In his longer too sacred to be versified upon. poems and his novels alone that memory moves enchanted and disguised. In "To Mary in Heaven," Burns, after a sleepless night on the banks of the Nith, gave voice to what we may presume to have been his purest and most unalterable affection. Mary's memory, at least is "like a star,"-" the lingering star with lessening ray that loves to greet the early morn "-and "dwells apart." The other feature in Burns's character concerning which there has been dispute and moralizing, is, of course, his attachment to Scottish drink. Little need be said about it. The age was devoted to hard drinking. Burns often complains of the local whiskey, the execrable whiskey of Dumfriesshire. He complains of "the savage hospitality" that knocks a man down with ardent liquors. He satirizes the orgies in his own house after the sale of his year's harvest. Probably he was far from being an intemperate man in the judgment of his age, till many disappointments, failures, sorrows, wore him down. "Even in the hour of social mirth," he writes to Aiken as early as 1786, "my gaiety is the madness of an intoxicated criminal under the hands of the executioner." He wrote Bacchanalian ditties many, as he wrote other ditties, in "The Merry Muses." These were concessions to the taste of his companions. In his last years, perhaps, he may have sought to forget his many miseries in an artificial Paradise. His mistake was the common mistake of his period and country: nothing would have been heard of it had he not been great. The indulgence of these passions, or their absence, or the mastery of them, is not the whole of morality. Burns had in the highest measure the masculine virtues. He was kind; there was nothing he hated like unkindness. Lockhart mentions an old Galloway laird and magistrate who was indifferent to poetry, but loved the goodness of heart which Burns showed in his official reports as an exciseman. He was honest, and upright, and generous. If he had been "rich as the sun," he says, he would have been " generous as the day." He lent his brother Gilbert a large proportion of the four or five hundred pounds he made by his poems. For his songs in Thomson's collection he absolutely refused to take money. In song, like that Theocritean Cyclops, he "found more happiness than could be bought by gold," and he would not allow gold to be brought into the sacred place of the Muses. We may regret the scruple, but we must respect it. He honestly laboured to support his family by the work of his hands. Farming was not successful with him, partly for want of capital perhaps, partly because he reasoned, "if miry ridges and dirty dunghills are to engross the better functions of a soul immortal, I had better have been a rook or magpie at once. When he took the resolution to become an exciseman, he may not have calculated prudently, but he displayed a noble courage in disregarding cheap satire and the paper bullets of the brain. The idea of gaining some secure income for his family, " "To make a happy fireside clime For weans and wife," by duties in no way dishonourable, mastered all fear of dependence and all dread of ridicule. What should Burns have done? what should have been done for Burns? These are questions often asked, but in practice not to be answered. Probably he would not have allowed anyone to give him a farm free of rent, as the Duke of Buccleuch did to James Hogg. In the copious patronage of the time we cannot but think that a higher office than that of a gauger might have been found for him, had he chanced to be on the dominant side in politics. No such post was found. The profession of literature, as we understand it now, as even Hogg found it not unremunerative, scarcely existed, at least in Scotland. Burns could not have been a journalist, or an editor; probably he never dreamed of being a novelist, or of living by the theatre. To succeed in any of those fields he must have dwelt in England, which he would have found impossible. Burns in London is inconceivable, though London, if he could have endured it, might have proved less fatal to him than Dumfries. The religion of Burns was rather a religion of hope than of belief. Brought up among peasant Puritans, and ardently admiring what was beautiful in the old Scotch faith, Burns early made the acquaintance of "The Moderates," the refined, philosophical, and more or less easy-going ministers of his day. The Moderates are often accused of having injured his character by critics who perhaps know very little about their writings and nothing but some traditional stories about their lives. Burns was unfortunate enough to see the Holy Willies of his district, to behold the orgies of their revival meetings and holy fairs. As nothing was more sternly solemn than the one annual sacrament of the Scottish Church, so nothing can have been more deserving of satire than the corruptions which Burns describes, if he describes them truly. That was probably what his victims denied. For all we know, Mr. Moodie, who "cleared the points o' faith," may have been as excellent a man as Smith of the "cauld harangues." But Burns was on the other side. The clergy of the straiter sect, the evangelical clergy, had subjected him to ecclesiastical censure— a discipline perhaps always inefficient outside of the Church of Rome, and by Burns's time half obsolete and wholly ludicrous. For himself, as he told Mrs. Dunlop, religion was "his dearest enjoyan irreligious poet is a monster." He was usually prepared to admit his belief in God and immortality, to grant that Jesus Christ was "from God." ment .... "A Power from the Unknown God, As for immortality, in a moment of depression he cries, "Would to God that I as firmly believed it as I ardently wish it!" In a more flippant humour he observes, "If there be any truth in the orthodox faith of these churches, I am damned past redemption" (which surely is not "the orthodox faith of these churches") .... so I shall e'en turn Arminian, and trust to 'sincere though imperfect |