MARGARET FULLER ON BURNS. MARGARET FULLER, the distinguished American writer, in describing her tour in Scotland, in 1846, pays one of the most eloquent tributes to the genius and essential manhood of Burns that has ever been written. In her journal, passing through the Scott country, she writes: Both "On the coach with us was a gentleman coming from London to make his yearly visit to the neighborhood of Burns, in which he was born. 'I can now,' said he,' go but once a year; when a boy I never let a week pass without visiting the house of Burns.' He afterwards observed, as every step woke us to fresh recollections of Walter Scott, that Scott, with all his vast range of talent, knowledge and activity, was a poet of the past only, and in his inmost heart wedded to the habits of a feudal aristocracy, while Burns is the poet of the present and the future, the man of the people, and throughout a genuine man. This is true enough; but for my part I cannot endure a comparison which by a breath of coolness depreciates either. were wanted; each acted the important part assigned him by destiny with a wonderful thoroughness and completeness. Scott breathed the breath just fleeting from the forms of ancient Scottish heroism and poesy into new-he made for us the bridge by which we have gone into the old Ossianic hall and caught the meaning just as it was about to pass from us forever. Burns is full of the noble, genuine democracy which seeks not to destroy royalty, but to make all men kings, as he himself was, in nature and in action. They belong to the same world; they are pillars of the same church, though they uphold its starry roof from opposite sides. Burns was much the rarer man; precisely because he had most of common nature on a grand scale; his humor, his passion, his sweetness, are all his own; they need no picturesque or romantic accessories to give them due relief; looked at by all lights they are the same. Since Adam, there has been none that approached nearer fitness to stand up before God and angels in the naked majesty of manhood than Robert Burns; but there was a serpent in his field also! Yet, but for his fault, we could never have seen brought out the brave and patriotic modesty with which he owned it. Shame on him who could bear to think of fault in this rich jewel, unless reminded by such confession," BURNS AND PITT. A CORRESPONDENT in an English newspaper "has unearthed an interesting contemporary criticism of Burns. It is by William Pitt, and is to this effect :-'I can think of no verse, since Shakespeare's, that has so much the appearance of coming sweetly from nature as that of Burns.'" If by the word "unearthed" it is intended to convey the impression that the opinion expressed by Pitt is a discovery, the writer is altogether mistaken. Pitt's opinion was first quoted by Lockhart, in his "Life of Burns," which was published in 1828. It was Lockhart's work which drew forth Carlyle's magnificent essay on the poet. Pitt's words have, of course, been quoted in every good biography of Burns since Lockhart's time. The great Minister was not essentially a literary man, though he wrote some verses, but his reference to the poetry of our National Bard shows that he possessed a sound literary instinct. It was Pitt's Ministry, moreover, that conferred a pension of £200 upon Dibdin, the author of so many admirable sea songs. Singularly enough, it was Fox's Ministry that reduced that poet's pension by one-half-surely a mean and discreditable act. Pitt was well aware of the poetic merits of Burns, and was, in fact, specially reminded of his claims by Addington when the poet was living. But, according to Allan Cunningham-not always a trustworthy authorityPitt "pushed the bottle to Lord Melville, and did nothing." Possibly Burns's political opinions clouded his chances with the Ministry; and Lockhart is not far wrong when he says that, had Burns put forth some newspaper squibs upon Lepaux and Carnot, or a smart pamphlet "On the State of the Country," he might have been more attended to in his lifetime. There is no doubt much truth in that view-for, although the nation was on the eve of a great literary revival, to which Burns vastly contributed, yet he lived at a time when mean work done for a political party was more assured of reward than the noblest poetic service conferred upon mankind. Whatever Burns's political opinions might be, he was always a patriot; and even from a party point of view he would have been regarded with lenity, had it been known that he declined to earn £50 a year by contributing an occasional political article to an Opposition newspaper. After all, Lord Rosebery's defence of, or apology for, Pitt's attitude toward literary claimants is not wholly unsound. Pitt, he says, in his sketch of the great Minister, "may have believed that money does not brace but relax the energies of literature; that more Miltons have remained mute and inglorious under the suffocation of wealth than under the frosts of penury; that, in a word, half the best literature of the world has been produced by duns." Lord Rosebery shrewdly adds that "pensionless poetry may at least bear comparison with that which has flourished upon bounties;" and he gives a noble list of literary men, including Burns, Wordsworth, Cowper, Scott, and Coleridge, who flourished bountiless," under the chill rays of Pitt." Again, "Nothing, Pitt may have thought, is so difficult as for a Parliamentary Government to encourage literature. It may begin by encouraging a Shakespeare, but it is far more likely to discover a Pye. You start with a genius and end with a job." These words were written before the death of Tennyson, but at the present moment they are profoundly significant. The Laureateship is vacant, and there is not the slightest indication of a desire on the part of the Government to make an appointment. It may be thought that, in the absence of a Shakespeare, they have no appetite for any of the vast batch of waiting Pyes, in the creation of whom Nature has had no finger, but whom art has baked from very mixed materials. In brief, Lord Rosebery would fain have a genius for the next Laureate, and he shudders at the bare possibility of perpetrating a job in the selection of a Pye that would "stink in the nostrils of the nation." ROBIN. BY REV. ARTHUR JOHN LOCKHART. HERE'S a health to you,-Robin! Robin! Ha! did they scorn you,-Robin! Robin! Here's a health to you,-Robin! Robin! Brimmed with its portion of clearest dew. Deck it with heather, or hawthorn blossom, Pluck the red rose, for Robin! Robin! Ah! but our love for you,-Robin! Robin! Here's a health to you,-Robin! Robin! CARLYLE ON BURNS. BY JOHN MUIR, F.S.A. SCOT. TOWARD the close of last century, Ecclefechan presented an appearance differing little from its aspect to-day. Lying in a hollow surrounded by wooded slopes, it consisted of two rows of houses of a plain, unornamental character, which were annually whitewashed in honor of the village fair. Down one side of this single street, at that period, ran an open brook, which has been immortalized in Sartor Resartus as "the little Kuhbach," but which is now, for sanitary reasons, built over. The street is irregularly formed a circumstance due not only to the disposition of the houses, but also to the windings of the little stream which gushes kindly by, wimpling and gurgling on its way to join the Mein water at the foot of the town, before the Mein loses itself in the river Annan. On the west side of the burn the houses are of single and two stories almost alternately, presenting a peculiarly notched appearance, and when seen from a distance, resembling the battlements of an imposing fortress. In this little village the poet Burns might frequently have been seen during the last years of his life, while acting temporarily as Supervisor during the illness of that official. He made at least two visits to Ecclefechan, a record of which has been preserved in print. One of these is recorded by an individual who was lying in the womb of Eternity at the time of the poet's first recorded visit; and the other, which took place in the early spring of the year prior to his death, has been recorded by Burns himself. On the day following his entry into Ecclefechan, he had the misfortune to be snowed up; and, to break the monotony of his enforced imprisonment in the village inn, he imbibed to an extent which has left perceptible traces of a suggestive nature on the orthography of the following letter-a strange mixture of humor, exaggeration, and unconscious ungratefulness: ECCLEFECHAN, February 7, 1795. MY DEAR THOMSON,-You cannot have any idea of the predicament in which I write you. In the course of my duty as Supervisor (in which capacity I have acted of late), I came yesternight to this unfortunate, wicked little vil lage. I would have gone forward, but snows of ten feet deep have impeded my progress. I have tried to " gae back the gate I cam' again," but the same obstacle has shut me up within insuperable bars. To add to my misfortune, since dinner a scraper has been torturing cat-gut, in sounds that would have insulted the dying agonies of a sow under the hand of a butcher, and thinks himself, on that very account, exceeding good company. In fact, I have been in a dilemma, either to get drunk, to forget my miseries; or to hang myself, to get rid of them; like a prudent man (a character congenial to my every thought, word, and deed), I, of two evils, have chosen the least, and am very drunk, at your service! I wrote you yesterday from Dumfries. I had not time then to tell you all I wanted to say; and, heaven knows, at present I have not capacity. Do you know an air-I am sure you must know it"We'll gang nae mair to yon town?" I think, in slowish time, it would make an excellent song. I am highly delighted with it; and if you should think it worthy of your attention, I have a fair dame in my eye to whom I would |