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 satisfac. tion 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

attacks contained in his early poems on the "Unco Gude, or Rigidly Righteous." There is nothing so contemptible as the assumption of a virtue where it does not exist; but the worst form of this hypocrisy is the persistence in the outward manifestation of a principle after the principle has disappeared. Even the Quaker's hat is now falling into contempt, because it represents no longer what it was introduced to represent. The simplicity of apparel which was assumed by the Friends was intended to keep them from being noticed on account of their clothes; they therefore dressed in the common fashion of their time, without the recent importation of hats from Spain, or doublets from France; but the effect of their continued breadth of brim and wideness of tail is the very reverse of their first unostentatious adoption. The Puritans of the West, in the same way, had outlived the period of their rigid forms. They were the Don Quixotes of religion, and transplanted the feelings and manners of the days of Lauderdale and Claverhouse into the times of Edmund Burke and Charles James Fox. Burns accordingly laughed at them as anachronisms, as he would have laughed at the Spanish hidalgo in his suit of armour on Rosinante. But he had other sentiments excited besides those of laughter. His attack on individual preachers

we have already disapproved; but can we wonder that a man smarting under the greatest calamity which can befal an affectionate heart-the cruel and needless separation from the object of its affection-allowed the circle of his indignation to extend from the cold-blooded elder who tore his daughter from his arms on a point of doctrine, till it embraced the whole principle from which such ferocious dogmatism sprang? It is not unjust to call this rigidly righteous father a hypocrite -rather it is a compliment even to his views of religion to deny that such an action could be justified by its precepts, or that it called for the abnegation of all enjoyment, or the repression of the natural impulses of childhood, so that youth itself was but a long deceit, a painful imitation of the gravity of age, or that it condemned the devout admiration of the beauties of a landscape. Don't these people see that, by going round in a circle, they have, become close followers of the very persons of whom they have the greatest horror-the voluntary sufferers of the Romish Church; the shivering anchorite in his cave, the drivelling maniac on his pillar? And what was the result on the manners of the peasantry or of the gentry at the time? Alas! Burns himself, who reveals the cause, serves also as an example of the effect. In the midst of all this false and hollow Puritanism raged a coarse

ness and sensuality among the general body of the people which it is difficult to describe. Scotland at that period was a poor and thinlypeopled country. The disputed succession in 1745 had hindered the progress of wealth, and the foolish pride of the most barren and feudal of all the nations of Europe had prevented the gentry even of the second degree from entering into trade. In idle gentility, the younger brothers of the Laird were more dependent on him than his servants, and, in fact, performed the offices of his domestics, while they would have scorned to earn their bread by honest industry. This combination of pride and servility is what we see in the Scottish characters presented to us by the novelists and dramatic writers of the last century. But suddenly the prospects of the younger gentry brightened. India was thrown open to their exertions-India, where whole countries were to be conquered, and native kings subdued and pillaged. Commerce itself, in that golden land, was a monopoly requiring jobbery and interest to get a right to exercise it, and therefore was fitted for gentle blood. Away went half the junior aristocracy of Scotland: they were soldiers, writers, merchants; they were all three together, and fought and diplomatized, and bought and sold, and were grasping and cruel, and trampled on the native popu

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lations, and exacted great ransoms from prisoners they had no right to take, and came back to their own country in the hateful character of Nabob-tyrannical, blustering, and ostentatious, but distributing, by acquisitions of land, the riches they had so iniquitously acquired. This periodic return of Indian fortunes was beginning in the days of Burns; but the improvement had not yet reached the peasantry. There were no good roads, the first elements of civilization and wealth, except the great passages between town and town. Glasgow, in 1784, was a place of some forty thousand inhabitants, principally supported by a trade in slaves and sugar. Edinburgh was the capital of intellect and fashion, but very poor and very proud-a personification of the national character. There were small commercial dealings at Dundee and Aberdeen, and other places on the eastern coast, principally with Holland and the Baltic. The arts and sciences had not yet been applied to manufactures; women spun the flax at home; weavers wove it into webs in their own houses; hecklers, we have seen, carded the wool in company, but this was because the process required practice and skill, and combination expedited the work. Farms, whether large in size or not, were very low in rent: the finest lands in Roxburgh and Berwickshire let at sixteen shillings the Scotch