To amuse himself with the little creations of his own fancy, amid the toil and fatigues of a laborious life; to transcribe the various feelings, the loves, the griefs, the hopes, the fears, in his own breast; to find some kind of counterpoise to the struggles of a world, always an alien scene, a task uncouth to the poetical mind.'

Byron has wisely styled man a pendulum betwixt a smile and a tear. A tumultuous pulse, an excess of sap, kept Burns in apparent variations and extremes. Side by side with jocose satires are stanzas full of humble repentance or Christian resignation. He acknowledged but two classes of objects,—those of adoration the most fervent, or of aversion the most uncontrollable. Wrung with anguish one day, the next he was in merriment. In the prospective horrors of a jail, he composed verses of compliment; on his death-bed, he wrote a love-song. He

says:

'I lie so miserably open to the inroads and incursions of a mischievous, light-armed, well-mounted banditti, under the banners of imagination, whim, caprice, and passion; and the heavy-armed veteran regulars of wisdom, prudence, and forethought move so very, very slow, that I am almost in a state of perpetual warfare, and alas! frequent defeat. There are just two creatures I would envy,- a 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.'

Yet what harmony, what music are in these discords! Perhaps it is a law of our nature, that as high as we have mounted in delight we shall sink in dejection. Hood expresses it, 'There's not a string attuned to mirth, but has its chord in melancholy'; and Burns, 'Chords that vibrate sweetest pleasure thrill the deepest notes of woe.' 'Even in the hour of social mirth,' he tells us, 'my gayety is the madness of an intoxicated criminal under the hands of an executioner.'

If you would probe the real value of a man, ask not what is the grade of his living or the scale of his expenses, but what is the moral skeleton or frame-work of his career. Weigh the man, not his titles. There are those noble by nature, and they alone are noble. Only virtue is nobility,-all else is but paint wherewith to write its name. A lord with all his tinsel glitter is but a creature formed as you and I,— like us a wayfarer from tomb to tomb. He may have been rocked in a golden cradle, but he is not therefore well-born. He is better than the peasant, precisely in the degree that he has more thought, more truth, more humanity; richer, only in proportion as he is richer in his immortal nature. Ideas and principles, these are the stamp of royalty. Wisdom, integrity, justice, piety,- these are kingly, and whoso

has them, he only is the best-born of men, though laid in the crib of an ass, or trained in the soil between the furrows. So has Burns a just self-consciousness. As the first duty of man, he respects his own nature, estimating himself and others by the spiritual method. In the splendid drawing-rooms of Edinburgh, he is unaffected, unastonished, never forgets the majesty of manhood. Standing on his own basis, conscious of his natural rank, he repels the forward, and subdues the supercilious. Pretensions of wealth or of ancestry he ignores or despises. The sterling of his honest worth no poverty can debase into servility. Oppression may bend, but it cannot subdue, his independence. He will not be hired. He would rather assert his integrity than wear a diadem. A mercenary motive he abhors. He was solicited to supply twenty or thirty songs for a musical work, with an understanding distinctly specified that he should receive a regular pecuniary remuneration for his contributions. With the first part of the proposal he instantly complied, but the last he peremptorily rejected:

'As to any remuneration, you may think my songs either above or below price; for they shall absolutely be the one or the other. In the honest enthusiasm with which I embark in your undertaking, to talk of money, wages, fee, hire, etc., would be downright prostitution of soul.'

The editor subsequently ventured to acknowledge his services by a small sum, which the poet with difficulty restrained himself from returning:

'I assure you, my dear sir, that you truly hurt me by your pecuniary parcel. It degrades me in my own eyes. However, to return it would savor of affectation; but as to any more traffic of that debtor and creditor kind, I swear by that honor which crowns the upright statue of Robert Burns' integrity -on the least motion of it, I will indignantly spurn the by-past transaction, and from that moment commence entire stranger to you.'

So did proud old Samuel Johnson throw away with indignation the new shoes which had been placed at his chamber door. 'I ought not,' says Emerson, 'to allow any man, because he has broad lands, to feel that he is rich in my presence. I ought to make him feel that I can do without his riches, that I cannot be bought, neither by comfort, neither by pride,- and though I be utterly penniless, and receiving bread from him, that he is the poor man beside me.'

To measure his struggles and his pains, we must consider that he had not the patient dulness nor the crafty vigilance to make

mechanical toil and perpetual economy congenial or prosperous. He could plough, sow, harrow, reap, thrash, winnow, and sell,none could do it better; but he did it by a sort of mechanical impulse his thoughts were elsewhere. He would pen an ode on his sheep when he should have been driving them to pasture, see visions on his way home from market, write a ballad on the girl who shows the brightest eyes among his reapers. When addressed about a business matter, he always turned it off with, 'Oh, talk to my brother about that.' He procured a book of blank paper with the purpose, as expressed on the first page, of making farm memoranda. Here is a detached specimen of his entries:

'Oh, why the deuce should I repine,

And be an ill-foreboder?

I'm twenty-three, and five feet nine,
I'll go and be a sodger!'

How should a man grow opulent, or purchase the soil he tills, who says:

'I might write you on farming, on building, on marketing; but my poor distracted mind is so jaded, so racked, and bedeviled with the task of the superlatively damned obligation to make one guinea do the business of three, that I detest, abhor, and swoon at the very word business.'

His great defect was the lack of unity in his purposes, of consistency in his aims; the want of that self-command and selfsuppression by which great souls, conceiving a mission, are able to fulfil it, despite the impulses of earth, alike in sunshine and in wintry gloom.

conviviality

To the last, he had a divided aim in his activity, and the muse. Thus it is that, while his hoofs were of fire, he continued to wade the mud. To this, more than to his outward situation, is it due that he never rose permanently above his environment into the serene ether of moral and physical victory, but passed existence in an angry discontent with fate. We can believe that to his culture as a poet a season of poverty and suffering was a positive advantage-a divine mean to a divine end. It was required only that his heart should be right, that he should constitute one object the soul of his endeavors; then, as it was his lot to strive, it would have been his glory to conquer. Said Jean Paul, who had often only an allowance of water, 'I would not for much that I had been born richer.' 'The canary bird sings sweeter, the longer it has been trained in a

darkened cage.' 'Fortune,' says Disraeli, 'has rarely condescended to be the companion of genius.' Tasso was obliged to borrow a crown to subsist through the week. Cervantes, the genius of Spain, wanted bread. Said a nobleman to a bishop: 'I want your advice, my lord; how am I to bring up my son so as to make him get forward in the world?' 'I know of but one way,' replied the bishop; 'give him parts and poverty.' Poussin, shown a picture by a person of rank, remarked, 'You only want a little poverty, sir, to make you a good painter.' Johnson usually wrote from the pressure of want. With his lassitude and love of ease, he would never have been the literary autocrat of his century, had he not been pressed into service and driven on to glory at the sharp point of necessity.

Influence. On the popular mind of Scotland his influence has been great and lasting. His poetry has helped to awaken, enlarge, elevate, and refine it. This frank, generous, and reckless blooming of poetic life was needed as a counteraction against the pitiless doctrines of Calvinism. To the national literature it restored the idea of beauty; to the national religion, the pleasures of instinct; to both, the natural expression of the heart's emotions.

While 'rivers roll and woods are green,' aspiring youth will be instructed by the efforts, the miseries, the revolts, the errors, and the virtues of the mighty peasant who' grew immortal as he stooped behind his plough.'

COWPER.

Poor charming soul, perishing like a frail flower transplanted from a warm land to the snow: the world's temperature was too rough for it; and the moral law, which should have supported it, tore it with its thorns.-Taine.

Biography.-Born in the county of Hertford, in 1731, son of a clergyman. In his seventh year, he lost his mother, a lady of most amiable temper and agreeable manners. At this tender

age he was sent to a boarding-school. Timid and home-sick, he was singled out by a boy of fifteen who persecuted him with

relentless cruelty, and never seemed pleased except when tormenting him:

'I conceived such a dread of his figure, . . that I well remember being afraid to lift my eyes upon him higher than his knees; and that I knew him better by his shoebuckles than by any other part of his dress."

At nine a malady of the nerves seized him, the shadow of evil to come. At ten he was sent to Westminster, where he studied the classics diligently till eighteen. Here he experienced more brutality, and in consequence could never advert to those years without a feeling of horror. Warren Hastings was one of his schoolmates.

He next studied, or professed to study, the law, with a London attorney, and was admitted to the bar in 1754. A more unsuitable choice of profession it would have been difficult to make. He devoted his time chiefly to poetry and general literature. As students, he and Thurlow-the future Lord Chancellor-were constantly employed from morning to night in giggling and making giggle.' His evil had not left him. Melancholy came, profound dejection:

'Day and night I was upon the rack, lying down in horror and rising up in despair.'

At thirty-one, almost without an object in life, his father dead and his fortune small, he accepted gladly, without reflection, the post of reading clerk in the House of Lords. But his meek and gentle spirit was so overwhelmed by the idea of a public appearance, that he resigned his position before he assumed its duties. Thinking, like a man in a fever, that a change of posture would relieve his pain, he had requested appointment to the clerkship of the Journals-an office which, he had supposed, would not require his presence in the House. But he had to undergo an examination, and again his nerves were unstrung:

"They whose spirits are formed like mine, to whom a public exhibition of themselves, on any occasion, is mortal poison, may have some idea of the horror of my situationothers can have none. My continual misery at length brought on a nervous fever; quiet forsook me by day, and peace by night; even a finger raised against me seemed more than I could bear.'

For six months he studied the Journal books and tried to prepare himself, but he read without understanding:

'In this situation, such a fit of passion has sometimes seized me when alone in my chambers, that I have cried out aloud, and cursed the hour of my birth; lifting up my eyes to heaven not as a suppliant, but in the hellish spirit of rancorous reproach and blasphemy against my Maker.'