This letter owes its desponding tone to the fits of mental depression to which the poetic temperament is peculiarly subject. It took its rise from no romantic disappointment with the lowliness of his position, or want of confidence in himself. Burns, without being a vain man, knew from the first that he was gifted with great and varied faculties. Already he had essayed them in rhymes, and, buoyed up by anticipations of fame and fortune, he offered an unappalled front to evils far more serious than his narrow wages and small lodging at Irvine, for we find him bating nor heart nor hope when his father, after being ruined in the farm of Lochlea, had died and left his family desolate, and a fire had burned to the ground the shop in which he was learning his trade. "I was left," he says, "like a true poet, not worth a sixpence." But, like a true poet, or true anything else, he gathered himself up for the battle of life, collected all that remained of the family property, and, in partnership with his brother Gilbert, and with the domestic management of his mother and sisters, he took the farm of Mossgiel, near Mauchline, and felt more at home with the plaid on his shoulders and his hand on the plough than when boxed up in a workshop, and intent on carding the flax. It was while "vexing this niggard soil for scanty bread" that he first

became distinguished for his poetical powers. But to a wretched use we must confess he turned them at first. It was as the fiercest satirist of one of the parties which then divided the religious world of Ayrshire that he let loose his irreverent muse. Whether the worthy persons he attacked were right or wrong in the course they pursued (there is no doubt, at all events, that neither side kept within the bounds of what would now be thought legitimate controversy), nobody can find any excuse, even in their wit and cleverness, for the frightful personal lampoons with which the new tenant of Mossgiel assaulted the rival camp. Their fame, however, though local, was great, and doubtless the practice thus gained encouraged him to nobler efforts; and high time it was for he had now a wife and son to support, and the farm was scarcely sufficient for the addition. The Bonnie Jean of so many of his songs was the mother of his child, under the sanction of marriage lines (as a written promise is called), which constitute as true a matrimony in the civil courts of Scotland as any performed in the Church; but alas! Jean's father was a leading man among the ecclesiastical sect which his son-in-law had opposed, and, giving way to his anger, determined on the gratification of his revenge, even at the expense of his daughter's

reputation. He burned the "lines" proving and establishing the marriage, and tore his daughter from a wicked and unbelieving heathen who had turned into ridicule the leaders of the party he belonged to. Here was a real suffering. Burns forgot his wretched fields-his prospects of distress. The worst of evils had come upon him, and all day long he looked despairing to the sinking sun which he knew was setting upon the cottage where Jean was kept away from him. How little many of us think, when we read or listen to his song on this occasion, how bitter was the grief it sprang from, and how true the affection it expressed :

Of a' the airts the wind can blaw,

I dearly like the west,

For there the bonnie lassie lives,

The lassie I lo'e 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 bonnie flower that springs

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

What sighs and vows amang the knowes

Hae passed atween us twa!

How fond to meet, how wae to part,

That night she gaed awa!
The powers aboon can only ken,
To whom the heart is seen,
That nane can be sae dear to me
As my sweet lovely Jean!

Whether his now disconsolate situation inspired him with poetic thoughts we cannot tell, but in two years he finished the poems which first spread his reputation beyond his native glens, and which from that hour to this have formed the solace, the pride, and the delight of every cottage in Scotland. Allan Cunningham tells us, in his delightful life of his brother bard, that the volume penetrated into quarters where such light literature had never ventured before. An old Cameronian divine gave a copy of it to Allan's father, and said, "Keep it out o' the way o' your children, lest ye find them, as I found mine, reading it on the Sabbath." The

Sabbath could certainly have been better employed than in reading those pages, but certainly, also, it could have been worse. The Puritanic feeling which at a darker period of Scottish history had been the mainspring and support of civil liberty, had by this time degenerated into a rigid asceticism, which cavilled at small departures from external decorum, but left the greater enormities of life and manners untouched. With a far greater appearance of sanctimoniousness than is practised at the present day was combined a larger amount of coarseness and immorality. The Covenanter, in his blue bonnet, with pistol in his belt and broadsword by his side, worshipping God in the wild fastnesses where the persecutor hardly ventured to follow, listening with grim satisfaction to the denunciations of some shrieking divine inculcating vengeance on the guilty disturbers of his devotions, this is a very different man from the Covenanting baker or grocer in a country town, still drawling through the nose, still raging with hatred against all who differed from him in doctrine, but mixing his flour with bones and alum, and sanding his sugar, as if he were a mere Erastian;-and therefore it is perhaps judging from a point of view not intended by the poet, when we deprecate as altogether wicked and indefensible the