pale, emaciated, and so feeble as occasionally to need help from my chair.-My spirits fled! fled! but I can no more on the subject." He finishes by alluding to the probable reduction in his salary, in consequence of his illness, to five-and-thirty pounds. He entreats his friend to move the commissioners of excise to grant the full salary. "If they do not," he continues, "I must lay my account with an exit truly en poete. If I die not of disease, I must perish of hunger."

It is needless to extract more. It has been truly said, there is not among all the martyrologies that ever penned so rueful a narrative as the lives of the poets." Burns, we are told by his biographer,

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though by nature of an athletic form, had in his constitution the peculiarities and delicacies that belong to the temperament of genius. He was liable, from a very early period of life, to that interruption in the process of digestion which arises from deep and anxious thought, and which is sometimes the effect, sometimes the cause, of depression of spirits. Connected with this disorder of the stomach, there was a disposition to head-ache affecting more especially the temples and eyeballs, and frequently accompanied by violent and irregular movements of the heart. Endowed by nature with great sensibility of nerves, Burns was in corporeal, as well as in his mental sys

tem, liable to inordinate impressions-to fever of body as well as of mind. This predisposition to disease, which strict temperance and diet, regular exercise and sound sleep, might have subdued, habits of a very different nature strengthened and inflamed."

In this brief observation is concentrated all the knowledge that is to be gathered from books on the subject of the literary malady, as indigestion may be pre-eminently called. There is not a word of it which demands not the most serious attention from every individual who is employed in literary pursuits; he may gather from it that excess in wine is not the only intemperance; but that excessive application to studious habits is another kind of intemperance no less injurious to the constitution than the former.

Burns wrestled with his disorder in want and wretchedness till October, 1795; about which time he was seized with his last illness-a rheumatic fever. The fever, it appears, was the effect of cold caught in returning from a tavern benumbed and intoxicated. His appetite from the first attack failed him, his hands shook, and his voice trembled on any exertion or emotion. His pulse became weaker and more rapid, and pain in the larger joints, and hands, and feet, deprived him of the enjoyment of refreshing sleep. Too much de

jected in his spirits, and too well aware of his real situation to entertain hopes of recovery, he was ever musing on the approaching desolation of his family, and his spirits sunk into a uniform gloom. In June he was recommended to go into the country; "and impatient of medical advice," says his biographer," as well as of every species of control, he determined for himself to try the effects of bathing in the sea." Burns, however, distinctly says in two of his letters, this extraordinary remedy. for rheumatism was prescribed by his physician; "The medical men," he wrote to Mr. Cunningham, "tell me that my last and only chance is bathing and country quarters, and riding."

For the sake of the faculty, I trust that Burns was mistaken in the matter, for no medical man of common sense could think that a patient sinking under rheumatism and shattered in constitution, was a fit subject for so violent a remedy as the cold bath. No medical man can consider, without shuddering, the mischief it must have produced in the case of Burns. At first he imagined that the bathing was of service; the pains in his limbs were relieved, but this was immediately followed by a new attack of fever, as well might have been expected, and when he returned to his own house in Dumfries on the 18th of July he was no longer able to stand upright. At this time a tremor pervaded

his frame; his tongue was parched, and his mind sunk into delirium, when not roused by conversation. On the 2d and 3rd day the fever increased, and his strength diminished. On the 10th the sufferings of this great but ill-fated genius were terminated, and a life was closed in which virtue and passion had been at perpetual variance.

Thus perished Burns in his thirty-seventh year. Let those who are without follies cast the first stone at his infirmities, and thank their God they are not like the other poor children of genius, frail in health, feeble in resolution, in small matters improvident, and unfortunate in most things.

END OF VOL. I.