last, except perhaps Bruar Water, are the best that he added to his collection during the wanderings of the summer. But in Burns's subsequent productions, we find many traces of the delight with which he had contemplated nature in these alpine regions.

The poet once more visited his family at Mossgiel, and Mr Miller at Dalswinton, ere the winter set in; and on more leisurely examination of that gentleman's estate, we find him writing as if he had all but decided to become his tenant on the farm of Elliesland. It was not, however, until he had for the third time visited Dumfries-shire, in March 1788, that a bargain was actually concluded.

More than half of the intervening months were spent in Edinburgh, where Burns found or fancied that his presence was necessary for the satisfactory completion of his affairs with the booksellers. It seems to be clear enough that one great object was the society of his jovial intimates in the capital. Nor was he without the amusement of a little romance to fill up what vacant hours they left him. He lodged that winter in Bristo Street, on purpose to be near a beautiful widow-the same to whom be addressed the song,

"Clarinda, mistress of my soul," &c.

and a series of prose epistles, which have been separately published, and which present more instances of bad taste, bombastic language, and fulsome sentiment, than could be produced from all his writings besides.

At this time the publication called Johnson's Museum of Scottish Song was going on in Edinburgh; and the editor appears to have early prevailed on Burns to give him his assistance in the

arrangement of his materials. Though Green grow the rashes is the only song, entirely his, which appears in the first volume, published in 1787, many of the old ballads included in that volume bear traces of his hand; but in the second volume, which appeared in March, 1788, we find no fewer than five songs by Burns; two that have been already mentioned,* and three far better than them, viz. Theniel Menzies' bonny Mary; that grand lyric,

"Farewell, ye dungeons dark and strong,
The wretch's destiny,

Macpherson's time will not be long
On yonder gallows tree;"

both of which performances bespeak the recent impressions of his Highland visit; and, lastly, Whistle and I'll come to you, my lad. Burns had been from his youth upwards an enthusiastic lover of the old minstrelsy and music of his country; but he now studied both subjects with far better oppor tunities and appliances than he could have commanded previously; and it is from this time that we must date his ambition to transmit his own poetry to posterity, in eternal association with those exquisite airs which had hitherto, in far too many instances, been married to verses that did not deserve to be immortal. It is well known that from this time Burns composed very few pieces but songs; and whether we ought or not to regret that such was the case, must depend on the estimate we make of his songs as compared with his other poems; a point on which critics are to this hour divided, and on which their descendants

"Clarinda," and "How pleasant the banks of the clear winding Devon."

are not very likely to agree. Mr Walker, who is one of those that lament Burns's comparative dereliction of the species of composition which he most cultivated in the early days of his inspiration, suggests very sensibly, that if Burns had not taken to song-writing, he would probably have written little or nothing amidst the various temptations to company and dissipation which now and henceforth surrounded him-to say nothing of the active duties of life in which he was at length about to be engaged.

Burns was present, on the 31st of December, at a dinner to celebrate the birth-day of the unfortunate Prince Charles Edward Stuart, and produced on the occasion an ode, part of which Dr Currie has preserved. The specimen will not induce any regret that the remainder of the piece has been suppressed. It appears to be a mouthing rhapsody far, far different indeed from the Chevalier's Lament, which the poet composed some months afterwards, with probably the tithe of the effort, while riding alone "through a track of melancholy muirs between Galloway and Ayrshire, it being Sunday."*

For six weeks of the time that Burns spent this year in Edinburgh, he was confined to his room, in consequence of an overturn in a hackney coach. "Here I am," he writes, " under the care of a surgeon, with a bruised limb extended on a cushion, and the tints of my mind vying with the livid horrors preceding a midnight thunder-storm. A drunken coachman was the cause of the first, and incomparably the lightest evil; misfortune, bodily constitution, hell, and myself, have formed

General Correspondence, No. 46.

a quadruple alliance to guarantee the other. have taken tooth and nail to the Bible, and am got half way through the five books of Moses, and balf way in Joshua. It is really a glorious book. I sent for my bookbinder to-day, and ordered him to get an Svo Bible in sheets, the best paper and print in town, and bind it with all the elegance of his craft."*

In another letter, which opens gaily enough, we find him reverting to the same prevailing darkness of mood. "I can't say I am altogether at my ease when I see anywhere in my path that meagre, squalid, famine-faced spectre, Poverty, attended as he always is by iron-fisted Oppression, and leering Contempt. But I have sturdily withstood his buffetings many a hard-laboured day, and still my motto is I DARE. My worst enemy is moi-même. There are just two creatures that I would envya horse in his wild state traversing the forests of Asia, or an oyster on some of the desert shores of Europe. The one has not a wish without enjoyment; the other has neither wish nor fear."+

have

One more specimen of this magnificent hypochondriacism may be sufficient. "These have been six horrible weeks. Anguish and low spirits have made me unfit to read, write, or think. a hundred times wished that one could resign life as an officer does a commission; for I would not take in any poor ignorant wretch by selling out. Lately, I was a sixpenny private, and God knows a miserable soldier enough: now I march to the campaign a starving cadet, a little more conspicuously wretched. I am ashamed of all this; for though I do not want bravery for the warfare of life, I * Reliques, p. 43. + Ibid. p. 44. + General Correspondence, No. 43.

could wish, like some other soldiers, to have as much fortitude or cunning as to dissemble or conceal my cowardice."

It seems impossible to doubt that Burns had in fact lingered in Edinburgh, in the hope that, to use a vague but sufficiently expressive phrase, something would be done for him. He visited and revisited a farm,-talked and wrote scholarly and wisely about "having a fortune at the plough-tail," and so forth; but all the while nourished, and assuredly it would have been most strange if he had not, the fond dream that the admiration of his country would ere long present itself in some solid and tangible shape. His illness and confinement gave him leisure to concentrate his imagination on the darker side of his prospects; and the letters which we have quoted may teach those who envy the powers and the fame of genius, to pause for a moment over the annals of literature, and think what superior capabilities of misery have been, in the great majority of cases, interwoven with the possession of those very talents, from which all but their possessors derive unmingled gratification.

Burns's distresses, however, were to be still farther aggravated. While still under the hands of his surgeon, he received intelligence from Mauchline that his intimacy with Jean Armour had once more exposed her to the reproaches of her family. The father sternly and at once turned her out of doors; and Burns, unable to walk across his room, had to write to his friends in Mauchline, to procure shelter for his children, and for her whom he considered as-all but his wife. In a letter to Mrs Dunlop, written on hearing of this new misfortune, he says, "I wish I were dead, but I'm no like to die.' I fear I am something like-undone; but I