Having settled with his publisher, Burns found himself master of nearly five hundred pounds, two hundred of which he immediately lent to his brother, who had taken upon himself the support of their aged mother; with the remainder of his money he purchased the farm of Ellisland, on which he determined to settle himself for life. His first act was to legalize his union with the object of his early attachment, which union then imperatively called for a public declaration of marriage.

The natural fickleness of his disposition, however, was soon manifested in his new career; and he had hardly entered upon the peaceful enjoyment of country life before he pined after the distinction of a maiden author's brief reign in literary society. The state of his feelings may be gathered at the time from his common-place book. "This is now the third day that I have been in this country. Lord! what is man? What a bustling little bundle of passions, appetites, ideas and fancies!-and what a capricious kind of existence he has here! I am such a coward in life—so tired in the service, that I would almost at any time, with Milton's Adam,

"Gladly lay me in my mother's lap at ease.'

"His application to the cares and labours of his farm, (says Currie,) was interrupted by several

visits to his family in Ayrshire, and as the distance was too great for a single day's journey, he sometimes fell into company, and forgot the resolutions he had formed, and in a little time temptation assailed him nearer home. It was not long before he began to view his farm with dislike and despondence."

He now applied to his friends to procure him some appointment, and by the interest of one of them he procured the post of an exciseman, or gauger, in the district in which he lived. It was an unfortunate employment for a man like Burns, and one which threw all the temptations in his path, which a judicious friend might have wished him removed from as far as possible. It must have been a sorry exhibition to have seen the poor poet, his mind probably communing with the skies, scampering over the country in pursuit of some paltry defaulter of the revenue, or travelling from ale-house to ale-house to grant permits, and do the other drudgery of his office: such business is rarely transacted without refreshment, and sometimes the refreshment of man and horse is the only business attended to.

It would have been difficult to have devised a worse occupation for the poor poet, or to have found a man less fitted for its duties than Burns.

After occupying his farm for nearly three years

and a half, he found it necessary to resign it, and depend on the miserable stipend of his officeabout fifty pounds a year, and which ultimately rose to seventy.

"Hitherto," says Currie, "though he was addicted to excess in social parties, he had abstained from the habitual use of strong liquors, and his constitution had not suffered any permanent injury from the irregularities of his conduct. But in Dumfries, temptations to the sin that so early beset him threw themselves in his way, and his irregularities grew by degrees into habits." In his own words, "he had dwindled into a paltry exciseman, and slunk out the rest of his insignificant existence in the meanest of pursuits, and among the lowest of mankind."

From this period poverty, and its attendant ills, were seldom from his door; the irritability of his temper increased, and, as is generally the case, the irregularity of his conduct. He became more reckless and inveterate in his disorders than ever: "He knew his own failings," says Currie, "he predicted their consequence; the melancholy foreboding was never absent from his mind, yet this passion carried him down the stream of error, and swept him over the precipice he saw directly in his course."

"The fatal defect in his character," adds his

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biographer, "lay in the comparative weakness of his volition-that superior faculty of the mind which governs the conduct according to the dictates of the understanding, and alone entitles us to be denominated rational."

"The occupations of a poet," he continues, "are not calculated to strengthen the governing powers of the mind, or to weaken that sensibility which requires perpetual control, since it gives birth to the vehemence of passion, as well as the higher powers of imagination. Unfortunately, the favourite occupations of genius are calculated to increase all its peculiarities, to nourish that lofty pride which disdains the littleness of prudence, and the restrictions of order, and, by indulgence, to increase that sensibility which, in the present form of our existence, is scarcely compatible with peace and happiness, even when accompanied with the choicest gifts of fortune!"

This is worth all that has ever been said on the subject of "the poetic temperament," and no apology, we trust, is needed for the length of the quotation.

The rapid progress of his disorder, both bodily and mental, is exhibited in the desponding tenor of his letters, from the period of his relinquishing his agricultural pursuits. Indolence, the baneful attendant of morbid sensibility, aggravated his hy

pochondria. Idleness became preferable to a distasteful occupation; and idleness, as usual, was followed by miseries which rendered existence intolerable without excitement. There is no habit gains so imperceptibly on the hypochondriac as that of intemperance. The melancholy man flies to stimulating draughts for a momentary relief, but the remedy must be increased in proportion to the frequency of its repetition; and in proportion as the spirits are exalted by any stimulant the stomach is debilited: in course of time the irritability of the latter organ, extending to the brain, the senses become trembligly alive (if the expression may be used) to external impressions; in a word, the sensations are diseased, and this result is morbid sensibility. Burns' biographer has described the progress of this disorder in language which needs not our feeble praise to recommend it.

"As the strength of the body decays the volition fails; in proportion as the sensations are soothed and gratified the sensibility increases; and morbid sensibility is the parent of indolence, because while it impairs the regulating power of the mind, it exaggerates all the obstacles to exertion." And, in the preceding observation, in speaking of morbid sensibility, as being the temperament of general talents, and not of poetry exclusively, as some would have it, he deprecates the indulgence in