ledge. In his early years, our poet is said to have been distinguished by the retentiveness of his memory, and by a certain intractability of his temper. He soon obtained the mastery of English grammar, and imbibed a passion for reading; which was at first indulged with books, supplied to him by a superstitious old woman in the neighbourhood, filled with legends and with tales of supernatural agency. It was not long, however, before his studies extended to more regular compositions, such as were capable of forming his taste and improving his mind, instead of feeding his imagination into disease with a mass of corrupt and morbid aliment. But his intercourse with books was much interrupted by the necessity which was imposed on him of manual labour. With the increase of his strength, he became an efficient assistant to his father in the cultivation of his fields; and he obtained the reputation of an expert ploughman. At the age nearly of sixteen he conceived a passion for his harvest companion, a girl who was one year younger than himself; and, under the influence of love, he now first adventured upon rhyme, in a song which he addressed to his mistress, and which he had adapted to one of her favourite tunes. Being harassed by the extortion and the insolence of an agent, who managed the property after the death of his master, William Burns removed to a larger farm; and during four years remained comfortably in its occupation. Some disputes, however, then occurring between him and his landlord, his circumstances became so distressed by the expenses of legal litigation that he was saved from a jail only by the intervention of death; an event which happened, from the effects of consumption, on the 13th of February, 1784. In the four calm years which preceded the commencement of this fatal quarrel, the desultory reading of young Robert Burns had extended over a wide field of knowledge; and had been

of a nature to strengthen his intellect, to foster his imagination, to form and polish his taste. Within this happy period of honourable though vulgar industry, when his bodily powers were invigorated, and the faculties of his mind not oppressed by labour, he had made himself acquainted with some of our highest poetry and our most elegant prose; with some also of our works of science, in geography, metaphysics, and divinity. In this time, in short, he had read, as we can assert upon his own authority, together with more than one work on his own immediate business of husbandry, the compositions of Shakspeare, Pope, and Addison, the Geographical Grammars of Salmon and of Guthrie, the Essay of Locke on the Human Understanding, Stackhouse's History of the Bible, Boyle's Lectures, Taylor's Scripture Doctrine of Original Sin, and Harvey's Meditations. From a consciousness of the awkwardness of his person and deportment, he sought, in his seventeenth year, the instructions of a country dancing master; and by this act he incurred the displeasure of his father; a circumstance which supplied him with the subject of much subsequent self reproach, and to which he is disposed to attribute much of the irregularity of his after days. He had now attained his twenty-third year, with manual labour for the occupation of his life, and with love and poetry for its amusements. To love he seems to have been a devotee from the very age of puberty; and poetry he had essayed, as we have already noticed, with his first amour, when he had yet scarcely numbered his fifteenth year.

On the death of his father, he engaged with his second brother as the lessee of a farm. But the ill success of this undertaking proved the ruin of his little fortune; and, to avoid a prison, he determined on embarking for Jamaica. At this crisis, however, he was encouraged by the popularity of his poems

in their dispersion through a wide circuit, to hazard their publication; and the twenty pounds, which he gained by this adventure, were to be applied to the defraying of the expenses of his passage to the new world. But the generous and liberal Mackenzie, in one of the papers of the Lounger,' had now made an appeal to the world in favour of the youthful bard; and, when he had made the last preparations for his voyage, and was on the point of embarking, he received a letter from Dr. Blacklock, which induced him to try the experiment of a second edition of his productions. For the accomplishment of this purpose he was brought to Edinburgh; and here, his fame being now widely propagated, he found himself introduced at once into the circles of the literary and the great. In these societies, the powers of his conversation fully established the reputation which had previously resulted from his writings. But this consequence of his genius, by involving him in the dissipation of a gay métropolis, and by thus exposing his ardent temperament to temptations which it was ill disposed to resist, proved ultimately injurious to his character and his fortunes. The profits of the republication of his poems amounted to five hundred pounds; and, resolving with a portion of this money to return to his primitive occupation of farming, he took, in 1788, the tenement of Ellisland, near Dumfries, on the banks of the Nith. From the pursuit, however, of this plan he was unfortunately diverted by his appointment to an exciseman's place, injudiciously obtained for him by his friends; and, resigning his farm, he retired, in the end of the year 1791, on a starving income of fifty, which was subsequently raised to seventy pounds a year, to a small house in Dumfries. He had previously married a young woman, who, in consequence of her intercourse with him, had been turned out of her father's house; and the straitness of his circumstances was

now rendered more sensible by the access of an infant family. No feeling of prudence, however, induced by his distress and his dependency, was of sufficient power to impose the proper restraint upon his conduct; and the same ardent temperament of mind, which impelled him to the social pleasures of a tavern, hurried him into discoveries of his sentiments on some of those great political topics which then agitated the public passions. By incautiously avowing himself too friendly to the principles of the French revolution, he incurred the displeasure of his official superiors; and it was only by the strong interference of his friends, that he escaped with a severe reprimand, and was suffered any longer to waste his genius in gauging for the excise. The humiliating conviction, which was thus impressed on him of his dependent condition, must necessarily have affected a high spirit like his; and it cannot reasonably excite our surprise, that the general discomforts of his situation, acting upon the sensibilities of his mind, should assist the effects of his excesses upon his body, and should thus contribute their share of poison to induce his premature dissolution. If the pride of his country, contemplating him as her prime ornament, was not sufficiently strong to urge her to lift him at once to ease and independence, it is to be wished that she had left him, as he was originally stationed by Providence, at the plough, where habitual labour would have strengthened his frame, where the excitements to intemperance, suggested by the society of towns, would not have existed, and where the consciousness of honest freedom would have preserved the vigour of his mind. By calling him from his furrows, not, as old Rome had called her dictators, to the elevation, but to the degradation of office, Scotland certainly consulted neither the demand of her own character nor the interests of him whom she affected to patronize. Amid the pains

of mortification and of indigence, but unstained with any act of improbity or meanness, and unincumbered with debt, Robert Burns concluded his unhappy life on the 21st of July, 1796, at the early age of thirty-seven: and may justly be considered as the pride and the reproach of that community to which he belonged. His person and countenance are recorded as remarkably handsome and prepossessing; the former being nearly five feet ten inches in height, and moulded equally for agility and for strength; and the latter being fraught with intelligence and interesting expression. Over his open and elevated forehead curled his black hair; and his large and dark eyes were irradiated with mind and ardent with spirit. His manners were easy and polite, and such as were adapted to that higher society into which his just fame had raised him; and the attractions of his conversation, at one time sparkling with wit, and at another striking with the remarks of profound thought, were universally acknowledged and admired. Instead, in short, of the rude and illiterate ploughman, the cultivated man of mind, of reading, reflection, and genius, was alone presented to the view. His morals were blemished by an indulgence, somewhat approaching to licentious, of his sensual propensities: but they were unsullied by any of the sordid or malignant passions. During his short and distressful intercourse with the world, his conduct was erect and honourable; and he uniformly approved himself to be just, liberal, candid, benevolent, affectionate to his relations, and grateful to his benefactors. It has been said by an acute anatomizer of the human understanding', who possessed the means of knowing him, that all the faculties of his mind were equally vigorous; and that he was qualified to run with success on any course of ambi

Dugald Stewart.