were frequently employed in disposing, before the dawn, of importations, made during the cloud of night; and though Burns, perhaps, took no part in the traffic, he associated with those who carried it on, and seemed to think that insight into new ways of life, and human character, more than recompensed him for the risk he ran. It is dangerous for a bare hand to pluck a lily from among nettles; men of few virtues and many follies are unsafe companions. "I have often observed," he says, "in the course of my experience of human life, that every man, even the worst, has something good about him, though very often nothing else than a happy temperament of constitution inclining him to this or that virtue. For this reason, no man can say in what degree any other person, besides himself, can be with strict justice called wicked. Let any of the strictest character for regularity of conduct among us examine, impartially, how many vices he has never been guilty of, not from any care or vigilance, but for want of opportunity; and how many of the weaknesses of mankind he has escaped, because he was out of the line of such temptation. I say, any man who can thus think will scan the failings, nay, the faults and crimes, of mankind around him with a brother's eye. I have often courted the acquaintance of that part of mankind, commonly known by the ordinary phrase of blackguards, sometimes further than was consistent with the safety of my character. Those who, by thoughtless prodigality or headstrong passions, have been driven to ruin, though disgraced by follies, I have yet found among them, in not a few instances, some of the noblest virtues, magnanimity, generosity, disinterested friendship, and even modesty." All this is true; but men of evil deeds are not, till they have purified themselves, fit companions for the young and the inflammable. There is no human being so depraved as to be without something which connects him with the sympathies of life. Dirk Hatteraick, before he hung himself, made out a balanced account to his owners, shewing that, though he had cut throats and drowned bantlings as a smuggler, he could reckon with the house of Middleburg for every stiver. It is more pleasing to perceive, in the Poet's early prose, sentiments similar to those which he afterwards more poetically expressed in his "Address to the Rigidly Righteous.”

"Then gently scan your brother man,
Still gentler sister woman;
Tho' they may gang a kennin' wrang,
To step aside is human.

One point must still be greatly dark,
The reason why they do it;
And just as lamely can ye mark,

How far, perhaps, they rue it."

The people of Kyle were slow in appreciating this philosophy. When they saw him

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hand-and-glove with roving smugglers, or sitting with loose comrades, who scorned the decencies of life, or looking seriously at a horde of gypsies huddled together in a kiln, or musing among randie, gangrel bodies" in Poosie Nancie's, they could not know that, like a painter, he was studying character, and making sketches for future pictures of life and manners: they saw nothing but danger to himself from such society. And here lies the secret of the complaint he has recorded against the world, in his twenty-fourth year.-“I don't well know what is the reason of it, but, somehow or other, though I am pretty generally beloved, yet I never could find the art of commanding respect. I imagine it is owing to my being deficient in, what Sterne calls, the understrapping virtue of discretion." No doubt of it. The sober and sedate saw that he respected not himself; they loved him for his manliness of character, and eloquence, and independence ; but they grieved for a weakness out of which they could not see that strength and moral beauty would come.

The glory of his poetry was purchased at a price too dear for himself. "In Irvine," says Gilbert, "he had contracted some acquaintance of a freer manner of thinking, whose society prepared him for overleaping the bounds of rigid virtue, which had hitherto restrained him."-"The principal thing which gave my mind a turn," says Burns to Dr. Moore, "was a friendship I formed with a young fellow, a very noble character, but a hapless child of misfortune. He was the son of a simple mechanic; but a great man, taking him under his patronage, gave him a genteel education, with a view of bettering his situation in life. The patron dying, just as he was ready to launch out into the world, he went to sea in despair. His mind was fraught with independence, magnanimity, and every manly virtue. I loved and admired him to a degree of enthusiasm, and, of course, strove to imitate him; in some measure I succeeded. I had pride before; but he taught it to flow in proper channels. His knowledge of the world was vastly superior to mine, and I was all attention to learn. He was the only man I ever saw who was a greater fool than myself, where woman was the presiding star; but he spoke of illicit love with the levity of a sailor, which hitherto I had regarded with horror. Here his friendship did me a mischief." Richard Brown, to whom this refers, survived the storms which threatened shipwreck to his youth, and lived and died respected. When spoken to on the subject, he exclaimed, "Illicit love! levity of a sailor! The Poet had nothing to learn that way when I saw him first."

That Burns talked and thought too freely and indiscreetly, in his early years, we have evidence in verse. In his memorandum-book

"There was a lad was born in Kyle,
But what'n a day o' what'n a style
I doubt its hardly worth our while
To be sae nice wi' Robin.

"The gossip keekit in his loof,

Quo' she, wha lives will see the proof, This waly boy will be nae coof

I think we'll ca' him Robin.

"But sure as three times three mak nine, I see, by ilka score and line,

This chap will dearly like our kin',

So leeze me on thee, Robin."

In these lines he approaches the border-land between modesty and impropriety-we must quote no farther, nor seek to shew the Poet in still merrier moods. Burns, in all respects, arose from the people: he worked his way out of the darkness, drudgery, and vulgarities of rustic life, and, in spite of poverty, pain, and disappointment, emerged into the light of heaven. He was surrounded by coarse and boisterous companions, who were fit for admiring the ruder sallies of his wit, but incapable of understanding those touches of moral pathos and exquisite sensibility with which his sharpest things are accompanied. They perceived but the thorns of the rose-they felt not its fine odour. The spirit of poesie led him, in much peril, through the prosaic wilderness around, and prepared him for asserting his right to one of the highest places in the land of song.

As the elder Burness was now dead, the Poet had to exercise his own judgment in the affairs of Mossgiel at first all seemed to prosper."I had entered," he 66 says, upon this farm with a full resolution-Come, go to, I will be wise; I read farming books; I calculated crops; I attended markets; and, in short, in spite of the devil, the world and the flesh, I believe I should have been a wise man; but the first year, from unfortunately buying bad seed, the second from the late harvest, we lost half our crops. This overset all my wisdom, and I returned, 'like the dog to his vomit, and the sow that was washed to her wallowing in the mire.'" "The farm of Mossgiel," says Gilbert, "lies very high, and mostly on a cold, wet bottom. The first four years that we were on the farm were very frosty, and the spring was very late. Our crops, in consequence, were very unprofitable, and, notwithstanding our utmost diligence and economy, we found ourselves obliged to give up our bargain, with the loss of a considerable portion of our original stock." The judgment could not

to do: when he put pen to paper, all thoughts of crops and cattle vanished; he only noted down ends of verse and fragments of song: his copy of Small's Treatise on Ploughs is now before me; not one remark appears on the margins; but on the title-page is written "Robert Burns, Poet." He had now decided on his vocation.

This study of song, love of reading, wanderings in woods, nocturnal excursions in matters of love, and choice of companions, who had seen much and had much to tell, was, unconsciously to himself, forcing Burns upon the regions of poesie. To these may be added the establishment of a club, in which subjects of a moral or domestic nature were discussed. The Tarbolton club consisted of some halfdozen young lads, sons of farmers; the Poet who planned it was the ruling star; the place of meeting was a small public-house in the village; the sum expended by each was not to exceed three-pence, and, with the humble cheer which this could bring, they were, when the debate was concluded, to toast their lasses and the continuance of friendship. Here he found a vent for his own notions, and as the club met regularly and continued for years, he disciplined himself into something of a debater and acquired a readiness and fluency of language; he was never at a loss for thoughts.

Burns drew up the regulations.-"As the great end of human society," says the exordium, "is to become wiser and better, this ought, therefore, to be the principal view of every man in every station of life. But, as experience has taught us that such studies as inform the head and mend the heart, when long continued, are apt to exhaust the faculties of the mind, it has been found proper to relieve and unbend the mind, by some employment or another, that may be agreeable enough to keep its powers in exercise, but, at the same time, not so serious as to exhaust them. But, superadded to this, by far the greater part of mankind are under the necessity of earning the sustenance of human life, by the labour of their bodies, whereby not only the faculties of the mind, but the sinews and nerves of the body, are so fatigued that it is absolutely necessary to have recourse to some amusement or diversion, to relieve the wearied man, worn down with the necessary labours of life." The first meeting was held on Halloween, in the year 1780, Burns was president, and the question of debate was, "Suppose a young man, bred a farmer, but without any fortune, has it in his power to marry either of two women, the one a girl of large fortune, but neither handsome

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in person, nor agreeable in conversation, but who can manage the household affairs of a farm well enough; the other of them a girl every way agreeable, in person, conversation, and behaviour, but without any fortune: which of them shall he choose?" Other questions of a similar tendency were discussed, and many matters regarding domestic duties and social obligations were considered. This rustic institution united the means of instruction with happiness; but, on the removal of the poet from Lochlea, it lost the spirit which gave it life, and, dissensions arising, the club was scattered, and the records, much of them in Burns' hand-writing, destroyed.

No sooner was the Poet settled at Mossgiel, than he was requested to aid in forming a similar club in Mauchline. The regulations of the Tarbolton institution suggested those of the other; but the fines for non-attendance, instead of being spent in drink, were laid out in the purchase of books; the first work thus obtained was the Mirror, the second the Lounger, and the time was not distant when the founder's genius was to supply them with a work not destined soon to die. This society subscribed for the first edition of the poems of its celebrated associate. The members were originally country lads, chiefly sons of husbandmen-a description of persons, in the opinion of Burns, more agreeable in their manners, and more desirous of improvement, than the smart, selfconceited mechanics of towns, who were ready to wrangle and dispute on all topics, and whose vanity would never allow that they were confuted.

One of the biographers of Burns has raised what the Poet calls "a philosophic reek," on the propriety of refining the minds of hinds and farmers, by means of works of elegance and delicacy without believing, with Currie, that if not a positive evil, it is a doubtful blessing, we may question whether more than a dozen, out of ten thousand hinds and mechanics, would feel inconvenience from increased delicacy of taste. On a vast number such lessons would be utterly lost, for no polish can convert a common pebble into a diamond; while, from the minds of many, it would remove the weeds with the same discriminating hand that the Poet cleared his riggs of corn, and "spared the symbol dear," the Scottish thistle. In truth, the danger which Currie dreaded has been encountered and overcome; more than all the works he enumerated, as forming the reading of Burns, are to be found in the hands of the peasantry of Scotland. Milton, Thomson, Young, poets of the highest order and of polished elegance, are as well known to the peasantry as the Bible is: yet no one has complained that a furrow more or less has been drawn in consequence, that our shepherds smear their sheep with too delicate a finger,

and that our rustics are oppressed by a fastidious nicety of taste.

It would have been better for the Poet if he had maintained that purity in himself, which, in the regulations of his clubs, he desired to see in others. The consequences of keeping company with the free and the joyous, were now to be manifested. Soon after his father's death, one of his mother's maids, in person not at all attractive, produced his

"Sonsie, smirking, dear-bought Bess," and furnished him with the opportunity of standing, as a sinner, on the stool of repentance, and commemorating the event in rhymes, licentious as well as humorous. He had already sung of his own birth in a free and witty way, and he now put a song into the mouth of the partner of his folly, in which she cries, with rather more of levity than sorrow

"Wha will own he did the fau't,
Wha will buy the groanin-maut,
Wha will tell me how to ca't?

The rantin' dog, the daddie o't.
"When I mount the creepie chair,
Wha will sit beside me there?

Gie me Rob, I'll ask nae mair,

The rantin' dog, the daddie o't.”

Nor can any one applaud the taste of "Rob the Rhymer's Address to his Illegitimate Child:" he glories in a fault which, he imagines, perplexed the church; for, he sought not to conceal from himself, that both the minister and elders were all but afraid of meddling with a delinquent, who could make the country merry at their expense. In a third poem, he gives a ludicrous account of his appearance before the session, and of the admonition he received. Instead of promising amendment, he draws consolation from Scripture with equal audacity

and wit:

"King David, o' poetic brief,

Wrought 'mang the lasses such mischief,
As fill'd his after life with grief,
An' bluidy rants,

An' yet he's rank'd amang the chief
O' lang-syne saunts.

"And maybe, Tam, for a' my cants,
My wicked rhymes, an' drucken rants,
I'll gi'e auld cloven Clootie's haunts
An unco slip yet,

An' snugly sit amang the saunts
At Davie's hip yet."

It is painful to touch, even with a gentle hand, on the moral sores of so fine a genius, but his character cannot be understood otherwise: almost any other erring youth would have resigned himself, without resistance, to the discipline of the kirk, and bowed to its rebuke: Burns was not to be so tamed-stricken, he struck again, and, instead of courting silence and seclusion, sung a new song, and walked out into the open sunshine of remark and ob

servation. I cannot set this regardlessness down to growing hardness within, nor to petrified feeling it arose from a want of taste in seeking distinction. "The mair they talk, I'm kenn'd the better," he had already adopted as a motto; he knew that folly such as his was not uncommon, and he hoped, for one person who censured, there would be two who thought him a clever fellow, with wit at will-a little of a sinner, but a great deal of a poet.

This desire of distinction was strong in Burns. In those days he would not let a five pound note pass through his hands, without bearing away a witty endorsement in rhyme: a drinking-glass always afforded space for a verse: the blank leaf of a book was a favourite place for a stanza; and the windows of inns, and even dwelling-houses, which he frequented, exhibit to this day lively sallies from his hand. Yet, perhaps, a love of fame was not stronger in him than in others. In his time magazines were few, and newspapers not numerous; into the daily, weekly, or monthly papers, aspirants in verse can now pour their effusions: but Burns had no such facilities when he started, and was obliged to take the nearest way to notice. He began, likewise, to talk of his exploits over the pint-stoup: he gave to himself, in one of his rhymes, the name of “ drunken ranter," and, with ordinary powers, and but a moderate inclination, desired to be numbered with five-bottle debauchees, who saw three horns on the moon, and had

"A voice like the sea, and a drouth like a whale."

He went farther: he asserted, with Meston, good rhyme to be the product of good drink,

and sung

"I've seen me daizet upon a time

I scarce could wink, or see a styme,
Just ae half-mutchkin does me prime,
Ought less is little ;

Then back I rattle on the rhyme
As gleg's a whittle."

This vaunted insobriety in verse must not be taken literally, We have seen Burns passionately in love in rhyme we know that he was not less so with his living goddess of the hour; but it was otherwise with him in the matter of strong drink. He was no practised toper, but thought it necessary to look a gay fellow in poetry. Inspiration, in both ancient and modern times, has been imputed to wine, and Burns wished to be thought inspired. Wine was out of his reach; his muse found her themes among humble and familiar things, and it was his boast that the Ferintosh could work intellectual wonders as well as the Falernian, For others, he wished Parnassus a vineyard; but for himself, he preferred the banks of the Ayr or the Lugar, to those of Helicon, and the juice of barley to that of the grape.

When he had neither money to spend on liquor, nor health to relish it, he was chanting songs in honour of tippling; putting himself down in the list of topers, and recording that whiskey was the northern ambrosia, too good for all, save gods or Scotsmen. This is not unlike the madness of Johnson from poverty, at College. In the case of Burns, there was something national as well as personal: whiskey and ale are the offspring of the Scottish vales, and he preferred them to "dearthfu' wine or foreign gill." Liquor was not then, and I believe never was, a settled desire of soul with the Poet.

When Burns supposed that his "drunken rants" and nocturnal excursions among the lasses of Kyle had made him

-Slander's common speech,

A text for infamy to preach,"

he found, to his surprise, that in another way he had won the approbation of certain ministers of the kirk of Scotland. How this came about may be briefly described. Calvinism, at that time, was agitated with a schism among its professors, and the factions were known in the west by the names of Old Light and New Light. The Old Light enthusiasts aspired to be ranked with the purest of the Covenanters ; they patronized austerity of manners and humility of dress, and stigmatized much that the world loved, as things vain and unessential to salvation. The New Light countenanced no such self-denial; men were permitted to gallop on Sunday, to make merry and enjoy themselves; and women were indulged in the article of dress, and failings or follies were treated with mercy at least, if not indulgence. The

former refused to lean on the slender reed of human works, thought a good deed savoured of selfishness, and that faith, and faith alone, was the light which led to heaven: the latter thought a cheerful heart was an acceptable thing with God; that good works helped to make a good end, and that faith, and faith alone, was not religion, but a false light, which led to perdition, Like the writers in the late singular controversy on Art and Nature in Poetry, the divines of the west of Scotland perhaps never concluded that faith and works were both essential to salvation, and that, in truth, Christianity required them, Each side thundered from the pulpit; their sermons partook of the character of curses, and their conversation in private life had the hue of controversy. Their parishioners, too, raised up their voices-for, in Scotland, the meanest peasant can be eloquent and puzzling on speculative theology-and the whole land rung with mystical discussions on effectual calling, free grace, and predestination, when Burns precipitated himself into the midst of the conflict.

The Poet sided with the New Light faction. For this several reasons may be assigned-he was not educated closely in the tenets of Cal