the same commentator adds" such is the glowing picture which the poet gives of youth, and health, and voluptuous beauty. But let no lady envy the poetic elevation of poor Chloris; her situation in poetry is splendid-her situation in life merits our pity-perhaps our charity."

Of all Burns's love songs, the best, in his own opinion, was that which begins,

"Yestreen I had a pint o' wine,

A place where body saw na'."

Allan Cunningham says, "if the poet thought so, I am sorry for it; while Mr Hamilton Paul fully concurs in the author's own estimate of the performance. "I believe, however," says Cunningham, "Anna wi' the gowden locks was no imaginary person. Like the dame in the old song, She brew'd gude ale for gentlemen; and while she served the bard with a pint of wine, allowed her customer leisure to admire her, as hostler wives should do.'

6

There is in the same collection a love-song, which unites the suffrages, and ever will do so, of all men. It has furnished Byron with a motto, and Scott has said that that motto is "worth a thousand romances."

"Had we never loved sae kindly,
Had we never loved sae blindly,
Never met,-or never parted,

We had ne'er been broken-hearted."

The "Nancy" of this moving strain was, according to Cunningham, another fair and somewhat frail dame of Dumfries-shire. *

I envy no one the task of inquiring minutely in. how far these traditions, for such unquestionably

* Cunningham's Scottish Songs, vol. iv. p. 178.

they are, and faithfully conveyed by Allan Cunningham, rest on the foundation of truth. They refer at worst to occasional errors. “Many insinuations," says Mr Gray, " have been made against the poet's character as a husband, but without the slightest proof; and I might pass from the charge with that neglect which it merits; but I am happy to say that I have in exculpation the direct evi dence of Mrs Burns herself, who, among many amiable and respectable qualities, ranks a veneration for the memory of her departed husband, whom she never names but in terms of the profoundest respect and the deepest regret, to lament his misfortunes, or to extol his kindnesses to herself, not as the momentary overflowings of the heart in a season of penitence for offences generously forgiven, but an habitual tenderness, which ended only with his life. I place this evidence, which I am proud to bring forward on her own authority, against a thousand anonymous calumnies."

Among the effusions, not amatory, which Burns contributed to Mr Thomson's Collection, the famous song of Bannockburn holds the first place. We have already seen in how lively a manner Burns's feelings were kindled when he visited that glorious field. According to tradition, the tune played when Bruce led his troops to the charge, was Hey tuttie tattie; and it was humming this old air as he rode by himself through Glenkens in Galloway, during a terrific storm of wind and rain, that the poet composed his immortal lyric in its first and noblest form. † This is one

66

* Letter in Gilbert Burns's edition, vol. i. app. v.p. 437. †The last line of each stanza was subsequently length

more instance of his delight in the sterner aspects of nature.

"Come, winter, with thine angry howl,

And raging bend the naked tree-"

"There is hardly," says he in one of his letters, "there is scarcely any earthly object gives me more-I do not know if I should call it pleasure

but something which exalts me, something which enraptures me-than to walk in the sheltered side of a wood in a cloudy winter day, and hear the stormy wind howling among the trees, and raving over the plain. It is my best season for devotion: my mind is wrapt up in a kind of enthusiasm to Him, who, in the pompous language of the Hebrew Bard, walks on the wings of the wind.'" When Burns entered a druidical circle of stones on a dreary moor, he has already told us that his first movement was 66 to say his prayers. His best poetry was to the last produced amidst scenes of solemn desolation.

I

may mention here, that during the later years of his life, his favourite book, the usual companion of his solitary rambles, was Cowper's Task. It is pleasing to know that these illustrious contemporaries, in spite of the widely different circumstances under which their talents were developed, and the, at first sight, opposite sets of opinions which their works express, did justice to each other. No English writer of the time eulogized

ened and weakened, in order to suit the tune of Lewie Gor don, which Mr Thomson preferred to "Hey tuttie tattie." However, almost immediately after having prevailed on the poet to make this alteration, Mr Thomson saw his error, and discarded both the change, and the air which it was made to suit.

Burns more generously than Cowper. And in truth they had much in common,

“ The stamp and clear impression of good sense; " the love of simplicity; the love of nature; sympa. thy with the poor; humour; pathos; satire; warm and manly hearts; the pride, the independence, and the melancholy of genius.

Some readers may be surprised to find two such names placed together otherwise than by way of contrast. Let it not be forgotten, that Cowper had done little more than building bird-cages and rabbit-hatches, at the age when the grave closed on Burns.

CHAPTER IX.

"I dread thee, Fate, relentless and severe,
With all a poet's, husband's, father's fear.

We are drawing near the close of this great poet's mortal career; and I would fain hope the details of the last chapter may have prepared the humane reader to contemplate it with sentiments of sorrow, pure comparatively, and undebased with any considerable intermixture of less genial feelings.

For some years before Burns was lost to his country, it is sufficiently plain that he had been, on political grounds, an object of suspicion and distrust to a large portion of the population that had most opportunity of observing him. The mean subalterns of party had, it is very easy to suppose, delighted in decrying him on pretexts, good, bad, and indifferent, equally to their superiors; and hence,-who will not willingly believe it ?-the temporary and local prevalence of those extravagantly injurious reports, the essence of which Dr Currie, no doubt, thought it his duty, as a biographer, to extract and circulate.

The untimely death of one who, had he lived to any thing like the usual term of human existence, might have done so much to increase his fame as a poet, and to purify and dignify his character as a man, was, it is too probable, hastened by his own intemperances and imprudences; but it seems to be extremely improbable, that even if his manhood had been a course of saintlike virtue