not used to beg. The worst of it is, my health was coming about finely. You know, and my physician assured me, that melancholy and low spirits are half my disease-guess, then, my horror since this business began. If I had it settled, I would be, I think, quite well, in a manner. How shall I use the language to you?-oh, do not disappoint me! but strong necessity's curst command.

"Forgive me for once more mentioning by return of post-save me from the horrors of a jail.

"My compliments to my friend James, and to all the rest. I do not know what I have written. The subject is so horrible I dare not look over it again. Farewell. "R. B."

On the same day he addressed Mr. Thomson :

"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 in jail. Do, for God's sake, send me 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 songgenius 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!"

This was Burns's last working day. He wrote his song in the morning, Fairest Maid on Devon Banks, and the two letters afterwards-to both of which answers were promptly returned. He soon after left the Solway and returned to Dumfries, where his wife was daily expected to be confined. He came home in a small spring cart, and when he alighted he was unable to stand. The hand of death was visibly upon him. His children were sent to the house of Mr. Lewars: Jessie was sedulous in her attentions. On the 21st, he sank into delirium; his children were brought to see him for the last time; and with an execration on the legal agent who had threatened him, the troubled spirit passed. Those who came to see him as he lay in his last sleep were touched and affected. Mighty is the hallowing of death to all,-to him more than to most. As he lay stretched, his dark locks already streaked with unnatural grey, all unworthiness fell away from him—every stain of passion and debauch, every ignoble word, every ebullition of scorn and pride-and left pure nobleness. Farmer no longer, exciseman no longer, subject no longer to criticism, to misrepresentation, to the malevolence of mean natures and evil tongues, he lay there the great poet of his country, dead too early for himself and for it. He had passed from the judgments of Dumfries, and made his appeal to Time,

Of Burns, the man and poet, what is there left to be said? During his lifetime he was regarded as a phenomenon; and now, when he has been seventy years in his grave, he is a phenomenon still. He came up from Ayrshire with all the sense and shrewdness of its peasantry, the passion of its lovers, the piety of its circles of family worship, the wild mirth of its kirns and halloweens. Of all the great men of the North Country, his was incomparably the fullest soul. What fun he had, what melancholy, what pity, what anger, what passion, what homely sagacity, what sensitiveness! Of everything he was brimful and overflowing. It is difficult to carry a full cup and not to spill it. He had his errors, but they arose out of his splendid and perilous richness. As a man he was full of natural goodness, but he was unreticent even amongst poets. We know the best and the worst of him; and he has himself frankly told us that best and that worst. He had to fight with adverse circumstances, he died before he had run his race, and his fame-greater than that of any other poet of his country-rests upon poems written swiftly, as men write their letters, and on songs which came to him naturally as its carol comes to the blackbird.

Of all poets Burns was, perhaps, the most directly inspired. His poems did not grow-like stalactites-by the slow process of accretion; like Adam, they had no childhood—they awoke complete. Burns produced all his great effects by single strokes. In his best things there is an impetus, a hurry, which gives one the idea of boundless resource. To him a song was the occupation of a morning; his poetic epistles drive along in a fiery sleet of words and images: his Tam O'Shanter was written in a day—since Bruce fought Bannockburn, the best single day's work done in Scotland Burns was never taken by surprise; he was ready for all calls and emergencies. He had not only-like Addison-a thousand-pound note at home, but he had-to carry out the image-plenty of loose intellectual coin in his pocket. A richer man-with plenty of money in his purse, and able to get the money out of his purse when swift occasion required-Nature has seldom sent into the world.

Born and bred as he was in the country, we find in Burns the finest pictures of rural life. We smell continually the newly-turned earth, the hawthorn blossom, the breath of kine. His shepherds and shepherdesses are not those who pipe and make love in Arcady and on Sèvres china-they actually work, receive wages, attend markets, hear sermons, go sweethearting, and, at times, before the congregation endure rebuke. The world he depicts is a real world, and the men and women are also real. Burns had to sweat in the eye of Phoebus, and about all he writes there is an out-of-doors feeling. Although conversant with sunrises and sunsets, the processes of vegetation, and all the shows and forms of nature, he seldom or never describes these things for their own sake; they are always kept in subordination to the central human interest. Burns cared little for the natural picturesque in itself; the moral picturesque touched him more nearly. An

old soldier in tattered scarlet interested him more than an old ruin; he preferred a gnarled character to a gnarled tree. The ridges of Arran haunt Ayrshire Burns must daily have seen them from his door at Mossgiel-and yet, to this most striking object in his range of vision, there is not a single allusion in his letters and poems. If Wordsworth had been placed in the same environment, how he would have made his suns rise or set on Arran! After all, it is usually the town-poets-men like Hunt and Keats—who go philandering after nature, who are enraptured by the graceful curvature of ferns and the colours of mosses and lichens. Burns had an exquisite delight in Nature, especially in her more sombre and gloomy aspects; but he took a deeper interest in man, and, as a consequence, the chief interest of his poems is of a moral kind. We value them not so much for their colour, their harmony, their curious felicities of expression, as for the gleams of sagacity, the insight into character, the strong homely sense, and those wonderful short sentences scattered everywhere. Of those short lines and sentences, now sly, now caustic, now broadly humorous, now purely didactic, no writings, if Shakespeare's be excepted, have a greater abundance. They circulate everywhere like current coin; they have passed like iron into the blood of our com mon speech. Of Burns's conversation in Edinburgh we have little recorded that is specially characteristic-and for this we blame not Burns, but his reporters. The best thing—indeed, the only true and deep thing-is the simple statement which struck Dugald Stewart so much when the pair were standing on the Braid hills, looking out on the fair morning world. Beneath were cottages, early sparrows doubtless noisy in the thatch, pillars of blue smoke, telling of preparation of breakfast for labourers afield, curling in the calm air. Burns took in the whole landscape, and declared that, in his view, the worthiest object it contained was the cluster of smoking cots, knowing as he did, what worth, what affection, what pious contentment and happiness, nestled within them. This really is a gleam into the man's inmost soul. Poetry, to him, lay in the cottage rather than in the tree that overshadowed it, or the stream that sparkled past it. In one of his poems he lays down the doctrine in express terms

"To mak a happy fireside clime
To weans and wife,
That's the true pathos and sublime
Of human life."

The poetry of a man so intensely humane is certain to come home to the bosoms and businesses of all other men-powerfully to the happy, more powerfully to the miserable, who are ever in the majority. To the wretched, out of the Bible, there is no such solace as the poetry of Burns. His genius comes to their hovels, their poor bread wetted with tears, as Howard came to the strong places of pestilence— irradiating, consoling; like the hearing of soft tones, like the touches of tender hands. And then his large friendliness flows out in every direction. The "mouse

is his "poor earth-born companion and fellow-mortal." He pities the "silly sheep," and the " chittering wing" of the bird perched on the frozen spray. The farmer speaks to his old mare Maggie" as he would to a comrade, who had shared with him his struggles, toils, and triumphs. The poetry of Burns flows into a wintry world, like a tepid gulf-stream-mitigating harsh climates, breathing genial days, carrying with it spring-time and the cuckoo's note.

Of his humour again-which is merely his love laughing and playing antics in very extravagance of its joy-what can be said, except that it is the freshest, most original, most delightful in the world? What a riot of fun in Tam O'Shanter; what strange co-mixture of mirth and awfulness in Death and Dr. Hornbook; what extravaganza in the Address to a Haggis! To Burns's eye the world was dark enough, usually; but on the gala days and carnivals of his spirit Mirth rules the hour, ragged Poverty dances all the lighter for his empty pockets, Death himself grins as he is poked in the lean ribs. And if, as is said, from the sweetest wine you can extract the sourest vinegar, one can fancy into what deadly satire this love will congeal itself, when it becomes hate. Burns hates his foe-be it man or

doctrine-as intensely as he loves his mistress. Holy Willie's Prayer is a satirical crucifixion-slow, lingering, inexorable. He hated Hypocrisy, he tore its holy robe, and for the outrage Hypocrisy did not forgive him while he lived, nor has it yet learned to forgive him.

If we applaud the Roman Emperor who found Rome brick and left it marble, what shall we say of the man who found the songs of his country indelicate and left them pure-who made wholesome the air which the spirit and the affections breathe? And Burns did this. He drove immodesty from love, and coarseness from humour. And not only did he purify existing Scottish Song; he added to it all that it has of best and rarest. Since his day, no countryman of his, whatever may be his mood, need be visited by a sense of solitariness, or ache with a pent-up feeling. If he is glad, he will find a song as merry as himself; if sad, he will find one that will sigh with his own woe. In Burns's Songs, love finds an exquisite companionship; independence a backer and second; conviviality a roaring table, and the best fellows round it; patriotism a deeper love of country, and a gayer scorn of death than even its own. And in so adding to, and purifying Scottish song, Burns has conferred the greatest benefit on his countrymen that it is in the power of a poet to confer.