much, arrest my sun before he has well reached his middle career, and will turn over the poet to far more important concerns than studying the brilliancy of wit or the pathos of sentiment. However, hope is the cordial of the human heart, and I endeavour to cherish it as well as I can." The new year found him making feeble efforts to crawl across his room. But no suffering could teach prudence to Burns. The firstfruits of his strength were given to a tavern dinner, prolonged into the late morning. Returning home, he sunk on the snow and slept. The old enemy came in his sleep, and he awoke with the torments of rheumatism, renewed and sharpened. Pale, emaciated, and wanting a hand to help him from his chair, he complained of "spirits fled-fled!" One faint hope remained—it was the shadow of a shade: sea-bathing might restore him. In order to obtain it, he was removed to Brow, a village on the Solway Frith; and there his pains were slightly relieved. But the fire was still burning. He returned to Dumfries on the 18th of July, 1796, wasted in body and face, and hardly able to stand. Dr. Maxwell, who attended him, communicated the particulars of his closing hours to Currie :-A tremor pervaded his frame; his tongue was parched, and his mind sunk into delirium when not roused by conversation. On the second and third day the fever increased, and his strength diminished. Upon the fourth day the cord was loosed, and the spirit took its flight.

So died Robert Burns, the most remarkable person of that age; alike gifted and wretched; the glory and the shame of literature. Can the tale be more fittingly ended, or moralized, than by the last words of a Scottish minstrel of wider renown, and who did not die in a noisy street, but in the splendid home which his genius had erected. The September afternoon was calm and sunny, and the Tweed, rippling over its pebbles, sounded through the open window, when the expiring poet whispered to a friend by his bed, "I may have but a minute to speak to you,-My

dear, be a good man-be virtuous, be religious. Nothing else will give you any comfort when you come to lie here."

Men forgive much to the dead, and round the grave of Burns nothing was remembered but the light that had been quenched. It went down in stormy splendour among clouds and darkness, but the survivors thought only of the full and glowing orb, and the beauty which it had left for ever to illuminate the streams and fields of Scotland. He was buried, July 26th, with military honours, as belonging to the Dumfries Volunteers, and a great multitude followed him. The sun shone brightly all the day, and while the earth" was heaped up, and the green sod was laid over him, the crowd stood gazing for some minutes' space, and then melted silently away.”

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Few faces are more familiar to poetical readers than the broad, massive, earnest countenance of Burns. A plainspoken and rough acquaintance said that he was a goodlooking, fine fellow, "rather black an' ill-coloured ;" and Professor Walker recognized the weather-beaten features of a master of a trading vessel. His black hair, slightly sprinkled with grey, was spread over his forehead, and suited the large dark eye, which really glowed under the impulse of pleasure or anger. 'I have seen," wrote Scott, "the most distinguished men of my time; and I never saw such another eye in a human head." His figure was tall-nearly five feet ten inches,—but an ungraceful stoop diminished his height to the observer. Like many poets, he was not captivated by science, or skill, in music. An old strathspey awoke exquisite pleasure, and "Rothemurche's Rant" put him in raptures. In this feeling he resembled Scott, who was melted by the simplest tune, while a complicated harmony seemed to be a babble of sounds. But no ear was wakefuller than that of Burns to every tone of Nature: her sigh, her murmur, her breath of love; the rustle of the copse, the wind in the branches, the whistle of the curlew, the cadence of plovers, the moan of the river sedge,—each sound passed

over his mind like a cunning finger upon a harp, and left him soothed, inflamed, enamoured, or devout.

His literary taste was instinctively pure and refined. Virgil charmed him by rural pictures and exquisite grace, filling his mind "with a thousand fancies of emulation," and, at the same time, reminding him of a Shetland pony by the side of a racer starting for the plate. His judgment of English poetry was chaste and true. Pope, Dryden, Collins, Gray, Thomson, and Beattie were especially dear. I think that he never read much of Spenser, but Milton he revered. He hailed "the glorious poem, 'The Task,'” and admired the water-colour drawings of Hurdis. In prose he did not show so exact a judgment; for while he loved the sweet, serious morals of Addison, he suffered himself to be dazzled and beguiled by the rant of Ossian, and the pantomime of Sterne. Nor may I forget the "Meditations" of Hervey, which have long been among the popular reading of Scotland.

:

Of his personal character, the key was pride, often manifesting itself in arrogance and injustice. He dines with Lord Glencairn, who has one other guest, a man of rank, to whom he shows becoming attention. The blood of the poet boils against the "blockhead," and he is on the point of " throwing down his gage of contemptuous defiance," for " Dunderpate' to take up. The incident recals the pleasant story of Selden :—“ Wę measure the excellency of other men by some excellency which we conceive to be in ourselves. Nash, a poet (poor enough, as poets used to be) seeing an alderman with the gold chain upon his great horse, said to one of his companions, "Do you see yon fellow, how goodly, how big he looks? Why, that fellow cannot make a blank verse." Dunderpate" was probably a usefuller member of society than Burns. Such passages suggest a comparison with the American Cooper, shaking the dust off his feet, because an infirm nobleman entered a drawing-room before him. The temper of Burns occasionally broke into

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open rudeness and insult. A lady asked him if he had nothing to say of a fine scene before them. "Nothing, madam," was his reply, while his eye glanced to the leader of the party, "for an ass is braying over it."

The politics of Burns took the part of his fancy, his friendship, or his pique. Scott, enclosing a few letters to Mr. Lockhart, remarked-"In one of them (to the singular old curmudgeon, Lady Winifred Constable) he plays high Jacobite, and on that account it is curious; though I imagine, his Jacobitism, like my own, belonged to the fancy rather than to the reason." There is no need of conjecture. Burns acknowledges that his "Jacobitism was merely by way of vive la bagatelle.”

Of his religious opinions, a letter to Mrs. Dunlop (June 21, 1789), gives a full and interesting account :

give a sermon.

I have just heard He is a man famous for his benevolence, and I revere him; but from such ideas of my Creator, good Lord deliver me! Religion, my honoured friend, is surely a simple business, as it equally concerns the ignorant and the learned, the poor and the rich. That there is an incomprehensibly great Being, to whom I owe my existence, and that he must be intimately acquainted with the operations and progress of the internal machinery, and consequent outward deportment of this creature which he has made,—these are, I think, selfevident propositions. That there is a real and eternal distinction between virtue and vice, and consequently that I am an accountable creature that from the seeming nature of the human mind, as well as from the evident imperfection, nay, positive injustice, in the administration of affairs, both in the natural and moral worlds, there must be a retributive scene of existence beyond the grave, must, I think, be allowed by every one who will give himself a moment's reflection. I will go farther, and affirm, that from the sublimity, excellence, and purity of his doctrine and precepts, unparalleled by all the aggregated wisdom and learning of many preceding ages, though, to appearance, he himself was the obscurest and most illiterate of our species, therefore, Jesus Christ was from God.

Whatever mitigates the woes, or increases the happiness of others, this is my criterion of goodness; and whatever injures society at large, or any individual in it, this is my measure of iniquity.

"I hate," he said, upon another occasion, "the very idea of a controversial divinity; I despise the superstition

of a fanatic: but I love the religion of a man." His lines had not fallen in pleasant places. Controversy was rampant; and the truth, if truth it were, was often told with the tongue of a viper. The religion of the heart he seldom found. Born and brought up a Presbyterian, the Gospel came to him in the roar of black Russell and the invectives of Father Auld. In no dress could the creed look fair or engaging. A man of taste, in a kirk, has a feeling of being snowed up in an unfurnished house, without a fire. A chill strikes him from the cold building and the colder worship. In one of the poet's journals, we hear him pouring out his intense disgust:-" What a poor, pimping business is a Presbyterian place of worship: dirty, narrow, squalid, stuck in a corner of old Popish grandeur, such as Linlithgow, and much more, Melrose." His greatest countrymen have shared his dislike: Byron remembered the fiery Calvinism of his boyhood with a sense of personal injury; the heart of Scott yearned for that nobler and purer ritual which has breathed into its prayers the devotion and the language of the Apostles; and the sentiments of Jeffrey are known to have been of the same kind.

Presbyterianism in Burns's time was coarser and fiercer than in ours. Vulgar in attire, wrathful in look, menacing in speech,-it combined in its visage the most repulsive features of the faith. Nor had it always inward virtue to atone for the outward offence. The Elders frequently showed the curiosity of the Inquisition; and in some of the Ministers might be seen the tyranny of the cowl, without the romance.

Wordsworth expressed his regret that, instead of writing poems like “The Holy Fair," in which the religious services of his country are treated with levity and scorn, Burns did not employ his genius in exhibiting religion under the serious and affecting aspect which it so frequently takes. And Jeffrey paints a delightful sketch of a Highland Sacrament, with its Gaelic sermon preached out of tents