ROBERT BURNS (1759-1796). In a company of German critics who were weighing the claims and estimating the rank of the poets, their contemporaries, the leader of their chorus, the genial humorist, Jean Paul Richter, is said to have hushed his audience when the name of Goethe was introduced, exclaiming" We are not to sit in judgment on that sacred head." Scotsmen are apt to attach the same half-superstitious reverence to the name which is, more than any other, that of Scotland condensed in a personality, the representative of what is noblest and also of much that is erring in their race.
Robert Burns was born on the 25th of January 1759, in a cottage about two miles from Ayr, the eldest son of a small farmer, William Burness, of Kincardineshire stock, who wrought hard, practised integrity, wished to bring up his children in the fear of God, but had to fight all his days against the winds and tides of adversity. " The poet," says Mr Carlyle, his best biographer, " was fortunate in his fathera man of thoughtful intense character, as the best of our peasants are, valuing knowledge, possessing some and open-minded for more, of keen insight and devout heart, friendly and fearless : a fully unfolded man seldom found in any rank in society, and worth descending far in society to seek. . . . Had he been ever so little richer, the whole might have issued otherwise. But poverty sunk the whole family even below the reach of our cheap school system, and Burns remained a hard-worked ploughboy."
Through a series of migrations from one unfortunate farm to another; from Alloway (where he was taught to read), to Mt. Oliphant, and then (1777) to Lochlea in Tarbolton (where he learnt the rudiments of geometry), the poet remained in the same condition of straitened circumstances. At the age of thirteen he thrashed the corn with his own hands, at fifteen he was the principal labourer. The family kept no servant, and for several years butchers' meat was a thing unknown in the house. " This kind of life," he writes, " the cheerless gloom of a hermit and the unceasing toil ot a galley-slave, brought me to my sixteenth year." His naturally robust frame was overtasked, and his nervous constitution received a fatal strain. His shoulders were bowed, he became liable to headaches, palpitations, and fits of depressing melancholy. From these hard tasks and his fiery temperament, craving in vain for sympathy in a frigid air-grew the strong temptations on which Burns was largely wrecked,the thirst for stimulants and the revolt against restraint which soon made headway and passed all bars. In the earlier portions of his career, a buoyant humour bore him up ; and amid thick-coming shapes of ill he bated no jot of heart or hope. He was cheered by vague stirrings of ambition, which he pathetically compares to the " blind groping of Homer's Cyclops round the walls of his cave." Sent to school at Kirkoswald, he became, for his scant leisure, a great readereating at meal-times with a spoon in one hand and a book in the other,and carrying a few small volumes in his pocket to study in spare moments in the fields. " The collection of songs," he tells us, " was my vade mecum. I pored over them driving my cart or walking to labour, song by song, verse by verse, carefully noting the true, tender, sublime, or fustian." He lingered over the ballads in his cold room by night; by day, whilst whistling at the plough, he invented new forms and was inspired by fresh ideas, " gathering round him the memories and the traditions of his country till they became a mantle and a crown." It was among the furrows of his father's fields that he was inspired with the perpetually quoted wish
"That I for poor auld Scotland's sake Some useful plan or book could make, Or sing a sang at least."
An equally striking illustration of the same feeling is to be found in his summer Sunday's ramble to the Leglen wood,tie fabled haunt of Wallace,which the poet confesses to have visited " with as much devout enthusiasm as ever pilgrim did the shrine of Loretto." In another reference to the same period he refers to the intense susceptibility to the homeliest aspects of Nature which throughout characterized his genius. " Scarcely any object gave me moreI do not know if I should call it pleasurebut something which exalts and enraptures methan to walk in the sheltered side of a wood or high plantation in a cloudy winter day and hear the stormy wind howling among the trees and raving over the plain. I listened to the birds, and frequently turned out of my path lest I should disturb their little songs or frighten them to another station." Auroral visions were gilding his horizon as he walked in glory, if not in joy, " behind his plough upon the mountain side ;" but the swarm of his many-coloured fancies was again made grey by the atra cura of unsuccessful toils.
Burns had written his first verses of note, " Behind yon hills where Stinchar (afterwards Lugar) flows," when in 1781 he went to Irvine to learn the trade of a flax-dresser. " It was," he says, " an unlucky affair. As we were giving a welcome carousal to the New Year, the shop took fire and burned to ashes ; and I was left, like a true poet, without a sixpence." His own heart, too, had unfortunately taken fire. He was poring over mathematics till, in his own phraseology,still affected in its prose by the classical pedantries caught from Pope by Ramsay," the sun entered Virgo, when a charming fillette, who lived next door, overset my trigonometry, and set me off at a tangent from the scene of my studies." We need not detail the story, nor the incessant repetitions of it, which marked and sometimes marred his career. The poet was jilted, went through the usual despairs, and resorted to the not unusual sources of consolation. He had found that he was " no enemy to social life," and his mates had discovered that he was the best of boon companions in the lyric feasts, where his eloquence shed a lustre over wild ways of life, and where he was beginning to be distinguished as a champion of the New Lights and a satirist of the Calvinism whose waters he Jound like those of Marah.
In Robert's 25 th year his father died, full of sorrows and apprehensions for the gifted son who wrote for his tomb, in Alio way kirkyard, the fine epitaph ending with the characteristic line
" For even his failings leaned to virtue's side. '
For some time longer the poet, with his brother Gilbert, lingered at Lochlea, reading agricultural books, miscalculating crops, attending markets, and in a mood of reformation resolving, " in spite of the world, the flesh, and tho devil, to be a wise man." Affairs, however, went no better with the family; and in 1784 they migrated to Mossgiel, where he lived and wrought, during four years, for a return scarce equal to the wage of the commonest labourer in our day. Meanwhile he had become intimate with his future wife, Jean Armour; but the father, a master mason, discountenanced the match, and the girl being disposed to " sigh as a lover," as a daughter to obey, Burns, in 1786, gave up his suit, resolved to seek refuge in exile, and having accepted a situation as bookkeeper to a slave estate in Jamaica, had taken his passage in a ship for the West Indies. His old associations seemed to be breaking up, men and fortune scowled, and " hungry ruin had him in the wind," when he wrote the lines ending
" Adieu, my native banks of Ayr,"
and addressed to the most famous of the loves, in which he was as prolific as Catullus or Tibullus, the proposal
" "Will ye go to the Indies, my Mary.
He was withheld from his project and, happily or unhappily, the current of his life was turned by the success of his first volume, which was published at Kilmarnock in June 1786. It contained some of his most justly celebrated poems, the results of his scanty leisure at Lochlea and Mossgiel; among others " The Twa dogs,"a graphic idealization of vEsop," The Author's Prayer," the " Address to the Deil," " The Vision " and " The Dream," " Halloween," " The Cottar's Saturday Night," the lines "To a Mouse" and "To a Daisy," "Scotch Drink," " Man was made to Mourn," the " Epistle to Davie," and some of his most popular songs. This epitome of a genius so marvellous and so varied took his audience by storm. " The country murmured of him from sea to sea." " With his poems," says Robert Heron, " old and young, grave and gay, learned and ignorant, were alike transported. I was at that time resident in Galloway, and I can well remember how even ploughboys and maidservants would have gladly bestowed the wages they earned the most hardly, and which they wanted to purchase necessary clothing, if they might but procure the works of Burns. This first edition only brought the author £20 direct return, but it introduced him to the literati of Edinburgh, whither he was invited, and where he was welcomed, feasted, admired, and patronized. He appeared as a portent among the scholars of the northern capital and its university, and manifested, according to Mr Lockhart, " in the whole str&in of his bearing, his belief that in the society of the most eminent men of his nation he was where he was entitled to be, hardly deigning to flatter them by exhibiting a symptom of being flattered."
Sir Walter Scott bears a similar testimony to the dignified simplicity and almost exaggerated independence of the poet, during this annus mirabilis of his success. " As for Burns, Yin/ilium vidi tantum, I was a lad of fifteen when he came to Edinburgh, but had sense enough to be interested in his poetry, and would have given the world to know him. I saw him one day with several gentlemen of literary reputation, among whom I remember the celebrated Dugald Stewart. Of course we youngsters sat silent, looked, and listened. ... I remember ... his shedding tears over a print representing a soldier lying dead in the snow, his dog sitting in misery on one side, on the other his widow with a child in her arms. His person was robust, his manners rustic, not clownish. . . . His countenance was more massive than it looks in any of the portraits. There was a strong expression of shrewdness in his lineaments ; the eye alone indicated the poetic character and temperament. It was large and of a dark cast, and literally glowed when he spoke with feeling or interest. I never saw such another eye in a human head. His conversation expressed perfect self-confidence, without the least intrusive, forwardness. I thought his acquaintance with English poetry was rather limited; and having twenty times the abilities of Allan Ramsay and of Ferguson he talked of them with too much humility as his models. He was much caressed in Edinburgh, but the efforts made for his relief were extremely trifling." Laudatur et alget. Burns went from those meetings, where he had been posing professors (no hard task), and turning the heads of duchesses, to share a bed in the garret of a writer's apprentice,they paid together 3s. a week for the room. It was in the house of Mr Carfrae, Baxter's Close, Lawnmarket, " first scale stair on the left hand in going down, first door in the stair." During Burns's life it was reserved for William Pitt to recognize his place as a great poet, the more cautious critics of the North were satisfied to endorse him as a rustic prodigy, and brought upon themselves a share of his satire. Some of the friendships contracted during this periodas for Lord Glencairn and Mrs Dunlopare among the most i pieasing and permanent in literature; for genuine kindness was never wasted on one who, whatever his faults, has never been accused of ingratitude. But in the bard's city life there was an unnatural element. He stooped to beg for neither smiles nor favour, but the gnarled country oak is cut up into cabinets in artificial prose and verse. In the letters to Mr Graham, the prologue to Mr Wood, and the epistles to Clarinda, he is dancing minuets with hob-nailed shoes. When, in 1787, the second edition of the Poems came out, the proceeds of their sale realized for the author ¿£400. On the strength of this sum he gave himself two long rambles, full of poetic materialone through the border towns into England as far as Newcastle, returning by Dumfries to Mauchline, and another a grand tour through the East Highlands, as far as Inverness, returning by Edinburgh, and so home to Ayrshire.
In 1788 Burns took a new farm at Ellisland on the Nith, settled there, married, lost his little money, and wrote, among other pieces, " Auld Lang Syne " and " Tam O' Shanter." In 1789 he obtained, through the good office of Mr Graham of Eintry, an appointment as excise-officer of the district, worth ¿£50 per annum. In 1791 he removed to a similar post at Dumfries worth ¿£70. In the course of the following year he was asked to edit and supply the Melodies of Scotland with Symphonies and Accompaniments Jor the Pianoforte and Violin : the poetry by Robert Burns. To this work he contributed about one hundred songs, the best of which are now ringing in the ear of every Scotchman from New Zealand to San Francisco. For these, original and adapted, he received a shawl for his wife, a picture by David Allan representing the " Cottar's Saturday Night," and ¿£5 ! The poet wrote an indignant letter and never afterwards composed for money. Unfortunately the " Bock of Independence " to which he had proudly retired was but a castle of air, over which the meteors of French political enthusiasm cast a lurid gleam. In the last years of his life, exiled from polite society on account of his revolutionary opinions, he became sourer in temper and plunged more deeply into the dissipations of the lower ranks, among whom he found his only companionship and sole, though shallow, sympathy. To have Jacobin tendencies, to rejoice at the downfall of the Bastille, was regarded as the sign of an abandoned character, as it was twelve years ago in Scotland to embrace the cause of the Northern States in the American War.
Burns began to feel himself prematurely old. Walking with a friend who proposed to him to join a county ball, he shook his head, saying " that's all over now," and adding a verse of Lady Grissel Baillie's ballad
" 0 were we young as we ance hae been, AVe sud hae been galloping down on yon green, And linking it ower the lily-white lea, But were na my heart light I wad dee."
His hand shook; his pulse and appetite failed ; his spirits sunk into a uniform gloom. In April 1796 he wrote" I fear it will be some time before I tune my lyre again. By Babel's streams I have sat and wept. I have only known existence by the pressure of sickness and counted time by the repercussions of pain. I close my eyes in misery and open them without hope. I look on the vernal day and say with poor Ferguson
"Say wherefore has an all-indulgent heaven Life to the comfortless and wretched given."
On the 4th of July he was seen to be dying. On the 12th he wrote to his cousin for the loan of ¿£10 to save him from passing his last days in jail. On the 21st he was no more. On the 25th, when his last son came into the world, he was buried with local honours, the volunteers of the company to which he belonged firing three volleys over Ids grave.
It has been said that " Lowland Scotland as a distinct nationality came in with two warriors and went out with two bards. It came in with William Wallace and Robert Bruce and went out with Bobert Burns and Walter Scott. The first two made the history, the last two told the story and sung the song." But what in the minstrel's lay was mainly a requiem was in the people's poet also a prophecy. The position of Burns in the progress of our literature may be shortly defined; he was a link between two eras, like Chaucer, the last of the old and the first of the newthe inheritor of the traditions and the music of the past, in some respects the herald of the future.
The volumes of our lyrist owe part of their popularity to the fact of their being an epitome of melodies, moods, and memories that had belonged for centuries to the national life, the best inspirations of which have passed into them. But in gathering from his ancestors Burns has exalted their work by asserting a new dignity for their simplest themes. He is the heir of Barbour, distilling the spirit of the old poet's epic into a battle chant, and of Dunbar, reproducing the various humours of a half-sceptical, half-religious philosophy of life. He is the pupil of Bamsay, but he leaves his master, to make a social protest and to lead a literary revolt. The Gentle Shepherd, still largely a court pastoral, in which " a man's a man " if born a gentleman, may be contrasted with the "Jolly Beggars"the one is like a minuet of the ladies of Versailles on the sward of the Swiss village near the Trianon, the other like the march of the maenads with Theroigne de Mericourt. Bamsay adds to the rough tunes and words of the ballads the refinement of the wits who in the " Easy " and " Johnstone " clubs talked over their cups of Prior and Pope, Addison and Gay. Burns inspires them with a fervour that thrills the most wooden of his race. We may clench the contrast by a representative example. This is from Bamsay's version of perhaps the best known of our songs,
"' Methinks around us on each bougli
A thousand Cupids play; Whilst through the groves I walk with you,
Each object makes me gay. Since your return the sun and moon
With brighter beams do shine, Streams murmur soft notes while they run
As they did lang syne."
Compare the verses in Burns
'' We twa hae run about the braes
And pou't the gowans fine ; But we've wandered mony a weary foot
Sin auld lang syne. We twa hae paidl'd in the burn,
Frae morning sun till dine : But seas between us braid hae roar'd
Sin auld lang syne."
Burns as a poet of the inanimate world doubtless derived hints from Thomson (i.e., the poet, not his correspondent), but in his power of tuning its manifestations to the moods of the mind he is more properly ranked as a forerunner of Wordsworth. He never follows the fashions of his century, except in his failuresin his efforts at set panegyric or fine letter-writing. His highest work knows nothing of " Damon " or " Musidora." He leaves the atmosphere of drawing-rooms for the ingle or the ale-house or the mountain breeze.
The affectations of his style are insignificant and rare. His prevailing characteristic is an absolute sincerity. A love for the lower forms of social life was his besetting sin ; Nature was his healing power. Burns compares himself to an JEolian harp, strung to every wind of heaven. His genius flows over all living and lifeless things with a sympathy that finds nothing mean or insignificant. An uprooted daisy becomes in his pages an enduring emblem of the fate of artless maid and simple bard. He disturbs a mouse's nest and finds in the " tim'rous beastie " a fellow-mortal doomed like himself to " thole the winter's sleety-dribble," and draws his oft-repeated moral. He walks abroad and, in a verse that glints with the light of its own rising sun before the fierce sarcasm of the " Holy Fair," describes the melodies of a " simmer Sunday morn." He loiters by Afton Water and " murmurs by the running brook a music sweeter than its own." He stands by a roofless tower, where " the howlet mourns in her dewy bower," and " sets the wild echoes flying," and adds to a perfect picture of the scene his famous vision of " Libertie." In a single stanza he concentrates the sentiment of many Night Thoughts
" The pale moon is setting beyond the white wave, And Time is setting wi' me, 0."
For other examples of the same graphic power we may refer to the course of his stream
" Whiles ow'r a linn the burnie plays
As through the glen it wimpled," &c,
or to the " Birks of Aberfeldy " or the " spate " in the dialogue of the " Brigs of Ayr." The poet is as much at home in the presence of this flood as by his " trottin' burn's meander." Familiar with all the seasons, he represents the phases of a northern winter with a frequency characteristic of his clime and of his fortunes; her tempests become anthems in his verse, and the sounding woods " raise his thoughts to Him that walketh on the wings of the wind ;" full of pity for the shelterless poor, the " ourie cattle," the " silly sheep," and the " helpless birds," he yet reflects that the bitter blast is not " so unkind as man's ingratitude." This constant tendency to ascend above the fair or wild features of outward things, or to penetrate beneath them, to make them symbols, to endow them with a voice to speak for humanity, distinguishes Burns as a descriptive poet from the rest of his countrymen. As a painter he is rivalled by Dunbar and James I., more rarely by Thomson and Bamsay. The " lilt" of TannahilPs finest verse is even more charming. But these writers rest in their art; their main care is for their own genius. The same is true in a minor degree of some of his great English successors. Keats has a palette of richer colours, but he seldom con-descends to " human nature's daily food." Shelley floats in a thin air to stars and mountain tops, and vanishes from our gaze like his skylark. Byron, in the midst of his revolutionary fervour, never forgets that he himself belongs to the " caste of Veré de Vere." Wordsworth's placid affection and magnanimity stretch beyond mankind, and, as in " Hart-leap-well" and the " Cuckoo," extend to bird and beast; he moralizes grandly on the vicissitudes of common life, but he does not enter into, because by right of superior virtue he places himself above them. " From the Lyrical Ballads," it has been said, " it does not appear that men eat or drink, marry or are given in marriage." We revere the monitor who, consciously good and great, gives us the dry light of truth, but we love the bard, nostree delicice, who is all firefire from heaven and Ayrshire earth mingling in the outburst of passion and of power, which is his poetry and the inheritance of his race. He had certainly neither culture nor philosophy enough to have written the " Ode on the Recollections of Child-hood," but to appreciate that ode requires an education. The sympathies of Burns, as broad as Wordsworth's, are more intense ; in turning his pages we feel ourselves more decidedly in the presence of one who joys with those who rejoice and mourns with those who mourn. He is never shallow, ever plain, and the expression of his feeling is so terse that it is always memorable. Of the people he speaks more directly for the people than any of our more considerable poets. Chaucer has a perfect hold of the homeliest phases of life, but he wants the lyric element, and the charm of his language has largely faded from untutored ears. Shakespeare, indeed, has at once a loftier vision and a wider grasp; for he sings of "Thebes and Pelops line," of Agincourt and Philippi, as of Falstaff, and Smug the joiner, and the "meanest flower that blows." But not even Shakespeare has put more thought into poetry which the most prosaic must appreciate than Burns has done. The latter moves in a narrower sphere and wants the strictly dramatic faculty, but its place is partly supplied by the vividness of his narrative. His realization of incident and character is manifested in the sketches in which the manners and pre-vailing fancies of his countrymen are immortalized in connection with local scenery. Among those almost every variety of disposition finds its favourite. The quiet households of the kingdom have received a sort of apotheosis in the " Cottar's Saturday Night." It has been objected that the subject does not afford scope for the more daring forms of the author's genius; but had he written no other poem, this heartful rendering of a good week's close in a God-fearing home, sincerely devout, and yet relieved from all suspicion of sermonizing by its humorous touches, would have secured a permanent place in our literature. It transcends Thomson and Beattie at their best, and will smell sweet like the actions of the just for generations to come. Lovers of rustic festivity may agree with Professor Craik in holding that the poet's greatest performance is his narrative of "Halloween," which for easy vigour, fulness of rollicking life, blended truth and fancy, is unsurpassed in its kind. Campbell, Wilson, Hazlitt, Montgomery, Burns himself, and the majority of his critics, have recorded their preference for "Tam 'O Shanter," where the weird superstitious element that has played so great a part in the imaginative work of this part of our island is brought more prominently forward. Few passages of description are finer than that of the roaring Doon and Alloway Kirk glimmering through the groaning trees; but the unique excellence of the piece consists in its variety, and a perfectly original combination of the terrible and the ludicrous. Like Goethe's Walpurgis Nacht, brought into closer contact with real life, it stretches from the drunken humours of Christopher Sly to a world of fantasies almost as brilliant as those of the Midsummer Night's Dream, half solemnized by the severer atmosphere of a sterner clime. The contrast between the lines " Kings may be blest," &c, and those which follow, beginning " But pleasures are like poppies spread," is typical of the per-petual antithesis of the author's thought and life, in which, at the back of every revelry, he sees the shadow of a warn-ing hand, and reads on the wall the writing, Omnia mxdantur. With equal or greater confidence other judges have pro-nounced Burns's masterpiece to be " The Jolly Beggars." Certainly no other single production so illustrates his power of exalting what is insignificant, glorifying what is mean, and elevating the lowest details by the force of his genius. " The form of the piece," says Mr Carlyle, " is a mere cantata, the theme the half-drunken snatches of a joyous band of vagabonds, while the grey leaves are floating on the gusts of the wind in the autumn of the year. But the whole is compacted, refined, and poured forth in one flood of liquid harmony. It is light, airy, and soft of movement, yet sharp and precise in its details ; every face is a portrait, and the whole a group in clear photography. The blanket of the night is drawn aside; in full ruddy gleaming light these rough tatterdemalions are seen at their boisterous revel wringing from Fate another hour of wassail and good cheer." Over the whole is flung a half-humorous, half-savage satireaimed, like a two-edged sword, at the laws and the law-breakers, in the acme of which the graceless crew are raised above the level of ordinary gipsies, footpads, and rogues, and are made to sit " on the hills like gods together, careless of mankind," and to launch their Titan thunders of rebellion against the world.
" A fig for those by law protected ; Liberty's a glorious feast; Courts for cowards were erected,
Churches built to please the priest."
A similar mixture of drollery and defiance appears in the justly-celebrated " Address to the Deil," which, mainly whimsical, is relieved by touches of pathos curiously quaint. " The effect of contrast," it has been observed, " was never more happily displayed than in the conception of such a being straying in lonely places and loitering among trees, or in the familiarity with which the poet lectures so awful a personage,"we may add, than in the inimitable outbreak, anticipatory of Professor Maurice, at the close
" O would you tak a thought an' men'."
Mr Carlyle, in reference to this passage, cannot resist the suggestion of a parallel from Sterne. " He is the father of curses and lies, said Dr Slop, and is cursed and damned already. I am sorry for it, quoth my Uncle Toby."
Burns fared ill at the hands of those who were not sorry for it, and who repeated with glib complacency every terrible belief of the system in which they had been trained. The most scathing of his Satires, under which head fall many of his minor and frequent passages in his major pieces, are directed against the false pride of birth, and what he conceived to be the false pretences of religion. The apologue of " Death and Dr Hornbook," " The Ordination," the song " No churchman am I for to rail and to write," the " Address to the Unco Guid," " Holy Willie," and above all "The Holy Fair," with its savage caricature of an ignorant ranter of the time called Moodie, and others of like stamp, not unnaturally provoked offence. As regards the poet's attitude towards some phases of Calvinism prevalent during his life, it has to be remarked that from the days of Dunbar till now there has been a degree of antagonism between Scotch verse and the more rigid forms of Scotch theology,
It must be admitted that in protesting against hypocrisy he has occasionally been led beyond the limits prescribed by good taste. He is at times abusive of those who differ from him. This, with other offences against decorum, which here and there disfigure his pages, can only be condoned by an appeal to_ the general tone of his writing, which is reverential. Burns had a firm faith in a Supreme Being, not as a vague mysteriour. Power, but as the Arbiter of human life. Amid the vicissitudes of his career he responds to the cottar's summons," Let us worship God."
'' An atheist's laugh's a poor exchange For Deity offended "
is the moral of all his verse, which treats seriously of religious matters. His prayers in rhyme give him a high place among secular Psalmists.
Like Chaucer, Burns was a great moralist, though a rough one. In the moments of his most intense revolt against conventional prejudice and sanctimonious affecta-tion, he is faithful to the great laws which underlie change, loyal in his veneration for the cardinal virtuesTruth, Justice, and Charity,and consistent in the warnings, to which his experience gives an unhappy force, against trans-gressions of Temperance. In the " Epistle to a Young Friend," the shrewdest advice is blended with exhortations appealing to the highest motive, that which transcends the calculation of consequences, and bids us walk in the straight path from the feeling of personal honour, and "for the glorious privilege of being independent." Burns, like Dante, " loved well because he hated, hated wickedness that hinders loving," and this feeling, as in the lines" Dweller in yon dungeon dark," sometimes breaks bounds; but his calmer moods are better represented by the well-known passages in the " Epistle to Davie," in which he preaches acquiescence in our lot, and a cheerful acceptance of our duties in the sphere where we are placed. This pkilosophie donee, never better sung by Horace, is the prevailing refrain of oui author's Songs. On these there are few words to add to the acclaim of a century. They have passed into the air we breathe; they are so real that they seem things rather than words, or, nearer still, living beings. They have taken all hearts, because they are the breath of his own; not polished cadences, but utterances as direct as laughter or tears. Since Sappho loved and sung, there has been no such national lyrist as Burns. Fine ballads, mostly anony-mous, existed in Scotland previous to his time; and shortly before a few authors had produced a few songs equal to some of his best. Such are Alexander Boss's " Wooed and married," Lowe's "Mary's Dream," "Auld Bobin Gray," " The Land o' the Leal," and the two versions of " The Flowers o' the Forest." From these and many of the older pieces in Bamsay's collection, Burns admits to have derived copious suggestions and impulses. He fed on the past literature of his country as Chaucer on the old fields of English thought, and
" Still the elements o' sang, In formless jumble, right and wrang, Went floating in his brain."
But he gave more than he received ; he brought forth an hundred-fold ; he summed up the stray material of the past, and added so much of his own that one of the most conspicuous features of his lyrical genius is its variety in new paths. Between the first of war songs, composed in a storm on a moor, and the pathos of " Mary in Heaven," he has made every chord in our northern life to vibrate. The distance from " Duncan Gray " to " Auld Lang Syne " is nearly as great as that from Falstaff to Ariel. There is the vehemence of battle, the wail of woe, the march of veterans " red-wat-shod," the smiles of meeting, the tears of parting friends, the gurgle of brown burns, the roar of the wind through pines, the rustle of barley rigs, the thunder on the hillall Scotland is in his verse. Let who will make her laws, Burns has made the songs, which her emigrants recall " by the long wash of Australasian seas," in which maidens are wooed, by which mothers lull their infants, which return " through open casements unto dying ears "they are the links, the watchwords, the masonic symbols of our race.
In his " Vision " the poet imagines his Muse (probably as real to him as to Homer) descending to address her votary beside the plough. After paying through her lips a generous tribute to his predecessors, he draws, as usual, a lesson from his own career, "by passion driven." The goddess counsels him to "preserve the dignity of man" and "trust the universal plan," and leaving a wreath of green holly to deck his brows, passes "in light away."
The poet passed away in darkness, but his name will never disappear from our literature. He stands before us as a feature of Nature; and the fact that he cannot be moved from the hearts of his countrymen, that they recognize and respect a man who has refused to mutilate human nature, and who at once celebrates and strives to harmonize its ethnical and Christian elements, marks a gulf still fixed between Scotland and the Spain with which Mr Buckle has associated it. " The generous verse of Burns," says Dr Craik, " springs out of the iron-bound Calvinism of the land like flowing water from Horeb's rock."
The first edition of Burns's Foetus was published at Kilmarnock in 1 vol. 8vo, in 1786; the second edition was published in Edinburgh in 1787 (2 vols. 8vo); the third edition appeared at Dumfries in 1793. After the poet's death Dr Currie of Liverpool issued a collected edition of his works, with a Life, for the benefit of his widow and family (4 vols. 8vo, Lond. 1800). This included letters as well as poems, but was far from being complete. The edition of Allan Cunningham (8 vols. 8vo. Lond. 1834) contains a large number of pieces that are not to be found in Currie's edition. The, Life, and Works of Burns, by Dr Robert Chambers (Edin. 1851-2), has the distinctive feature that the poems are arranged in chronological order, and interwoven with the narrative of the poet's life, which is, perhaps, the fullest and most precise in its details that has appeared. The Kilmarnock Popular Edition (2 vols. Kilmarnock, 1871) pos-sesses special interest from the fact that the first volume contains an exact reprint, with fac-simile title-page, of the original edition of 1786. It deserves notice that within a year of the publication of the first Edinburgh edition, two separate editions of the poems were issued in America, at New York and Philadelphia, 1788.
The Life of Bams, by J. Gibson Loekhart (1828), has passed through several editions. Among the numerous critical estimates of the poet the foremost place is given by universal consent to the essay of Carlyle, which first appeared in the Edinburgh Beview (1828), and is reprinted, among his miscellaneous essays. (J. N.)