My humble knapsack a' my wealth,
A poor but honest sodger.

"A right leal heart was in my breast,
A hand unstained wi' plunder,
And for fair Scotia hame again,

I cheery on did wander.

I thought upon the banks o' Coil,
I thought upon my Nancy,

I thought upon the witching smile,
That caught my youthful fancy.

"At length I reached the bonnie glen,
Where early life I sported;

I passed the mill, and trysting thorn,
Where Nancy oft I courted:

Wha spied I but my ain dear maid,

Down by my mother's dwelling!
And turned me round to hide the tear
That in my breast was swelling."

The ballad is a very beautiful one, and throughout how true to nature! It is alive all over Scotland; that other is dead, or with suspended animation; not because "The Soldier's Return" is a happy, and "Will and Jean” a miserable story; for the people's heart is prone to pity, though their eyes are not much given to tears. But the people were told that "Will and Jean" had been written for their sakes, by a wise man made melancholy by the sight of their condition. The upper ranks were sorrowful exceedingly for the lower-all weeping over their wine for them over their whisky, and would not be comforted! For Hector Macneil informs them that

"Maggie's club, wha could get nae light

On some things that should be clear,
Fand ere long the fau't, and ae night
Clubb'd and gat the Gazetteer."

The lower ranks read the Lamentation, for ever so many thousands were thrust into their hands; but though not insensible of their own infirmities, and willing to confess them, they rose up in indignation against a charge that swept their firesides of all that was most sacredly cherished there, asked who wrote

"The Cottar's Saturday Night ?" and declared with one voice, and a loud one, that if they were to be bettered by poems, it should be by the poems of their own Robert Burns.

And here we are brought to speak of those Satirical compositions which made Burns famous within the bounds of more than one Presbytery, before the world had heard his name. In boyhood and early youth he showed no symptoms of humor—he was no droll-―dull even-from constitutional headaches, and heartquakes, and mysteries not to be understood-no laughing face had he the lovers of mirth saw none of its sparkles in his dark, melancholy looking eyes. In his autobiographical sketch he tells us of no funny or facetious "chap-books;" his earliest reading was of the "tender and the true," the serious or the sublime. But from the first he had been just as susceptible and as observant of the comic as of the tragic-nature had given him a genius as powerful over smiles as tears-but as the sacred source lies deepest, its first inspirations were drawn thence in abstraction and silence, and not till it felt some assurance of its diviner strength did it delight to disport itself among the ludicrous images that, in innumerable varieties of form and color-all representative of realities-may be seen, when we choose to look at them, mingling with the most solemn or pathetic shows that pass along in our dream of life. You remember his words, "Thus with me began Love and Poetry." True; they grew together; but for a long time they were almost silent-seldom broke out into song. His earliest love verses but poorly express his love-nature was then too strong within him for art which then was weak—and young passion, then pure but all-engrossing, was filling his whole soul with poetry that ere long was to find a tongue that would charm the world.

It was in the Humorous, the Comic, the Satirical, that he first tried and proved his strength. Exulting to find that a rush of words was ready at his will-that no sooner flashed his fancies than on the instant they were embodied, he wanton'd and revelled among the subjects that had always seemed to him the most risible, whatever might be the kind of laughter, simple or compound-pure mirth, or a mixture of mirth and contempt, even of indignation and scorn-mirth still being the chief ingredient that

qualified the whole-and these, as you know, were all included within the "Sanctimonious," from which Burns believed the Sacred to be excluded; but there lay the danger, and there the blame if he transgressed the holy bounds.

His satires were unsparingly directed against certain ministers of the gospel, whose Calvinism he thought was not Christianity; whose characters were to him odious, their persons ridiculous, their manners in the pulpit irreverent, and out of it absurd; and having frequent opportunities of seeing and hearing them in all their glory, he made studies of them con amore on the spot, and at home from abundant materials with a master's hand elaborated finished pictures-for some of them are no less-which, when hung out for public inspection in market-places, brought the originals before crowds of gazers transported into applause. Was this wicked? Wicked we think too strong a word; but we cannot say that it was not reprehensible, for to all sweeping satire there must be some exception-and exaggeration cannot be truth. Burns by his irregularities had incurred ecclesiastical censure, and it has not unfairly been said that personal spite barbed the sting of his satire. Yet we fear such censure had been but too lightly regarded by him; and we are disposed to think that his ridicule, however blameable on other grounds, was free from malignity, and that his genius for the comic rioted in the pleasure of sympathy and the pride of power. To those who regard the persons he thus satirized as truly belonging to the old Covenanters, and Saints of a more ancient time, such satires must seem shameful and sinful; to us who regard "Rumble John" and his brethren in no such light, they appear venial offences, and not so horrible as Hudibrastic. A good many years after Burns's death, in our boyhood we sometimes saw and heard more than one of those worthies, and cannot think his descriptions greatly overcharged. We remember walking one dayunknown to us as a fast day-in the neighborhood of an ancient fortress, and hearing a noise to be likened to nothing imaginable on this earth but the bellowing of a buffalo fallen into a trap upon a tiger, which as we came within half a mile of the castle we discerned to be the voice of a pastor engaged in public prayer. His physiognomy was little less alarming than his voice, and his

sermon corresponded with his looks and his lungs-the whole being indeed an extraordinary exhibition of divine worship. We never can think it sinful that Burns should have been humorous on such a pulpiteer; and if we shudder at some of the verses in which he seems yet alive, it is not at the satirist.

"From this time, I began to be known in the country as a maker of rhymes. Holy Willie's Prayer next made its appearance, and alarmed the kirk-session so much, that they held several meetings to look over their spiritual artillery, and see if any of it might be pointed against profane rhymers;" "and to a place among profane rhymers," says Mr. Lockhart, in his masterly volume, "the author of this terrible infliction had unquestionably established his right." Sir Walter speaks of it as "a piece of satire more exquisitely severe than any which Burns ever afterwards wrote, but unfortunately cast in a form too daringly profane to be received into Dr. Currie's collection.'

We have

no wish to say one word in opposition to the sentence pronounced by such judges; but has Burns here dared beyond Milton, Goethe, and Byron? He puts a Prayer to the Almighty into the mouth of one whom he believes to be one of the lowest of blasphemers. In that Prayer are impious supplications couched in shocking terms, characteristic of the hypocrite who stands on a familiar footing with his Maker. Milton's blasphemer is a fallen angel, Goethe's a devil, Byron's the first murderer, and Burns's an elder of the kirk. All the four poets are alike guilty, or not guilty-unless there be in the case of one of them something peculiar that lifts him up above the rest, in the case of another something peculiar that leaves him alone a sinner. Let Milton then stand aloof, acquitted of the charge, not because of the grandeur and magnificence of his conception of Satan, but because its high significance cannot be misunderstood by the pious, and that out of the mouths of the dwellers in darkness, as well as of the Sons of the Morning "he vindicates the ways of God to man." Byron's Cain blasphemes; does Byron? Many have thought so for they saw, or seemed to see, in the character of the Cursed, as it glooms in soliloquies that are poetically sublime, some dark intention in its delineator to inspire doubts of the justice of the Almighty One who inhabiteth eternity. Goethe in

the "Prologue in Heaven" brings Mephistopheles face to face with God. But Goethe devoted many years to "his great poem, Faust," and in it he too, as many of the wise and good believe, strove to show rising out of the blackness of darkness the attributes of Him whose eyes are too pure to behold iniquity.. Be it even so; then, why blame Burns? You cannot justly do so, on account of the "daringly profane form " in which "Holy Willie's Prayer" is cast, without utterly reprobating the "Prologue in Heaven."

Of the Holy Fair few have spoken with any serious reprehension. Dr. Blair was so much taken with it that he suggested a well known emendation—and for our own part we have no hesitation in saying, that we see no reason to lament that it should have been written by the writer of the Cottar's Saturday Night. The title of the poem was no profane thought of his—it had arisen long before among the people themselves, and expressed the prevalent opinion respecting the use and wont that profaned the solemnization of the most awful of all religious rites. In many places, and in none more than in Mauchline, the administration of the Sacrament was hedged round about by the self-same prac. tices that mark the character and make the enjoyment of a Rural Fair-day. Nobody doubts that in the midst of them all sat hundreds of pious people whose whole hearts and souls were in the divine service. Nobody doubts that even among those who took part in the open or hardly concealed indecencies which custom could never make harmless, though it made many insensible to their grossness, not a few were now and then visited with devout thoughts; nay, that some, in spite of their improprieties, which fell off from them unawares, or were by an act of pious volition dismissed, were privileged to partake of the communion elements. Nobody supposes that the heart of such an assemblage was to be judged from its outside-that there was no composed depth beneath that restless surface. But everybody knows that there was fatal desecration of the spirit that should have reigned there, and that the thoughts of this world were paramount at a time and place set apart, under sanctions and denunciations the most awful, to the remembrance of Him who purchased for us the kingdom of Heaven.