and several other of his now celebrated productions, were included in the volume. The reader should refer to the preface, at once modest and distinct in self-assertion, with which the ploughman-poet introduced his verses. While indulging in gratuitous self-depreciation as compared with Allan Ramsay or Fergusson, "the author tells him [the possible critic] once for all that he certainly looks upon himself as possessed of some poetic abilities."

This was the crisis of Burns's life. The book was well received from the first, and cleared for its writer the small but acceptable sum of nearly £20. A letter came from Dr. Blacklock to a friend of Burns, which entirely overthrew the poet's Jamaican scheme, enlarged his practical views, and encouraged him to try his opportunities in Edinburgh. He arrived in the Scottish capital in November 1786, without either acquaintances there or letters of introduction : but he soon got to know all sorts of leading people, whether in literature or in fashion and social rank, and surprised all by his brilliant conversational powers, though he was not forward in talking unless he had something substantial to say. His demeanour was worthy of his exceptional position in its complicated bearings; and he was above all the tricks of a man who is showing off, or allowing others to show him off. He spent two winters in Edinburgh, leaving the city finally in February 1788; meanwhile he had been visiting various other parts of Scotland, and had crossed the English Border to Newcastle and Carlisle. A new edition of his poems, under the patronage of Dugald Stewart and many other celebrities, had been published in Edinburgh in April 1787; it consisted of 2800 copies, for which a subscription-list of 1500 names had been obtained, and it brought in nearly £600 to the poet. So far all was well. But Burns, already too convivial as an Ayrshire peasant,

naturally grew still more convivial as the cynosure of social gatherings in Edinburgh; and the éclat and excitement of this episode in his history were not the natural precursors and props for a retired laborious country-life, in which hard field-work was again to be his means of subsistence, and the alleviator of his load was to be the rustic Jean Armour. The latter, it should be mentioned, presented her lover, in the spring of 1778, with a second pair of twins, who died almost immediately; for she and Burns had met again during one of the intervals of his Edinburgh sojourn, when her parents naturally courted his return. Her second frailty caused her exclusion from the paternal home; but some degree of reconciliation had been attained by the time of her delivery. Burns's enamoured correspondence with Mrs. M'Lehose (the "Clarinda" of his letters) was going on at its hottest about the same period.

In the early summer of 1788 Burns returned to Ayrshire. He espoused Jean by making a public declaration of marriage; liberally advanced £180 to his brother Gilbert, to give him a start in life; and took for himself a somewhat considerable farm at Ellisland in Dumfries-shire. Here he was domiciled before the end of June; and resumed, among other rural occupations, the exercise of his skill as a ploughman, at which (it is pleasant to learn) he was a capital hand. Soon, however, he found that his income needed eking out; and, as nothing more congenial offered as an outlet for his energies, he applied to be appointed excise-officer for his own vicinity, and obtained this post through the interest of Mr. Graham of Fintray. His pay was at first the pittance of £50 per annum, increased after a time to £70.

Burns an exciseman is a rather dejecting picture to contemplate. Still, if we exclude idealisms and prejudices, and take a plain common-sense view of the practicalities of

the case, it might seem that the peasant poet, married to his early sweetheart who proved an affectionate wife; settled on a farm of his own, the management of which he understood; enthusiastically admired for his genius by his countrymen, from the noblest duke to the most tattered gaberlunzie; habitually writing short pieces which he could throw off rapidly athwart a pressure of occupations, and which he could readily get published at once in some form or other, thereby keeping his name and fame in ever fresh remembrance; and having a small settled income, from a government post, to fall back upon-was not, as human lots go, a person worthy of mere commiseration, and altogether battered by the Fates. We hear of his having two men and two women servants; nine or ten milch-cows; some young cattle; four horses; and several pet sheep, of which he was fond. The position looks like an endurable one to begin with, and likely to continue in a steady course of quiet progressive improvement. Unfortunately this was not to be. The centre of Burns's hopes of material comfort and independence was his farm: but, after he had been there about three years and a half, he found that his duties in the excise interfered with the satisfactory conduct of agricultural operations, and he gave the farm up. It may indeed be surmised that, if his habits had been steadier, and himself more faithful to the severe traditions of his father's life, if he had not allowed the jolly dogs and loose fishes of his neighbourhood to prey upon his leisure, and if he had not grown a more and more helpless slave of the devil of drink, he might have sufficed for both occupations. However that may be, he did not thus suffice: and we may well infer that things had come to a bad pass with the farm when Burns, having to make his option between that and a government stipend of £70 a year, chose the latter as the

mainstay of his household. About the end of 1791, he removed to a small house in the town of Dumfries (how many thousands of people have looked since then with reverence on its mean outside!) and here he remained for the brief residue of his life.

Burns had a certain Jacobite and tory tone of political sentiment; but every great and unprosperous genius, born in the lower ranks of society, is a potential democrat; and the era of the French Revolution was not one to leave the secret places of such a soul unstirred. More than once Burns used some expressions regarding the Revolution not strictly befitting an officer in the excise service of King George the Third-rather suitable to a man of genius and insight: this spoiled his prospects in the excise, and very nearly resulted in his dismissal. The chances open to his aspirations were that he might within a moderate number of years rise to the position of supervisor, with about £200 a year, any amount of hard work, and no leisure—and then, after another interval of years, to the post of collector at about £300 to £400. This latter promotion would have relieved him from the severer toils of business, and would have satisfied his desires. "A life of literary leisure, with a decent competence, is the summit of my wishes,” he said in one of his letters. In fact, however, he never rose out of the ranks in the excise service.

The majority of the songs which Burns wrote subsequently to his first Edinburgh edition were sent to Johnson's Scots Musical Museum, published in that city, and at a later date, to the Collection of Original Scottish Airs edited and published by Mr. George Thomson. In this work he wrote the words for many long-popular melodies— a field for the exercise of his genius which roused his heartiest and most generous sympathies. His first letter reply

work are breathing and potent realities, for one Englishman to whom Shakspeare is any more than a name. It may certainly be said that the more they admired the poet, the less willing should his countrymen have been to leave the man huddled in obscurity: this (as I said at starting) is a point already more than sufficiently debated elsewhere.

At the present time of day it would be almost a futility to analyse, in such space and in such method as I have at my disposal, the individual or characteristic merits of the poems of Burns. Every Scotchman is born to an intuition of them which is as much as saying that whatever is strongest, deepest, broadest, and finest, in that remarkable concrete the Scotch national character, finds its euthanasia in these immortal verses. The ideal Scotchman is the man to whom Burns's poems most come home. They give all his distinctive faculties and foibles; only with this modification necessary to the excellence of the poetic result that the prudential and prosaic attributes-what one might call the minus quantities—of the Scotch character are left in proportion less than the reality, while the plus quantities-the geniality, fervency, and even rampancy, of whatever kind—are thrown in with a prodigal and affectionate exuberance. But all are there-the less as well as the more kindly excesses. Burns is in fact the demigod-the prophet, priest, and king-of Scotland: the Scotchman who, more than any other man or men, knits together at the present moment Scotchmen all over the globe, and may prolong and intensify for ages the nationalising work in which the Battle of Bannockburn and the anti-prelatical reformation under Knox were earlier yet it may be hardly so powerful coefficients. This is after all the greatest of Burns's many and great poetic merits-that he has Scoti