and covenant. The pious woman had put a lady's night-cap on him, and had laid him a-bed with her own daughter, and passed him to the soldiery as a lady, her daughter's bed-fellow. -A mutilated stanza or two are to be found in Herd's collection, but the original song consists of five or six stanzas, and were their delicacy equal to their wit and humor, they would merit a place in any collection.-The first stanza is,— Ramsay's song, Being pursued by the dragoons, Within my bed he was laid down; And weel I wat he was worth his room, For he was my daintie Davie. 'Luckie Nansie,' though he calls it an old song with additions, seems to be all his own, except the chorus ; I was a telling you, Lucky Nansie, luckie Nansie, Auld springs wad ding the new, But ye wad never trow me which I should conjecture to be part of a song, prior to the affair of Williamson. THE BOB O' DUMB LANE. Ramsay, as usual, has modernized this song. The original, which I learned on the spot, from my old hostess in the principal inn there, is— Lassie, lend me your braw hemp heckle, And I'll lend you my thripplin-kame; And we'll gae dance the bob o' Dumblane, &c. I insert this song to introduce the following anecdote, which I have heard well authenticated:-In the evening of the day of the battle of Dunblane (Sheriff muir) when the action was over, a Scots officer in Argyle's army, observed to his Grace, that he was afraid the rebels would give out to the world that they had gotten the victory. 'Weel, weel,' answered his Grace, alluding to the foregoing ballad, if they think it be nae well bobbit, we 'll bob it again.' THE CHARACTER AND GENIUS OF BURNS. I. N forming an estimate of the character of Burns, the period of his life selected for judgment is of prime importance. To take an opinion of him from his hot youth would be as misleading as to have judged King Henry V. by the 'promise of his greener days.' We must fix on the stage of his career when he set himself to the working out of a deliberate plan of life. Such a stage was reached when Burns resolved to make Jean Armour his wife, if she were not so already in law, or to avow her publicly as such if she were. This was the most important step he had hitherto taken in life, and it was not taken without considerable inner conflict. There was the Clarinda entanglement, melodramatic in many aspects, but involving serious elements as well. There were other domestic possibilities and dreams, counselling delay. It was a difficult and undesirable situation, for which Burns, with his usual unsparing self-judgment, severely blamed himself. But, as matters stood, the right thing for him to do was to marry Jean. He did so, and reaped the usual fruits of right-doing. His marriage put him at peace with himself in an unspeakably important sphere of feeling. It brought him a positive and valuable element of happiness. Some of Burns's critics have inferred from one or two angry or not quite respectful allusions to Jean in letters, to Clarinda among others, that he must have been haunted during his married life by the thought that he might have done better. There is no evidence of this otherwise; on the contrary, all the evidence is to the contrary effect. Burns knew—no man better— that it is impossible to improve upon the ethically right, and the casual expressions in question were either transient outbreaks of incidental displeasure, or touches of the amatory art brought into play by the Clarinda episode. The same critics have found in the allegation that Jean had an earlier attachment a further à priori proof that the Burns marriage was an unhappy one. This inference, even if it were based on verified facts-which it is not-does not show much knowledge of the world or of human nature. Such things happen in romance, not in real life, and among sensible people, which Burns and his wife undoubtedly were. Burns's marriage was unquestionably a blessing to him. To his family he was intensely devoted; he even went so far as to describe making a happy fireside clime for weans and wife' as 'the true pathos and sublime of human life.' This is strong, but it was not Burns's way to feel or say things by halves, and he generally meant the most of what he said. That he was a good husband and a good father will not be questioned by any except those who contend that there can be no excellence but in faultless perfection. His wife, who was in every sense the true judge, was always his warmest defender; and she had good reason. She began life a dowerless and illiterate country girl. Through her relation with Burns she ended it in comfort, a woman of comparative refinement and quiet dignity that gained her general respect. The sons of Burns, too, had just cause to be thankful for their father, not only because his fame gave them position and won them friends, but also because his early care for their education and training gave them motives and habits that carried them high in honourable careers. That Burns got back as good as he gave is merely to restate the tritest of moral truisms. His eight years of family duty made him, as a matter of course, a better man. II. Taking the married portion of his life, then, as the only true and just measure of Burns the man and poet, we have yet one or two qualifications to make. For one thing, in judging of any higher work which he aspired to do, or ought to have done, we cannot take into account the period-about a year-during which he was prostrated by bereavement and illness, and had begun to fear that the hand of death was upon him. We really must not 'sweat' our great men. We must give them time to dry their natural tears and recover their health, and if they see death coming, we must give them a few moments to prepare. Besides, although it might be by fits and starts, Burns did work up to the last, and in this, as in other respects, he bore himself in the supreme emergency of fate with the calm dignity proper to the great man he was. His anxieties about his family-although he could hardly have a rational fear that they would be neglectedand the irritated, if groundless, alarm at the prospective degradation of imprisonment for debt which embittered his last and weakest moments, only enhance the admiration due to the finer elements of his character. Then it should never be forgotten that Burns died at thirtyseven, after a life mainly occupied in severe physical toil. His destiny did not give him a fair chance of working out his ideals, ethical or poetical. What would most men have to show in the way either of virtue or of achievement if it was the rule to be cut off at thirty-seven? How many men of genius have done half as much of the kind of service Burns performed before they were thirty-seven? In how many men, great or undistinguished, has the conquest of evil been effected before that age? Besides, we must remember that Burns was a man of the most powerful, penetrating, and original understanding, with an imagination and sensibility on an equal scale. Such a man would not, rather could not, be content with the traditional views of destiny and duty. He would attack the problem of the Universe and its mystery for himself. Not an article of religion, not a principle of morals, but he would investigate it to its foundations, and demand its why and its wherefore. As he tells us himself, he 'ventured' on 'the daring path Spinoza trod.' And if he saw more clearly and deeply than the average man, he also felt more keenly and desired more vehemently what he saw. Burns, as some one has well said, had ten or twelve times, probably twenty times, the ordinary man's sense and desire, say, of beauty. Let us think what that involves. Probably most of us know enough of what hunger means to understand what we should be like at the close of a two days' fast. Imagine that sensation twenty times as strong should we be safe neighbours for a baker's shop? But Burns cannot be fairly judged unless by a test specially adapted to an artistic temperament of the intensest kind. In the light of such general reflections, let us consider the nature of the life-plan which Burns formed at the date selected, and how he carried it out within the time allowed him by fate. It was the plan not only of a right but of a great life. Burns determined to live for duty and for poetry. He would set up a home, and install Jean as its mistress. He would support himself and his family by farming or, alternatively, if combination of the two were impossible, by gauging; and he would try to rise officially that he might secure the largest attainable leisure for poetry. To the commonplace person this may not perhaps look much of a plan. To him, living for poetry naturally seems a species of lunacy. Then Jean was not a fine lady like Clarinda or the divine Burnett, and gauging was looked down upon by superior people. These, however, are exactly the reasons that made Burns's plan admirable. His head had not been turned a hairsbreadth by his meteoric success in Edinburgh. He had quietly made up his mind to being lionised and forgotten, except by two or three men whom he really respected, Dugald Stewart, Bishop Geddes, Graham of Fintry, Moore, Blacklock, Dunbar, Cunningham, and a few more who did not forget him, and whom he did not forget. Certain critics have said he was mortified because, on his return to Edinburgh, he did not have a second season of triumph. There is no evidence of any such feeling, but very much to show that he expected what happened, and did not care. looked the facts of the situation fairly in the face, and, finding them morally imperative and socially humbling, he squared his arrangements accordingly. III. He Let it be distinctly understood that Burns's first object was the moral reconstruction of his career. Writing to Bishop Geddes some time after his marriage, and explaining the step he had taken, he speaks of that first concern, the conduct of the man;' and, connecting his marriage with that first concern, he says, 'there was ever but one side on which I was habitually blamable, and there I have secured myself in the way pointed out by nature and nature's God.' The 'alternative' to marriage was, in his view, 'being at eternal warfare with myself, on account of habitual follies, to give them no worse name, which no general example, no licentious wit, no sophistical infidelity, would to me ever |