and azure depth of heaven, or hanging over the towers and temples of great cities. They shunned not to parley with the blind beggar by the wayside; they knew how to transmute, by divinest alchemy, the base metal into the fine gold. Whatever company of human beings they have mingled with, they lent it colours, and did not receive its shade; and hence their mastery over the "wide soul of the world, dreaming of things to come." Burns was born, bred, lived, and died in that condition of this mortal life to which they paid but visits; his heart lay wholly there; and that heart, filled as it was with all the best human feelings, and sometimes with thoughts divine, had no fears about entering into places which timid moralists might have thought forbidden and unhallowed ground, but which he, wiser far, knew to be inhabited by creatures of conscience, bound there often in thick darkness by the inscrutable decrees of God.

For a year and more after the publication of the Edinburgh Edition, Burns led a somewhat roving life, till his final settlement with Creech. He had a right to enjoy himself; and it does not appear that there was much to blame in his conduct either in town or country, though he did not live upon air nor yet upon water. There was much dissipation in those days-much hard drinking-in select as well as in general society, in the best as well as in the worst; and he had his share of it in many circles-but never in the lowest. His associates were all honourable men, then, and in after life; and he left the Capital in possession of the respect of its most illustrious citizens. Of his various tours and excursions there is little to be said; the birthplaces of old Scottish Song he visited in the spirit of a religious pilgrim; and his poetical fervour was kindled by the grandeur of the Highlands. He had said to Mrs Dunlop, "I have no dearer aim than to have it in my power, unplagued with the routine of business, for which, heaven knows! I am unfit enough, to make leisurely pilgrimages through Caledonia; to sit on the fields of her battles, to wander on the romantic banks of her rivers, and to muse by the stately towers or venerable ruins, once the honoured abodes of her heroes. But these are all Utopian thoughts; I have dallied long enough with life; 'tis time to be in earnest. I have a fond, an aged mother to care for, and some other bosom ties perhaps equally tender. Where the individual only suffers

by the consequences of his own thoughtlessness, indolence, or folly, he may be excusable, nay, shining abilities and some of the nobler virtues may half sanctify a heedless character: but where God and nature have intrusted the welfare of others to his care, where the trust is sacred, and the ties are dear, that man must be far gone in selfishness, or strangely lost to reflection, whom these connections will not rouse to exertion."

Burns has now got liberated, for ever, from "stately Edinborough throned on crags," the favoured abode of philosophy and fashion, law and literature, reason and refinement, and has returned again into his own natural condition, neither essentially the better nor the worse of his city life; the same man he was when "the poetic genius of his country found him at the plough and threw her inspiring mantle over him." And what was he now to do with himself? Into what оссираtion for the rest of his days was he to settle down? It would puzzle the most sagacious even now, fifty years after the event, to say what he ought to have done that he did not do at that juncture, on which for weal or woe the future must have been so deeply felt by him to depend. And perhaps it might not have occurred to every one of the many prudent persons who have lamented over his follies, had he stood in Burns's shoes, to make over, unconditionally, to his brother one-half of all he was worth. Gilbert was resolved still to struggle on with Mossgiel, and Robert said, "there is my purse. The brothers, different as they were in the constitution of their souls, had one and the same heart. They loved one another-man and boy alike; and the survivor cleared, with pious hands, the weeds from his brother's grave. There was a blessing in that two hundred pounds-and thirty years afterwards Gilbert repaid it with interest to Robert's widow and children, by an Edition in which he wiped away stains from the reputation of his benefactor, which had been suffered to remain too long, and some of which, the most difficult, too, to be effaced, had been even let fall from the fingers of a benevolent biographer who thought himself in duty bound to speak what he most mistakenly believed to be the truth. "Oh Robert!" was all his mother could say on his return to Mossgiel from Edinburgh. In her simple heart she was astonished at his fame, and could not understand it well, any more than she could her own happiness and her own pride.

VOL. VII.

D

But his affection she understood better than he did, and far better still his generosity; and duly night and morning she asked a blessing on his head from Him who had given her such a son.

"Between the men of rustic life," said Burns-so at least it is reported" and the polite world I observed little difference. In the former, though unpolished by fashion, and unenlightened by science, I have found much observation and much intelligence. But a refined and accomplished woman was a thing altogether new to me, and of which I had formed but a very inadequate idea." One of his biographers seems to have believed that his love for Jean Armour, the daughter of a Mauchline mason, must have died away under these more adequate ideas of the sex along with their corresponding emotions; and that he now married her with reluctance. Only think of Burns taking an Edinburgh Belle to wife! He flew, somewhat too fervently,

"To love's willing fetters, the arms of his Jean."

Her father had again to curse her for her infatuated love of her husband-for such, if not by the law of Scotland, which may be doubtful, Burns certainly was by the law of heaven -and like a good Christian had again turned his daughter out of doors. Had Burns deserted her he had merely been a heartless villain. In making her his lawful wedded wife he did no more than any other man, deserving the name of man, in the same circumstances would have done; and had he not, he would have walked in shame before men, and in fear and trembling before God. But he did so, not only because it was his most sacred duty, but because he loved her better than ever, and without her would have been miserable. Much had she suffered for his sake, and he for hers; but all that distraction and despair which had nearly driven him into a sugar plantation, were over and gone, forgotten utterly, or remembered but as a dismal dream endearing the placid day that for ever dispelled it. He writes about her to Mrs Dunlop and others in terms of sobriety and good sense— "The most placid good nature and sweetness of disposition; a warm heart, gratefully devoted with all its powers to love me; vigorous health and sprightly cheerfulness, set off to the best advantage by a more than commonly handsome figure"-these

he thought in a woman might, with a knowledge of the Scriptures, make a good wife. During the few months he was getting his house ready for her at Ellisland he frequently travelled, with all the fondness of a lover, the long wilderness of moors to Mauchline, where she was in the house of her austere father, reconciled to her at last. And though he has told us that it was his custom, in song-writing, to keep the image of some fair maiden before the eye of his fancy, " some bright particular star," and that Hymen was not the divinity he then invoked, yet it was on one of these visits, between Ellisland and Mossgiel, that he penned under such homely inspiration as precious a love-offering as genius in the passion of hope ever laid in a virgin's bosom. His wife sung it to him that same evening and indeed he never knew whether or no he had succeeded in any one of his lyrics, till he heard his words and the air together from her voice.

"Of a' the airts the wind can blaw,

I dearly like the west,

For there the bonny lassie lives,
The lassie I loe best :

There wild woods grow, and rivers row,

And mony a hill between ;

But day and night my fancy's flight
Is ever wi' my Jean.

I see her in the dewy flowers,
I see her sweet and fair:

I hear her in the tunefu' birds,

I hear her charm the air:

There's not a bonny flower that springs,
By fountain, shaw, or green,
There's not a bonny bird that sings,
But minds me o' my Jean.

Oh blaw ye westlin winds, blaw saft
Amang the leafy trees,

Wi' balmy gale, frae hill and dale,
Bring hame the laden bees;
And bring the lassie back to me

That's aye sae neat and clean;
Ae smile o' her wad banish care,

Sae charming is my Jean.

And here we ask you who may be reading these pages, to pause for a little, and consider with yourselves, what up to this time Burns had done to justify the condemnatory judgments that have been passed on his character as a man by so many admirers of his genius as a poet? Compared with that of men of ordinary worth, who have deservedly passed through life with the world's esteem, in what was it lamentably wanting? Not in tenderness, warmth, strength of the natural affections; and they are good till turned to evil. Not in the duties for which they were given, and which they make delights. Of which of these duties was he habitually neglectful? To the holiest of them all next to piety to his Maker, he was faithful beyond most-few better kept the fourth commandment. His youth though soon too impassioned had been long pure. If he were temperate by necessity and not nature, yet he was so as contentedly as if it had been by choice. He had lived on meal and water with some milk, because the family were too poor for better fare; and yet he rose to labour as the lark rises to sing.

In the corruption of our fallen nature he sinned, and, it has been said, became a libertine. Was he ever guilty of deliberate seduction? It is not so recorded; and we believe his whole soul would have recoiled from such wickedness: but let us not affect ignorance of what we all know. Among no people on the face of the earth is the moral code so rigid, with regard to the intercourse of the sexes, as to stamp with ineffaceable disgrace every lapse from virtue; and certainly not among the Scottish peasantry, austere as the spirit of religion has always been, and terrible ecclesiastical censure. Hateful in all eyes is the reprobate the hoary sinner loathsome; but many a grey head is now deservedly reverenced that would not be so, were the memory of all that has been repented by the Elder, and pardoned unto him, to rise up against him