not come in the way of ordinary men; and if he drank hard, it was in an age when hard drinking was fashionable. If he sinned in this respect, he sinned in company with English prime ministers, Scotch Lords of Session, grave dignitaries of the Church in both countries, and with thousands of ordinary blockheads who went to their graves in the odour of sanctity, and whose epitaphs are a catalogue of all the virtues. Burns was a man set apart; he was observed, he was talked about; and if he erred, it was like erring in the market-place. In any other inhabitant of Dumfries, misdemeanours such as Burns's would hardly have provoked remark; what would have been unnoticed on the hodden grey of the farmer became a stain on the singing robe of the poet. That Burns should have led an unworthy life is to be deplored, but the truth is and herein lies explanation, palliation perhaps that in Dumfries he was somewhat a-weary of the sun. Not seldom he was desperate and at bay. He was neither in harmony with himself nor with the world. He had enjoyed one burst of brilliant success, and in the light of that success his life before and after looked darker than it actually was. The hope deferred of a supervisorship made his heart sick. He had succeeded as a poet, but in everything else failure had dogged his steps; and out of that poetical success no permanent benefit had resulted, or seemed now in his need likely to result. In the east were the colours of the dawn, but the sun would not arise. His letters at this time breathe an almost uniform mood of exasperation and misery, and it is hard for a miserable man to be a good one. He is tempted to make strange alliances, and to pay a high price for forgetfulness. And over Burns's head at this time was suspended one other black

cloud, which, although it only burst in part, made the remainder of his life darker with its shadow.

Chief amongst Burns's friends during the early portion of his residence at Dumfries were Mr. and Mrs. Riddel. They were in good circumstances, possessing a small estate in the neighbourhood of the town, and Burns was frequently their guest. Mrs. Riddel was young and pretty, and distinguished by literary taste and accomplishment. She wrote verses which Burns praised, and he introduced her to his friend Smellie, the naturalist, who was enchanted with her vivacity and talent. But this pleasant relationship was destined to be interrupted. On the occasion of a dinner-party at Woodley Park, the residence of Mr. Riddel, when wine flowed much too freely, Burns—in some not quite explained manner—grievously offended his hostess. On the following morning he apologised in prose and verse, threw the onus of his rudeness on Mr. Riddel's wine-which was the next thing to blaming Mr. Riddel himself—and in every way expressed regret for his conduct, and abhorrence of himself. These apologies do not seem to have been accepted, and for a time the friends ceased to meet. Burns was hurt and angry, and he made the lady he was accustomed to address in adoring verses and high-flown epistles the subject of cruel and unmanly lampoons. The estrangement was, of course, noised abroad, and people were inclined to side with the fashionable lady rather than with the Jacobinical exciseman. For a time at least, Dumfries regarded Burns with a lowering and suspicious eye, one reason of which may be found in his quarrel with the Riddels and its cause, and another in the political principles which he professed to hold, and to which he gave imprudent expression.

His immediate ancestors had perilled something in the cause of the Stuarts, and Burns, in his early days, was wont to wear a sentimental Jacobitism-for ornament's sake, like a ring on the finger, or a sprig of heather in the bonnet. This Jacobitism was fed by his sentiment and his poetry. It grew out of the House of Stuart as flowers grow out of the walls of ruins. But while he held the past in reverence, and respected aristocracy as an outcome of that past, a something around which tradition and ballad could gather, there was always a fierce democratic impulse in his mind, which raged at times like the ocean tide against the Bullers of Buchan. This democratic feeling, like his other feeling of Jacobitism, rested on no solid foundation. He had a strong feeling that genius and worth are always poor, that baseness and chicanery are always prosperous. He considered that the good things of this life were secured by the rascals more or less. The truth is, his Jacobitism sprang from his imagination, his Radicalism from his discontent; the one the offspring of the best portion of his nature, the other the offspring of the worst. Radicalism was originally born of hunger; and Burns, while denouncing the rulers of his country, was simply crying out under his own proper sore. He passionately carried particulars into generals. He was sick, and so was the whole body politic. He needed reform, so, of course, did the whole world, and it was more agreeable

to begin with the world in the first instance. He was imprudent in the expression of his political opinions, and was continually doing himself injury thereby. He had written, as we have seen, treasonable verses on the inn window at Stirling; and although on a subsequent visit he dashed out the pane, he could not by that means destroy the copies which were in circulation. The writing of the verses referred to was imprudent enough, but the expression of his Radicalism at Dumfries —which was a transient mood, not a fixed principle with him-was more imprudent still. In the one case he was a private individual, anxious to enter the Excise; in the other, he had entered the Excise, was actually a Government officer, and in receipt of a Government salary. Besides, too, the times were troublous: there was seditious feeling in the country, France had become a volcano in active eruption, and European business was carried on in its portentous light. It became known that Burns looked with favour on the revolutionary party across the Channel, that he read newspapers which were opposed to the Government, and, as a consequence, by the well-to-do inhabitants of Dumfries he was regarded with suspicion. This suspicion was, of course, wretched enough, but Burns need not have gone out of his way to incur it. He knew perfectly well that his Radicalism was based on no serious conviction, that it grew out of personal discontent, and that the discontent was the result of wounded pride, and the consciousness that he had not shaped his life aright. Besides all this, he seems to have lost self-command; he was constantly getting into scrapes from which there could be no honourable extrication. He burned his fingers, and he did not dread the fire. To the Subscription Library in Dumfries he presented, amongst other volumes, a copy of De Lolme on the British Constitution, and inscribed on the back of the portrait of the author, “Mr. Burns presents this book to the Library, and begs they will take it as a creed of British liberty—until they find a better. R. B." And next morning he came to the bedside of the gentleman who had the volume in custody, imploring to see De Lolme, as he feared he had written something in it that might bring him into trouble. We hear of him at a private dinner-party, when the health of Pitt was proposed, giving "The health of George Washington-a better man," and of his being sulky that his toast was not received. He had already sent a present of guns to the French Convention, with which our prospect of war was at this time becoming imminent; and at a later period we find him quarrelling with an officer on the subject of another toast, and writing apologies to the effect, firstly, that when the offence was committed he was drunk; and secondly, that he could not fight a duel, because he had the welfare of others to care for. When the Board of Excise ordered some inquiries to be made regarding his political conduct, he wrote Mr. Graham of Fintry, declaring that "To the British Constitution, on revolution principles, next after my God, I am most devoutly attached." He was in a state of chronic exasperation at himself, at the rich people of his acquaintance and of his immediate neighbourhood, and at the world generally; and his exasperation was continually blazing out in sarcasm and

invective. Curiously enough, too, when one thinks of it, during all this bitter time, he was writing songs for Mr. Thomson, who had opened a correspondence with him. He was busy with Chloris and Phillis, while thrones were shaking, and the son of Saint Louis knelt on the scaffold, and Marie Antoinette during her trial was beating out with weary fingers a piano tune on the bench before her. Every other week up from Dumfries to Edinburgh came by the fly a packet of songs for the new publication. On one occasion came the stern war-ode, Scots wha hae wi' Wallace bled, which Mr. Thomson thought susceptible of improvement. But Burns was inexorable; he liked his ode, and as it was it should remain. It has been said, that by the more respectable circles in Dumfries Burns was regarded with suspicion, if not with positive dislike. Some evidence of this will be found in the anecdote related by Mr. Lockhart. "Mr. M'Culloch," we are informed by that biographer, 'was seldom more grieved than when, riding into Dumfries one fine summer evening to attend a county ball, he saw Burns walking alone on the shady side of the principal street of the town, while the opposite side was gay with successive groups of ladies and gentlemen, all drawn together for the festivities of the night, not one of whom appeared willing to recognise him. 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 Grizel 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 let's wear ony gate it will hing,
And casts hinsel dowie upon the corn-bing.

'Oh, were we young as we ance hae been,
We sud hae been galloping down on yon green,
And linking it ower the lily-white lea-
And werena my heart light I wad die.'

Burns then turned the conversation, and took his young friend home with him till the time for the ball arrived."

This-with the exception of the actual close-was the darkest period in Burns's life. In a short time the horizon cleared a little. The quarrel with Mrs. Riddel was healed, and in a short time books and poems were exchanged between them as of yore. He appears also to have had again some hope of obtaining a supervisorship-the mirage that haunted his closing years. Meanwhile, political feeling had become less bitter; and, in 1795, he exhibited his friendliness to the institutions of the country by entering himself one of a corps of volunteers which was raised in Dumfries, and by composing the spirited patriotic song, Does haughty Gaul invasion threat? This song became at once popular; and it showed the nation that the heart of the writer was sound at the core, that he hated anarchy and tyranny alike, and wished to steer a prudent middle course. Better days were dawning; but by this time the hardships of his youth, his constant anxieties, his hoping

against hope, and his continual passionate stress and tumult of soul, began to tell on a frame that was originally powerful. In a letter to Mrs. Dunlop, in the beginning of the year, we have, under his own hand, the first warning of failing strength. "What a transient business is life," he writes. "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 over my frame." In spite of breaking health, he attended his Excise duties, and the packets of songs were sent regularly from Dumfries to Edinburgh. In the songs there was no symptom of ache or pain; in these his natural vigour was in no wise abated. The dew still hung, diamond-like, upon the thorn. Love was still lord of all. On one occasion he went to a party at the Globe Tavern, where he waited late, and on his way home, heavy with liquor, he fell asleep in the open air. The result, in his weakened state of body, was disastrous. He was attacked by rheumatic fever, his appetite began to fail, his black eyes lost their lustre, his voice became tremulous and hollow. His friends hoped that, if he could endure the cold spring months, the summer warmth would revive him; but summer came, and brought no recovery. He was now laid aside from his official work. During his illness he was attended by Miss Jessie Lewars, a sister of his friend Lewars-" a fellow of uncommon merit; indeed, by far the cleverest fellow I have met in this part of the world"-and her kindness the dying poet repaid by the only thing he was rich enough to give a song of immortal sweetness. His letters at this time are full of his disease, his gloomy prospects, his straitened circumstances. In July he went to Brow, a sea-bathing village on the Solway, where Mrs. Riddel was then residing, in weak health, and there the friends--for all past bitternesses were now forgotten-had an interview. "Well, Madam, have you any commands for the other world?" was Burns's greeting. He talked of his approaching decease calmly, like one who had grown so familiar with the idea that it had lost all its terror. His residence on the Solway was not productive of benefit: he was beyond all aid from sunshine and the saline breeze. On the 7th July, he wrote Mr. Cunningham, urging him to use his influence with the Commissioners of Excise to grant him his full salary. "If they do not grant it me,” he concludes, “I must lay my account with an exit truly en poëte; if I die not of disease, I must perish with hunger." On the 10th July, he wrote his brother Gilbert; and Mrs. Dunlop, who had become unaccountably silent, two days after. On this same 12th July, he addressed the following letter to his cousin :

"MY DEAR COUSIN, -When you offered me money assistance, little did I think I should want it so soon. A rascal of a haberdasher, to whom I owe a considerable bill, taking it into his head that I am dying, has commenced a process against me, and will infallibly put my emaciated body into jail. Will you be so good as to accommodate me, and that by return of post, with ten pounds? Oh, James! you know the pride of my heart, you would feel doubly for me!

did

Alas! I am