friends, new or old, belonging either to his own condition, or to a rank in life somewhat higher perhaps than his own, although not exactly to that "select society" to which the wonder awakened by his genius had given him a sudden introduction. Persons in that middle or inferior rank were his natural, his best, and his truest friends; and many of them, there can be no doubt, were worthy of his happiest companionship either in the festal hour or the hour of closer communion. He had no right, with all his genius, to stand aloof from them, and with a heart like his he had no inclination. Why should he have lived exclusively with lords and ladies-paper or landlords-ladies by descent or courtesy-with aristocratic advocates, philosophical professors, clergymen, wild or moderate, Arminian or Calvinistic? Some of them were among the first men of their age; others were doubtless not inerudite, and a few not unwitty in their own esteem; and Burns greatly enjoyed their society, in which he met with an admiration that must have been to him the pleasure of a perpetual triumph. But more of them were dull and pompous; incapable of rightly estimating or feeling the power of his genius; and when the glitter and the gloss of novelty was worn off before their shallow eyes, from the poet who bore them all down into insignificance, then no doubt they began to get offended and shocked with his rusticity or rudeness, and sought refuge in the distinctions of rank, and the laws, not to be violated with impunity, of" select society." The patronage he received was honourable, and he felt it to be so; but it was still patronage; and had he, for the sake of it or its givers, forgotten for a day the humblest, lowest, meanest of his friends, or even his acquaintances, how could he have borne to read his own two bold lines

"The rank is but the guinea stamp,
The man's the gowd for a' that”?

Besides, we know from Burns's poetry what was then the character of the people of Scotland, for they were its materials, its staple. Her peasantry were a noble race, and their virtues moralised his song. The inhabitants of the towns were of the same family-the same blood-one kindred-and many, most of them, had been born, or in some measure bred, in the country. Their ways of thinking, feeling, and acting, were

much alike; and the shopkeepers of Edinburgh and Glasgow were as proud of Robert Burns, as the ploughmen and shepherds of Kyle and the Stewartry. He saw in them friends and brothers. Their admiration of him was, perhaps, fully more sincere and heartfelt, nor accompanied with less understanding of his merits, than that of persons in higher places; and most assuredly among the respectable citizens of Edinburgh Burns found more lasting friends than he ever did among her gentry and noblesse. Nor can we doubt that then, as now, there were in that order great numbers of men of well cultivated minds, whom Burns, in his best hours, did right to honour, and who were perfectly entitled to seek his society, and to open their hospitable doors to the brilliant stranger. That Burns, whose sympathies were keen and wide, and who never dreamt of looking down on others as beneath him, merely because he was conscious of his own vast superiority to the common run of men, should have shunned or been shy of such society, would have been something altogether unnatural and incredible; nor is it at all wonderful or blamable that he should occasionally even have much preferred such society to that which has been called "more select," and therefore above his natural and proper condition. Admirably as he in general behaved in the higher circles, in those humbler ones alone could he have felt himself completely at home. His demeanour among the rich, the great, the learned, or the wise, must often have been subject to some little restraint, and all restraint of that sort is ever painful; or, what is worse still, his talk must sometimes have partaken of display. With companions and friends, who claimed no superiority in anything, the sensitive mind of Burns must have been at its best and happiest, because completely at its ease, and free movement given to the play of all its feelings and faculties; and in such companies we cannot but believe that his wonderful conversational powers shone forth in their most various splendour. He must have given vent there to a thousand familiar fancies, in all their freedom and all their force, which, in the fastidious society of high life, his imagination must have been too much fettered even to conceive; and which, had they flowed from his lips, would either not have been understood, or would have given offence to that delicacy of breeding which is often hurt even by the best manners of

those whose manners are all of nature's teaching, and unsubjected to the salutary restraints of artificial life. Indeed, we know that Burns sometimes burst suddenly and alarmingly the restraints of "select society;" and that on one occasion he called a clergyman an idiot for misquoting Gray's Elegya truth that ought not to have been promulgated in presence of the parson, especially at so early a meal as breakfast: and he confesses in his most confidential letters, though indeed he was then writing with some bitterness, that he never had been truly and entirely happy at rich men's feasts. If so, then never could he have displayed there his genius in full power and lustre. His noble rage must in some measure have been repressed-the genial current of his soul in some degree frozen. He never was, never could be, the free, fearless, irresistible Robert Burns that nature made him-no, not even although he carried the Duchess of Gordon off her feet, and silenced two Ex-Moderators of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland.

Burns, before his visit to Edinburgh, had at all times and places been in the habit of associating with the best men of his order-the best in everything, in station, in manners, in moral and intellectual character; such men as William Tell and Hofer, for example, associated with in Switzerland and the Tyrol. Even the persons he got unfortunately too well acquainted with (but whose company he soon shook off), at Irvine and Kirkoswald-smugglers and their adherents, were, though a lawless and dangerous set, men of spunk, and spirit, and power, both of mind and body; nor was there anything the least degrading in an ardent, impassioned, and imaginative youth becoming for a time rather too much attached to such daring and adventurous, and even interesting characters. They had all a fine strong poetical smell of the sea, mingled to precisely the proper pitch with that of the contraband. As a poet Burns must have been much the better of such temporary associates; as a man, let us hope, notwithstanding Gilbert's fears, not greatly the worse. The passions that boiled in his blood would have overflowed his life, often to disturb, and finally to help to destroy him, had there never been an Irvine and its seaport. But Burns's friends, up to the time he visited Edinburgh, had been chiefly his admirable brother, a few of the ministers round about,

farmers, ploughmen, farm-servants, and workers in the winds of heaven blowing over moors and mosses, cornfields, and meadows, beautiful as the blue skies themselves; and if you call that low company, you had better fling your copy of Burns's "Cottar's Saturday Night," "Mary in Heaven," and all, into the fire. He, the noblest peasant that ever trod the greensward of Scotland, kept the society of other peasants, whose nature was like his own; and then, were the silkensnooded maidens whom he wooed on lea-rig and 'mang the rigs o' barley, were they who inspired at once his love and his genius, his passion and his poetry, till the whole land of Coila overflowed with his immortal song-so that now to the proud native's ear every stream murmurs a music not its own, given it by sweet Robin's lays, and the lark more lyrical than ever seems singing his songs at the gates of heaven for the shepherd's sake as through his half-closed hand he eyes the musical mote in the sunshine, and remembers him who "sung her new-wakened by the daisy's side," were they, the blooming daughters of Scotia, we demand of you on peril of your life, low company and unworthy of Robert Burns?

As to the charge of liking to be what is vulgarly called "cock of the company," what does that mean when brought against such a man? In what company, pray, could not Burns, had he chosen it, and he often did choose it, have easily been the first? No need had he to crow among dunghills. If you liken him to a bird at all, let it be the eagle, or the nightingale, or the bird of Paradise. James Montgomery has done this in some exquisite verses, which are clear in our heart, but indistinct in our memory, and therefore we cannot adorn our pages with their beauty. The truth is, that Burns, though, when his heart burned within him, one of the most eloquent of men that ever set the table in a roar or a hush, was always a modest, often a silent man, and he would sit for hours together, even in company, with his broad forehead on his hand, and his large lamping eyes sobered and tamed, in profound and melancholy thought. Then his soul would "spring upwards like a pyramid of fire," and send "illumination into dark deep holds," or brighten the brightest hour in which Feeling and Fancy ever flung their united radiance over the common ongoings of this our commonplace world and everyday life. Was this the man to desire, with low long

ings and base aspirations, to shine among the obscure, or rear his haughty front and giant stature among pigmies? He who

"walked in glory and in joy,

Following his plough upon the mountain-side;"

he who sat in glory and in joy at the festal board, when mirth and wine did most abound, and strangers were strangers no more within the fascination of his genius, for

"One touch of nature makes the whole world kin ;"

or at the frugal board, surrounded by his wife and children, and servants, lord and master of his own happy and industrious home-the frugal meal, preceded and followed by thanksgiving to the Power that spread his table in the barren places?

Show us any series of works in prose or verse, in which man's being is so illustrated as to lay it bare and open for the benefit of man, and the chief pictures they contain drawn from "select society." There are none such; and for this reason, that in such society there is neither power to paint them, nor materials to be painted, nor colours to lay on, till the canvass shall speak a language which all the world as it runs may read. What would Scott have been, had he not loved and known the people? What would his works have been, had they not shown the many-coloured character of the people? What would Shakespeare have been, had he not often turned majestically from kings, and "lords and dukes and mighty earls," to their subjects and vassals and lowly bondsmen, and "counted the beatings of lonely hearts" in the obscure but impassioned life that stirs every nook of this earth where human beings abide? What would Wordsworth have been, had he disdained, with his high intellect and imagination, "to stoop his anointed head" beneath the wooden lintel of the poor man's door? His Lyrical Ballads, "with all the innocent brightness of the new-born day," had never charmed the meditative heart. His "Churchyard among the Mountains" had never taught men how to live and how to die. These are men who have descended from aerial heights into the humblest dwellings; who have shown the angel's wing equally when poised near the earth, and floating over its cottaged vales, as when seen sailing on high through the clouds