assisting him in his trade as a poet." But, alas! whatever advantages in this way it might have brought, were counteracted tenfold by other circumstances that attended it. The continual calls of a responsible business, itself sufficient to occupy a man-when devided with the oversight of his farm, overtasked his powers, and left him no leisure for poetic work, except from time to time crooning over a random song. Then the habits which his roving Excise life must have induced were, even to a soul less social than that of Burns, perilous in the extreme. The temptations he was in this way exposed to, Lockhart has drawn with a powerful hand. "From the castle to the cottage, every door flew open at his approach; and the old system of hospitality, then flourishing, rendered it difficult for the most soberly inclined guest to rise from any man's board in the same trim that he sat down to it. The farmer, if Burns was seen passing, left his reapers, and trotted by the side of Jenny Geddes, until he could persuade the bard that the day was hot enough to demand an extra libation. If he entered an inn at midnight, after all the inmates were in bed, the news of his arrival circulated from the cellar to the garret; and ere ten minutes had elapsed, the landlord and all his guests were assembled round the ingle; the largest punch-bowl produced,

and

'Be ours to-night-who knows what comes to-morrow?'

was the language of every one in the circle that welcomed him. The highest gentry of the neighbourhood when bent on special, merriment, did not think the occasion complete unless the wit and eloquence of Burns were called in to enliven their carousals.”

It can readily be imagined how distracting such a life must have been, how fatal to all mental concentration on high objects, not to speak of the habits of which it was too sure to sow the seeds. The frequent visits to Dumfries which his Excise work entailed, and the haunting of the Globe Tavern, already spoken of, led to consequences which, more than even deep potations, must have been fatal to his peace.

His stay at Ellisland is now hastening to a close. Before passing, however, from that, on the whole the best period of his life since manhood, one or two incidents of the spring of 1791 must be mentioned. In the February of that year Burns received from the Rev. Archibald Alison, Episcopalian clergyman in Edinburgh, a copy of his once famous, but now, I believe, forgotten, Essay on Taste, which contained the authorised exposition of that theory, so congenial to Scotch metaphysics, that objects seem beautiful to us only because our minds associate them with sensible objects which have previously given us pleasure. In his letter to the author, acknowledging the receipt of his book, Burns says, “I own, sir, at first glance, several of your propositions startle me as paradoxical that the martial clangour of a trumpet had something in it vastly more grand, heroic, and sublime than the twingle-twangle of a Jew's-harp; that the delicate flexure of a rose-twig, when the

half-blown flower is heavy with the tears of the dawn, was infinitely more beautiful and elegant than the upright stub of a burdock; and that from something innate and independent of all association of ideas-these I had set down as irrefragable orthodox truths until perusing your book shook my faith." These words so pierce this soap-bubble of the metaphysicians, that we can hardly read them without fancying that the poet meant them to be ironical. Dugald Stewart expressed surprise that the unschooled Ayrshire ploughman should have found "a distinct conception of the general principles of the doctrine of association; on which Mr. Carlyle remarks, "We rather think that far subtler things than the doctrine of association had been of old familiar to him."

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In looking over his letters at this time (1791), we are startled by a fierce outburst in one of them, apparently apropos of nothing. He had been recommending to the protection of an Edinburgh friend a schoolmaster, whom he thought unjustly persecuted, when all at once he breaks out: "God help the children of Dependence! Hated and persecuted by their enemies, and too often, alas! almost unexceptionally, received by their friends with disrespect and reproach, under the thin disguise of cold civility and humiliating advice. Oh to be a sturdy savage, stalking in the pride of his independence, amid the solitary wilds of his deserts, rather than in civilized life helplessly to tremble for a subsistence, precarious as the caprice of a fellow-creature! Every man has his virtues, and no man is without his failings; and curse on that privileged plainspeaking of friendship which, in the hour of my calamity, cannot reach forth the helping-hand without at the same time pointing out those failings, and apportioning them their share in procuring my present distress. . I do not want to be independent that I may sin, but I want to be independent in my sinning."

What may have been the cause of this ferocious explosionthere is no explanation. Whether the real source of it may not have lain in certain facts which had occurred during the past spring, that must have rudely broken in on the peace at once of his conscience and his home, we cannot say. Certainly it does seem, as Chambers suggests, like one of those sudden outbursts of temper which fasten on some mere passing accident, because the real seat of it lies too deep for words. Some instances of the same temper we have already seen. This is a sample of a growing exasperation of spirit, which found expression from time to time till the close of his life.

Let us turn from this painful subject, to one of the only notices we get of him from a stranger's hand during the summer of 1791. Two English gentlemen, who were travelling, went to visit him; one of whom has left an amusing account of their reception. Calling at his house, they were told that the poet was by the river side, and thither they went in search of him. On a rock that projected into the stream, they saw a man employed in angling, of a singular appearance. He had a cap of fox's skin on his head, a loose great-coat fixed round him by a belt, from which depended an enor、

He received them share his humble "On the table they

mous Highland broad-sword. It was Burns. with great cordiality, and asked them to dinner-an invitation which they accepted. found boiled beef, with vegetables and barley broth, after the manner of Scotland. After dinner the bard told them ingenuously that he had no wine, nothing better than Highland whiskey, a bottle of which he set on the board. He produced at the same time his punch-bowl, made of Inverary marble; and, mixing it with water and sugar, filled their glasses and invited them to drink. The travellers were in haste, and, besides, the flavour of the whiskey to their southern palates was scarcely tolerable; but the generous poet offered them his best, and his ardent hospitality they found impossible to resist. Burns was in his happiest mood, and the charm of his conversation was altogether fascinating. He ranged over a variety of topics, illuminating whatever he touched. He related the tales of his infancy and youth; he recited some of his gayest and some of his tenderest poems; in the wildest of his strains of mirth he threw in some touches of melancholy, and spread around him the electric emotions of his powerful mind. The Highland whiskey improved in its flavour; the marble bowl was again and again emptied and replenished; the guests of our poet forgot the flight of time and the dictates of prudence; at the hour of midnight they lost their way to Dumfries, and could scarcely distinguish it when assisted by the morning's dawn. There is much naïveté in the way the English visitor narrates his experience of that nicht wi' Burns.'

Mr. Carlyle, if we remember aright, has smiled incredulously at the story of the fox-skin cap, the belt, and the broadsword. But of the latter appendage this is not the only record. Burns himself mentions it as a frequent accompaniment of his when he went out by the river.

The punch-bowl here mentioned is the one which his father-inlaw had wrought for him as a marriage-gift. It was, when Chambers wrote his biography of Burns, in the possession of Mr. Haistie, than M.P. for Paisley, who is said to have refused for it three hundred guineas-" a sum," says Chambers, "that would have set Burns on his legs forever."

This is the last glimpse we get of the poet in his home at Ellisland till the end came. We have seen that he had long determined, if possible, to get rid of his farm. He had sunk in it all the proceeds that remained to him from the sale of the second edition of his poems, and for this the crops he had hitherto reaped had given no adequate return. Three years, however, wer a short trial, and there was a good time coming for all farmers, when the war with France broke out, and raised the value of farm produce to a hitherto unknown amount. If Burns could but have waited for that!-but either he could not, or he would not wait. But the truth is, even if Burns ever had it in him to succeed as a farmer, that time was past when he came to Ellisland. Independence at the plough-tail, of which he often boasted, was no

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longer possible for him. He could no more work as he had done of yore. The habits contracted in Edinburgh had penetrated too deeply. Even if he had not been withdrawn from his farm by Excise duties, he could neither work continuously himself, nor make his servants work. Faith," said a neighbouring farmer, "how could he miss but fail? He brought with him a bevy of servants from Ayrshire. The lasses did nothing but bake bread (that is, oat-cakes), and the lads sat by the fireside and ate it warm with ale." Burns meanwhile enjoying himself at the house of some jovial farmer or convivial laird. How could he miss but fail?

When he had resolved on giving up his farm, an arrangement was come to with the Laird of Dalswinton by which Burns was allowed to throw up his lease and sell off his crops. The sale took place in the last week in August (1791). Eveu at this day the auctioneer and the bottle always appear side by side, as Chambers observes; but then far more than now-a-days. After the roup, that is the sale, of his crop was over, Burns, in one of his letters, describes the scene that took place within and without his house. It was one which exceeded anything he had ever seen in drunken horrors. Mrs. Burns and her family fortunately were not there to witness it, having gone many weeks before to Ayrshire, probably to be out of the way of all the pain that accompanies the breaking up of a country home. When Burns gave up his lease, Mr. Millar, the landlord, sold Ellisland to a stranger, because the farm was an outlying one, inconveniently situated, on a different side of the river from the rest of his estate. It was in November or December that Burns sold off his farm-stock and implements of husbandry, and moved his family and furniture into the town of Dumfries, leaving at Ellisland no memorial of himself, as Allan Cunningham tells us, "but a putting-stone with which he loved to exercise his strength, and 3007. of his money, sunk beyond redemption in a speculation from which all had augured happiness."

It is not without deep regret that even now we think of Burns's departure from this beautiful spot. If there was any position on earth in which he could have been happy, and fulfilled his genius, it would have been on such a farm-always providing that it could have given him the means of a comfortable livelihood, and that he himself could have guided his ways aright. That he might have had a fair opportunity, how often one has wished that he could have met some landlord who could have acted towards him, as the present Duke of Buccleuch did towards the Ettrick Shepherd in his later days, and have given a farm on which he could have sat rentfree. Such an act, one is apt to fancy, would have been honourable alike to giver and receiver. Indeed, a truly noble nature would have been only too grateful to find such an opportunity put in his way of employing a small part of his wealth for so good an end. But the notions of modern society, founded as they are so entirely on individual independence, for the most part preclude the doing and the receiving of such favours. And with this social feeling no man was ever more filled than Burns.

CHAPTER VI.

MIGRATION TO DUMFRIES.

A GREAT change it must have been to pass from the pleasant holms and broomy banks of the Nith at Ellisland to a town home in the Wee Vennel of Dumfries. It was, moreover, a confession visible to the world of what Burns himself had long felt, that his endeavour to combine the actual and the ideal, his natural calling as a farmer with the exercise of his gift as a poet, had failed, and that henceforth he must submit to a round of toil, which, neither in itself nor in its surroundings, had anything to redeem it from commonplace drudgery. He must have felt, from the time when he first became Exciseman, that he had parted company with all thought of steadily working out his ideal, and that whatever he might now do in that way must be by random snatches. To his

ud spirit the name of gauger must have been gall and wormwood, dren is much to his credit that for the sake of his wife and chil loquy. It content to undergo what he often felt to be a social obdrawback to his have been well for him if this had been the only least able to withstand. If social indulgence and irregular habits led him exposed him toe very temptations which his nature was calling. Unfortunately the life into which it had somewhat impaired his better resolves, and his power of poetic concentration, before he left Ellisland, mfries, and the society

hat, from the time

into which it threw him, did with increased which had been already begun. His biograph rying degrees of emphasis, on the whole, agree this nwards." ity the fatal work ters, though with va he settled in Dumfries, "his moral course was dowhahen Burns went The social condition of Dumfries at the time wi sf other provinto live in it was neither better nor worse than that opf has depicted cial towns in Scotland. What that was, Dr. Chambers thenuntry town. from his own youthful experience of just such another cover,umbers of The curse of such towns, he tells us, was that large n their inhabitants were either half or wholly idle; either have on competences, with nothing to do, or but half employed; their only amusement to meet in tavern soak, gossip, and make stupid personal jokes. "The weary wast shopkeepers with their tit. of spirits and energy at those soaking evening meetings was de plorable. occurrences, endless disputes on small questions of fact, these re Insipid toasts, petty raillery, empty gabble about trivial

living

Pime