Mrs Burns, you know, was alive when this philosophical stuff was published, and she lived for more than twenty years after it, as exemplary a widow as she had been a wife. Its gross indelicacy-say rather wanton insult-to all the feelings of a woman, is abhorrent to all the feelings of a man, and shows the monk. And we have quoted it now that you may see what vile liberties respectable libellers were long wont to take with Burns and all that belonged to him—because he was a Gauger. Who would have dared to write thus of the wife and widow of a—Gentleman—of one who was a Lady? Not Josiah Walker. Yet it passed for years unreproved: the "Life" which contains it still circulates, and seems to be in some repute; and Josiah Walker on another occasion is cited to the rescue by George Thomson as a champion and vindicator of the truth. The insolent eulogist dared to say that Robert Burns in marrying Jean Armour "repaired seduction by the most precious sacrifice, short of life, which one human being can make to another!" To her, in express terms, he attributes her husband's misfortunes and misdoings—to her who soothed his sorrows, forgave his sins, inspired his songs, cheered his hearth, blest his bed, educated his children, revered his memory, and held sacred his dust.

What do you think was, according to this biographer, the chief cause of the blamable life Burns led at Ellisland? He knew not what to do with himself! "When not occupied in the fields, his time must have hung heavy on his hands!" Just picture to yourself Burns peevishly pacing the "half-parlour half-kitchen" floor, with his hands in his breeches pockets, tormenting his dull brain to invent some employment by which he might be enabled to resist the temptation of going to bed in the forenoon in his clothes! But how is this? "When not occupied in the fields, his time must have hung heavy on his hands; for we are not to infer, from the literary eminence of Burns, that, like a person regularly trained to studious habits, he could render himself by study independent of society. He could read and write when occasion prompted; but he could not, like a professional scholar, become so interested in a daily course of lettered industry, as to find company an interruption rather than a relief." We cheerfully admit that Burns was not engaged at Ellisland on a History of the World. He had not sufficient books. Besides, he had to

ride, in good smuggling weather, two hundred miles a-week. But we cannot admit that "to banish dejection, and to fill his vacant hours, it is not surprising that he should have resorted to such associates as his new neighbourhood, or the inns upon the road to Ayrshire, could afford; and if these happened to be of a low description, that his constant ambition to render himself an important and interesting figure in every society, made him suit his conduct and conversation to their taste." When not on duty, the Exciseman was to be found at home like other farmers, and when not "occupied in the fields" with farm work, he might be seen playing with Sir William Wallace and other Scottish heroes in miniature, two or three pet sheep of the quadruped breed sharing in the vagaries of the bipeds; or striding along the Scaur with his Whangee rod in his fist, with which, had time hung heavy, he would have cracked the skull of Old Chronos; or sitting on a divot-dyke with the ghost of Tam O'Shanter, Captain Henderson, and the Earl of Glencairn; or, so it is recorded, "on a rock projecting into the Nith (which we have looked for in vain), employed in angling, with a cap made of a fox's skin on his head, a loose great-coat fixed round him by a belt, from which depended an enormous Highland broadsword;" or with his legs under the fir, with the famous Black Bowl sending up a Scotch mist in which were visible the wigs of two orthodox English clergymen, "to whose tastes his constant ambition to render himself an important and interesting figure in every society, made him suit his conduct and conversation ;"-in such situations might Josiah Walker have stumbled upon Burns, and perhaps met with his own friend, "a clergyman from the south of England, who on his return talked with rapture of his reception, and of all that he had seen and heard in the cottage of Ellisland," or with Ramsay of Oughtertyre, who was so delighted "with Burns's uxor Sabina qualis and the poet's modest mansion, so unlike the habitations of ordinary rustics," the very evening the Bard suddenly bounced in upon us, and said as he entered, "I come, to use the words of Shakespeare, stewed in haste,' and in a little while, such was the force and versatility of his genius, he made the tears run down Mr L- 's cheeks, albeit unused to the poetic strain ;"—or who knows but the pedestrian might have found the poet engaged in religious exercises under the sylvan shade? For did he not write to Mrs Dun

เ

lop, "I own myself so little of a presbyterian, that I approve of set times and seasons of more than ordinary acts of devotion, for breaking in on that habitual routine of life and thought which is so apt to reduce our existence to a kind of instinct, or even sometimes, and with some minds, to a state very little superior to mere machinery. This day (New-Yearday morning), the first Sunday of May, a breezy blue-skyed noon, some time before the beginning, and a hoary morning and calm sunny day about the end of autumn;-these, time out of mind, have been with me a kind of holiday." Finally, Josiah might have made his salaam to the Exciseman just as he was folding up that letter in which he says,—

We know nothing, or next to nothing, of the substance or structure of our souls, so cannot account for those seeming caprices or whims, that one should be particularly pleased with this thing or struck with that, which, in minds of a different cast, makes no extraordinary impression. I have some favourite flowers in spring, among which are the mountain daisy, the harebell, the foxglove, the wildbrier rose, the budding birch, and the hoary hawthorn, that I view and hang over with particular delight. I never hear the loud solitary whistle of the curlew in a summer noon, or the wild mixing cadence of a troop of grey plovers in an autumnal morning, without feeling an elevation of soul like the enthusiasm of devotion or poetry. Tell me, my dear friend, to what can all this be owing? Are we a piece of machinery, which like the Eolian harp, passive, takes the impression of the passing accident? Or do these workings argue something within us above the trodden clod? I own myself partial to such proofs of those awful and important realities-a God that made all things—man's immaterial and immortal nature—and a world of weal or woe beyond death and the grave.

Burns, however, found that an active gauger, with ten parishes to look after, could not be a successful farmer; and looking forward to promotion in the Excise, he gave up his lease, and on his appointment to another district removed into Dumfries. The greater part of his small capital had been sunk or scattered on the somewhat stony soil of Ellisland; but with his library and furniture-his wife and his children-his and their wearing apparel-a trifle in ready money—no debt -youth, health, and hope, and a salary of seventy pounds, he did not think himself poor. Such provision, he said, was luxury to what either he or his better-half had been born to

and the Flitting from Ellisland, accompanied as it was with the regrets and respect of the neighbourhood, displayed on the whole a cheerful cavalcade.

It is remarked by Mr Lockhart that Burns's "four principal biographers, Heron, Currie, Walker, and Irving, concur in the general statement that his moral course, from the time that he settled in Dumfries, was downwards." Mr Lockhart has shown that they have one and all committed many serious errors in this " general statement," and we too shall examine it before we conclude. Meanwhile let us direct our attention, not to his "moral course," but to the course of his genius. It continued to burn bright as ever, and if the character of the man corresponded in its main features with that of the poet, which we believe it did, its best vindication will be found in a right understanding of the spirit that animated his genius. to the last, and gave birth to perhaps its finest effusions—HIS

MATCHLESS SONGS.

In his earliest Journal, we find this beautiful passage :

There is a noble sublimity, a heart-melting tenderness, in some of our ancient ballads, which show them to be the work of a masterly hand and it has often given me many a heartache to reflect, that such glorious old bards-bards who very probably owed all their talents to native genius, yet have described the exploits of heroes, the pangs of disappointment, and the meltings of love, with such fine strokes of nature-that their very names (O how mortifying to a bard's vanity!) are now "buried among the wreck of things which were." O ye illustrious names unknown! who could feel so strongly and describe so well; the last, the meanest of the Muse's train-one who, though far inferior to your flights, yet eyes your path, and with trembling wing would sometimes soar after you-a poor rustic bard, unknown, pays this sympathetic pang to your memory! Some of you tell us, with all the charms of verse, that you have been unfortunate in the world-unfortunate in love; he too has felt the loss of his little fortune, the loss of friends, and, worse than all, the loss of the woman he adored. Like you, all his consolation was his muse : She taught him in rustic measures to complain. Happy could he have done it with your strength of imagination and flow of verse! May the turf lie lightly on your bones! and may you now enjoy that solace and rest which this world rarely gives to the heart tuned to all the feelings of poesy and love.

The old nameless Song-writers, buried centuries ago in kirk-yards that have themselves perhaps ceased to exist-yet

one sees sometimes lonesome burial-places among the hills, where man's dust continues to be deposited after the house of God has been removed elsewhere-the old nameless Songwriters took hold out of their stored hearts of some single thought or remembrance surpassingly sweet at the moment over all others, and instantly words as sweet had being, and breathed themselves forth along with some accordant melody of the still more olden time;—or when musical and poetical genius happily met together, both alike passion-inspired, then was born another new tune or air soon treasured within a thousand maidens' hearts, and soon flowing from lips that "murmured near the living brooks a music sweeter than their own." Had boy or virgin faded away in untimely death, and the green mound that covered them, by the working of some secret power far within the heart, suddenly risen to fancy's eye, and then as suddenly sunk away into oblivion with all the wavering burial-place? Then was framed dirge, hymn, elegy, that, long after the mourned and the mourner were forgotten, continued to wail and lament up and down all the vales of Scotland-for what vale is unvisited by such sorrow? -in one same monotonous melancholy air, varied only as each separate singer had her heart touched, and her face saddened, with a fainter or stronger shade of pity or grief!-Had some great battle been lost and won, and to the shepherd on the braes had a faint and far-off sound seemed on a sudden to touch the horizon like the echo of a trumpet? Then had some ballad its birth, heroic yet with dying falls, for the singer wept, even as his heart burned within him, over the princely head prostrated with all its plumes, haply near the lowly woodsman, whose horn had often startled the deer as together they trode the forest-chase, lying humble in death by his young lord's feet!-0, blue-eyed maiden, even more beloved than beautiful! how couldst thou ever find heart to desert thy minstrel, who for thy sake would have died without one sigh given to the disappearing happiness of sky and earth—and, witched by some evil spell, how couldst thou follow an outlaw to foreign lands, to find, alas! some day a burial in the great deep? Thus was enchained in sounds the complaint of disappointed, defrauded, and despairing passion, and another air filled the eyes of our Scottish maidens with a

VOL. VII.

G