No wonder I'm fond of a sodger laddie.
The first of my loves was a swaggering blade,
To rattle the thundering drum was his
trade.

The sword I forsook for the sake of the

Full soon I grew sick of my sanctified sot, The regiment at large for a husband I got, From the gilded spontoon to the fife I was ready,

I asked no more but a sodger laddie.

But the peace it reduc'd me to beg in despair
Till I met my old boy at a Cunningham fair;
His rags regimental they flutter'd so gaudy,
My heart it rejoic'd at a sodger laddie..
But whilst with both hands I can hold the
glass steady,

Here's to thee, my hero, my sodger laddie."

orderly life, strict Puritan duty, do not | soiled the bark. Doubtless he did not exhaust all the powers of man. Burns boast about these excesses, he rather cries out in favor of instinct and enjoy-repented of them; but as to the upris ment, so as to seem epicurean. He has ing and blooming of the free poetic life genuine gayety, a glow of jocularity; in the open air, he found no fault with laughter commends itself to him; he it. He thought that love, with the praises it as well as the good suppers of charming dreams it brings, poetry, good comrades, where wine is plentiful, pleasure, and the rest, are beautiful pleasantry abounds, ideas pour forth, things, suitable to human instincts, and poetry sparkles, and causes a carnival therefore to the designs of God. In of beautiful figures and good-humored short, in contrast with morose Puritan people to move about in the humanism, he approved joy and spoke well brain. of happiness.*

Not that he was a mere epicurean on the contrary, he could be religious When, after the death of his father, he prayed aloud in the evening, he drew tears from those present; and his Cottar's Saturday Night is the most heartfelt of virtuous idyls. I even believe he was fundamentally religious, He advised his "pupil as he tenders his own peace, to keep up a regular warm intercourse with the Deity." What he made fun of was official worship; but as for religion, the language of the soul, he was greatly attached to it. Often before Dugald Stewart at Edinburgh, he disapproved of the skeptical jokes which he heard at the supper table. He thought he had "every evidence for the reality of a life beyond the stinted bourne of our present existence;" and many a time, side by side with a jocose satire, we find in his writings stanzas full of humble repentance, confiding fervor, or Christian resignation. These, if you will, are a poet's contradictions, but they are also a poet's divinations; under these apparent variations there rises a new ideal; old narrow moralities are to give place to the wide sympathy of the modern man, who loves the beautiful wherever it meets him, and who, refusing to mutilate human nature, is at once Pagan and Christian

He always was in love. He made love the great end of existence, to such a degree that at the club which he founded with the young men of Tarbolton, every member was obliged "to be the declared lover of one or more fair ones. From the age of fifteen this was his main business. He had for companion in his harvest toil a sweet and lovable girl, a year younger than himself: "In short, she, altogether unwittingly to herself, initiated me in that delicious passion, which, in spite of acid disappointment, gin-horse prudence, and book-worm philosophy, I hold to be the first of human joys, our dearest blessing here below."t He sat beside her with a joy which he did not understand, to "pick out from her little hand the cruel nettle-stings and thistles." He had many other less innocent fancies; it seems to me that by his very nature he was in love with all women: as soon as he saw a pretty one, he grew lively; his commonplacebook and his songs show that he set off in pursuit after every butterfly, golden or not, which seemed about to settle. Moreover he did not confine himself to Platonic reveries; he was as free of action as of words; broad jests cop up freely in his verses. He calls himself an unregenerate heathen, and he is right. He has even written obscene verses; and Lord Byron refers to This originality and divining instinct a quantity of his letters, of course un-exist in his style as in his ideas. The published, than which worse could not be imagined: ‡ it was the excess of the sap which overflowed in him, and * He himself says: "I have been all along ▲ miserable dupe to Love." His brother Gilbert said: "He was constantly the victim of

some fair enslaver.'

+ Chambers' Life of Burns, i. 12.

+ Byron's Works, ed. Moore, 17 vos., ii. 302, Journal, Dec. 13, 1813

specialty of the age in which we live, and which he inaugurated, is to blot out rigid distinctions of class, cate. chism, and style; academic, moral, o social conventions are falling away, and we claim in society a mastery for individual merit, in morality for inborn

*See a passage from Burns' commonplace book in Chambers' Life of Burns, i. 93.

generosity, in literature for genuine | people. He was respected, and even feeling. Burns was the first to enter on this track, and he often pursues it to the end. When he wrote verses, it was not on calculation or in obedience to fashion: "My passions, when once lighted up, raged like so many devils, till they got vent in rhyme; and then the conning over my verses, like a spell, soothed all into quiet."* He hummed them to old Scotch airs which he pasBionately loved, as he drove his plough, and which, he says, as soon as he sang them, brought ideas and rhymes to his lips. That, indeed, was natural poetry; not forced in a hothouse, but born of the soil between the furrows, side by side with music, amidst the gloom and Deauty of the climate, like the violet heather of the moors and the hillside. We can understand that it gave vigor to his tongue. For the first time this man spoke as men speak, or rather as they think, without premeditation, with a mixture of all styles, familiar and terrible, hiding an emotion under a joke, tender and jeering in the same place, apt to place side by side tapoom trivialities and the high language of poetry, so indifferent was he to ules, content to exhibit his feeling as it came to him, and as he felt it. At last, after so many years, we escape from measured declamation, we hear a man's voice! and what is better still, we forget the voice in the emotion which it expresses, we feel this emotion reflected in ourselves, we enter into relations with a soul. Then form seems to fade away and disappear: I think that this is the great feature of modern poetry; seven or eight times has Burns reached it.

loved. A subscription brought him a second edition and five hundred pounds. He also at last had won his position like the great French plebeians, amongst whom Rousseau was the first. Unfortunately he brought thither, like them, the vices of his condition and of his genius. A man oes not rise witb impunity, nor, above all, desire to rise with impunity: we also have our vices, and suffering vanity is the first of them "Never did a heart pant more ardently than mine to be distinguished," said Burns. This grievous pride marred his talent, and threw him into follies. He labored to attain a fine epistolary style, and brought ridicule on himself by imitating in his letters the men of the academy and the court. He wrote to his lady-loves with choice phrases, full of periods as pedantic as those of Dr. Johnson. Certainly we dare hardly quote them, the emphasis is so gro tesque.* At other times he committed to his commonplace-book literary expressions that occurred to him, and six months afterwards sent them to his correspondents as extemporary effusions and natural improvisations. Even in his verses, often enough, he fell into a grand conventional style; † brought into play sighs, ardors, flames, even the big classical and mythological machinery. Béranger, who thought or called himself the poet of the people, did the same. A plebeian must have much courage to venture on always remaining himself, and never slipping on the court dress. Thus Burns, a Scottish villager, avoided, in speaking, all Scotch village expressions: he was pleased to show himself as well-bred as fashionable folks. It was forcibly and by surprise that his genius drew him away from the proprieties: twice out of three times his feeling was mar red by his pretentiousness.

His success lasted one winter, afte

"O Clarinda, shall we not meet in a state. lavish hand of plenty shall minister to the some yet unknown state of being, where the highest wish of benevolence, and where the chill north-wind of prudence shall never blow over the flowery fields of enjoyment?" + Epistle to James Smith:

"O Life, how pleasant is thy morning, Young Fancy's rays the hills adorning, Cold-pausing Caution's lesson spurning!'

himself, begins again the next day, but in a contrary direction, and ends by finding nothing left in him, but ruins within and without. Burns had never been prudent, and was so less than ever, after his success at Edinburgh. He had enjoyed too much; he henceforth felt too acutely the painful sting of modern man, namely the disproportion between the desire for certain things and the power of obtaining them. Debauch had all but spoiled his fine imagination, which had before been "the chief source of his happiness;' and he confessed that instead of tender reveries, he had now nothing but sensual desires. He had been kept drinking till six in the morning; he was very often drunk at Dumfries, not that the whiskey was very good, but it makes thoughts to whirl about in the head; and hence poets, like the poor, are fond of it. Once at Mr. Riddell's he made himself so tipsy that he insulted the lady of the house; next

which the wide incurable wound of plebeianism made itself felt,-I mean that he was obliged to work for his living. With the money gained by the second edition of his poems he took a little farm. It was a bad bargain; and, moreover, we can imagine that he had not the money-grubbing character necessary. He says: "I might write you on farming, on building, on marketing; but my poor distracted mind is so torn, 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." Soon he left his farm, with empty pockets, to fill at Dumfries the small post of exciseman, which was worth, in all, £90 a year. In this fine employment he branded leather, gauged casks, tested the make of candles, issued licenses for the transit of spirits. From his dunghills he passed to office work and grocery: what a life for such a man! He would have been un-day he sent her an apology which was happy, even if independent and rich. These great innovators, these poets, are all alike. What makes them poets is the violent afflux of sensations. They have a nervous mechanism more sensitive than ours; the objects which leave us cool, transport them suddenly beyond themselves. At the least shock their brain is set going, after which they once more fall flat, loathe exist ence, sit morose amidst the memories of their faults and their lost pleasures. Burns said: "My worst enemy is moi même. 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." He was always in extremes, at the height of exaltation or in the depth of depression; in the morning, ready to weep; in the evening at table or under the table; enamored of Jean Armour, then on her refusal engaged to another, then return ing to Jean, then quitting her, then taking her back, amidst much scandal, many blots on his character, still more disgust. In such heads ideas are like cannon balls: the man, hurled onwards, bursts through every thing, shatters

not accepted, and out of spite, wrote rhymes against her: a lamentable excess, betraying an unseated mind. At thirty-seven he was worn out. One night, having drunk too much, he sat down and went to sleep in the street. It was January, and he caught rheumatic fever. His family wanted to call in a doctor. "What business has a physician to waste his time on me?" he said; "I am a poor pigeon not worth plucking." He was horribly thin, could not sleep, and could not stand on his legs. "As to my individual self I am tranquil. But Burns' poor widow and half a dozen of his dear little ones, there I am as weak as a woman's tear." He was even afraid he should not e in peace, and had the bitterness of be ing obliged to beg. Here is a letter he wrote to a friend: "A rascal of a haber dasher, taking into his head that I am dying, has commenced a process against me, and will infallibly put my emaciated body into jail. Will you be so good as to accommodate me, and that by return of post, with ten pounds? O James! did you know the pride of my heart, you would feel doubly for me! Alas, I am not used to beg!"* He died a *Chambers' Life; Letter to Mr. Js. Burnes iv. 205.