exaggerated the healthy reserve that most men feel in the expression of religious sentiments into a morbid reticence and concealment. He followed almost too literally the Scriptural exhortation to secrecy both in his charities and in his devotions. Yet surely no man has a right to impugn his sincerity. He believed his creed. He accepted its mysteries, and had nothing but contempt for those flippant coffeehouse skeptics who glibly professed to believe nothing they could not understand. Whether he knew much of the inspiration and the consolations of Christianity may perhaps admit of a mournful doubt. His belief hardly rose into that faith which can be hopeful in the presence of the universal spectacle of folly and sin. The grim picture of the world's wrong was always before his eyes: that, in spite of it, he held any silent belief is surely proof, not of hypocrisy, but of profound intellectual conviction.

But it is Swift's misanthropy that has done most to turn the verdict of posterity against him. Men cannot be expected to think well of him; for he didn't think well of men. This misanthropy did not show itself in any repellent form until after the great disappointment of his exile to Ireland in 1714. Yet the seeds of it were in his nature. No man was ever so endowed with the satiric gift to detect unveracities, to pierce through all conventions, to see how little substance is concealed by the big shows of life. And this gift is always fatal to its possessor unless it be balanced by a power to see also the manifold good of life and tempered by that charity which believeth and hopeth. He who does not love men will soon lose faith in them; then, the keener his vision, the sterner his sense of right, the more intense will be his indignation against his kind. And indignation, even righteous indignation, is not a mood in which any man may live happily or beneficently. Now in those redeeming graces that sweeten the satiric temper, Swift was by nature deficient. His affections, as we have seen, were deep-perhaps all the deeper and more impetuous because confined to so narrow a channel; but he never had much genial humanity. The broad injunction of the second commandment he avowed

himself unable to keep. This unfortunate temper would probably, in any case, have grown more bitter with advancing years; age dispels some generous illusions even for the most charitable man. But in Swift it was frightfully exaggerated by disappointment and disease. In his later years he too often lost all power of discrimination in his allembracing hatred of the race; and his anger at our sins was swallowed up in his contempt for our weakness.

But here again let us at least give Swift credit for sincerity. He was none of your easy gentlemen, who preach vanitas vanitatum in a graceful and superior manner. He never heightened his indignation for declamatory effect,—as Carlyle did, or made literary capital of his misanthropy. The black side of life gradually filled all his vision; he did not love it, but he could not thrust it away. This suggests the true explanation for the passages of extreme physical grossness that sometimes offend us in his writing. They are due in part, no doubt, to his lack of delicacy and his bold defiance of all conventions. Yet he was himself a scrupulously clean man in his habits and conversation,-far more so than Pope, and rebuked any violations of decency by others with unsparing severity. The truth seems to be, it was a mark of the morbid perversity of his temper that whatsoever was most displeasing to him forced itself most persistently into his thought. He dwells upon filth not because he loves it, but because he hates it. He disgusts us by the expression of his own disgust. This tendency increased in his later years, and Delany is doubtless right in taking it as a symptom of mental unsoundness. In truth the last word with reference to Swift should always be that whatever in his character most needs excuse was due in part to incurable physical disease-in how large part, only He can tell who so strangely joins these minds and bodies of ours, and to whom alone belongeth judgment.

I

ROBERT BURNS

T is hard to fix on any date or name that may mark with accuracy the beginning of a new literary era; changes in

literary manner are gradual, and you may find in Goldsmith, or still more in Cowper, notes of the new music and some breath of the new inspiration. But it seems to me that the new poetry began in a harvest-field of Scotland, on the skirts of the pleasant valley of the Ayr, in the autumn of 1773. In accordance with the old Scottish fashion each man and boy of the reapers has his partner among the women and girls of the harvest folk. Among all the lassies none sings more sweetly than trim little Nellie Kilpatrick, the daughter of the blacksmith at Ayr. She is but fourteen and her partner not quite a year older, proud that this year 'first among the yellow corn, a man he reckoned is.' Here, by your leave, Messrs. Pope and Gay and Shenstone, here is a bit of genuine pastoral. Nellie sings divinely—albeit mostly to one tune; and the words are wretched doggere! some country laird has written to his lady. But the notes of her song, as they two loiter behind the rest when they fare home from the harvest-field in the twilight, have touched in the heart of the boy that chord which was hardly ever to be still again so long as he lived.

I see her yet, the sonsie quean
That lighted up my jingle,
Her witching smile, her pauky een,
That gart my heart-strings tingle!
I, firèd inspired,

At ev'ry kindling keek,
But, bashing and dashing,
I feared ay to speak.

But why not tell it in a song, fitted to the air she herself was so often singing. a one as the country laird.

He could at least write as good
And thus love awoke the music:

O, once I lov'd a bonie lass,

Ay, and I love her still!

And whilst that virtue warms my breast

I'll love my handsome Nell.

As bonie lasses I hae seen,

And monie full as braw,
But for a modest gracefu' mien
The like I never saw.

She dresses aye sae clean and neat,
Both decent and genteel;

And then there's something in her gait
Gars onie dress look weel.

A gaudy dress and gentle air
May slightly touch the heart;
But it's innocence and modesty
That polishes the dart.

'Tis this in Nelly pleases me,
'Tis this enchants my soul;

For absolutely in my breast

She reigns without control.

This, as he used always after to say, was Robert Burns' first love and first song. I think we may call it the beginning of our new poetry. But we shall mistake if we think this bit of pretty pastoral came out of a sunny and quiet life. Assuredly the life of this man, Robert Burns, was a tragedy if any ever was, and the tragedy had already begun. His father clearly enough was a man of much native judgment and penetration, a stern, yet kindly, observant, patient, God-fearing man. But he wore his life slowly out in the silent struggle to wring from seven poor acres barely bread enough to keep his family from starvation-bread literally, "for years butcher's meat was unknown in our house," says one of the brothers.

At thirteen Robert was threshing all day with the men. At sixteen his shoulders were rounded; he went to bed every night with dull headache, with frequent faintness, and a feeling of suffocation. And the worst was, all would not

suffice. Every year saw the old father steadily weakening, and the whole family, with a proud Scottish dread of beggary, drawing nearer the desperate verge of want. Robert was naturally gay and buoyant, with an immense fund of animal spirits; but his life already told upon him. He was moody and often depressed as no boy of fifteen ought ever to be. Poverty when it pinches but moderately and only seems to brace the young man's power to more resolute effort, is often a great blessing; but poverty like that of Robert Burns is a curse which has slight mitigations. For it isn't merely physical privations and hardship that such poverty brings. This young man has intellectual cravings; but there are no libraries and universities for him. This young Robert Burns has a vivid imagination, a prompt unerring taste; but the great world of literature is all but closed to him. He reads over the few books he can find at home; besides the big ha' Bible, there was a Spectator, a Pope, a Locke On the Human Understanding, and The Whole Duty of Man; in none of which save the Bible would he be likely to find much. He borrows books when he can, gets a look into Shakespeare, and best of all finds a collection of old Scots songs, which he learns by heart. But this is about all the young poet can get before he is eighteen.

Then, too, this young man has native social gifts of the rarest sort; wit, exuberant spirits, keen penetration, versatility, tact, and that rare power of ardent, fascinating converse which was afterward to astonish for a little time the great people of Edinburgh. "Why, sir, his conversation set me completely off my feet," said the lively Duchess of Gordon, you remember. Such a young fellow must have vague, half-conscious, social longings and aspirations: he needs the stimulating and refining companionship of those who can appreciate and exercise his powers. But what society can young Robert Burns have? His brilliant conversation is squandered upon those who toil with him in the peat-bog or at the plow-tail. His tender heart and kindling fancy made him, in turn, the devotee of almost every comely girl in the parish; but it is doubtful whether in all the little