the half-wondering, half-warning words "O Robert!"-lent his brother £200, and resumed his intimacy with Jean Armour. In August we find him again in Edinburgh, projecting a journey to the Highlands along with William Nicol, a teacher in the High School, and whom, although he passed with most other people for a vulgar, noisy, intolerable pedant, Burns thought a clever fellow and a suitable companion. The ill-matched pair went through Linlithgow and Falkirk to Stirling, where Burns gave great offence by a coarse and witless epigram (inscribed on an inn window) against the House of Hanover, which might have been written by his companion -and thence to Harvieston, where Burns fell in love with Charlotte Hamilton, sister of his friend, Gavin, of Mauchline -a love which haunted him to the close of his life, as his very last song proves. From Harvieston they proceeded to Kenmore, Aberfeldy, and Blair in Athole, where the Duke showed him no small kindness, and where Josiah Walker took him up the beautiful banks of the Tilt by moonlight—and thence to Inverness, Culloden Moor, and to Gordon Castle, where the impatience of his companion, Nicol, hurried him away from a delightful evening with the family-and thence to Aberdeen, Stonehaven, and Montrose. When the twain were returning from this tour, we have been told, the late Provost Burnes, of Montrose, and his father, relatives of the poet, went to meet him at Marykirk, when Robert Burns said to them, "I have been at our paternal farm in the Mearns, and showed our old cousin some little things I had written by the way, which I mean to publish, but the farmer streckit himself up, struck his stick on the floor, and said, ‘Fie, fie, man, are ye gaen to affront your respectable friends by printing sic godless nonsense-na, na; gie me them, and I'll put them in the fire."" To this, it is said, the poet often alluded while in Montrose, and never altogether forgave his old relative. From Montrose he proceeded to Perth, and thence up the river Earn, to Invermay, Crieff, the charming village of Comrie, and the white castle of Abruchill, where, repelled by a cold reception from the inmates, in spite of the attraction of the dark magnificent mountains which tower above, he turned his horse's head, and left Strathearn for ever behind him. He had seen in this excursion many of the most beautiful scenes, and some of the most beautiful women, in Scotland; but Upper Strathearn may well be proud, that the scenes, and the lady that alone extracted genuine inspiration from him during all his route, were Loch-Turit, and young Phemy Murray of Lintrose, then residing at Ochtertyre. His "Lines on scaring wildfowl in Loch-Turit," and "Blythe, blythe, and merry was she," are beautiful -his lines on "Foyers" and "Taymouth" are laboriously unsuccessful. Arrived again in Edinburgh, he found new trials awaiting him. Creech was slow to settle his accounts; and he became acquainted with Clarinda. Her story is too well known to require to be repeated. The whole particulars of it have probably never been told, but from what is divulged we, at least, have gathered an impression of considerable contempt for both parties in the matter. In neither do we see any evidence of real love, or even of that infatuation which often mimics the effects of true passion. From beginning to end it was a case of vanity, dashed in one, and perhaps in both of them, by an admixture of a lower feeling still. The letters which passed between them are about the silliest and most ridiculous which two intelligent persons, who were at the same time thoroughly sane, ever addressed to one another; and their perpetuation and popularity disgrace the age. Burns, by this time, had found out that the nobility and gentry of a land will not long continue to help a man who does not help himself. Spurned from the doors of some of them where he had once been received with a warm welcome, and knowing too well that although, perhaps, misinformed as to particular facts, they were right in their general impression of his recent character and conduct, he determined, partly in pride and partly in remorse, to return to a sphere of manly industry. He became an exciseman and farmer; and we agree with Chambers and some others in thinking that at that time he could not have done any thing else, unworthy as the position was. Literature, and especially poetry, would then have starved him had he pursued it as a profession. To beg he was ashamed-of pandering to patrons he had got enough—but he could dig, and "Even the rumour ran that he could gauge." And therefore, after marrying his Jean, who had again fallen, through her love to him, and been turned out of her father's house to the naked elements, he settled down at Ellisland, near Dumfries, in a poor farm with a salary of fifty pounds per annum as an exciseman, with a disappointed heart, a wounded spirit, and a determination, as sure to fluctuate as an eddy in the adjacent stream, to become a wise, an honest, an industrious, and a virtuous man. If he only succeeded in attaining the second of these desirable characteristics-still was not that a quality far from common?—had he not often repeated with enthusiasm the words of Pope "An honest man 's the noblest work of God?" -- and was it not something, taking his whole past career and his terrible passions into account, that he did not drown himself in the Nith, instead of setting himself quietly to cultivate its banks? From the society of Stewart, Robertson, and Henry Mackenzie to that of Dumfriesshire ploughmen, and from that of Eliza Burnett and Charlotte Hamilton to that of Jean Armour and her compeers what a downfall! - felt the more because it came greatly by his own fault, and because it was irremediable. The courage and the firmness which could bear it were surely those of a giant of one who looked above the judgments of mankind, on toward the awards of future ages-looked so habitually, although, alas! not always. - Yet, for a while, life at Ellisland flowed on rather pleasantly with the poet. He had now, for the first time, a house and farm of his own; his wife came, after some delay, from Ayrshire to be the active mistress of his establishment; his children were now around him to "fill his home with smiles." The scenery of the farm was beautiful. There was a red scaur impending over the Nith, as if-made on purpose for the steps of a poet; and there he was often found, watching now the calm and rippling water, and now, with a stern delight and strange, the turbid waves of the spate-swollen river. Some of the neighbouring gentry paid him considerable attention; and ever and anon, young enthusiasts, like Sir Egerton Brydges, came, as pilgrims of his genius, to pay him the honour denied him, as usual with the prophetic order, in his own country. Rarest gleams of his old inspiration, too, burst, although fitfully, upon him. In the barn-yard of Ellisland, while the evening star was shining "like another moon," he sang that divine lyric to "Mary in Heaven." From his desk there, were issued many of his noblest letters, some of which are beautiful unrhymed poems; and, wandering by the banks of the Nith, there "came on" him, in the gush of one glorious hour, "Tam o' Shanter;" perhaps the finest short poem ever written, and in which animalism itself is made to glow and glitter into poetry, and Bacchus is crowned, not with vine, but with laurel leaves. Still Burns was not happy. He felt himself in a false position, and that his work-which, while he was at the plough, had been his pride-now that he was a gauger, had become his degradation. He was much in convivial society. His farm, too, was like all the farms with which he had ever been connected, an unfortunate speculation; and he at last determined to throw it up, and to remove to Dumfries. This was in December 1791. Lord Glencairn had died a little before, and poor Burns, who felt that the last link between him and the Scotch nobility was now severed, had sung a plaintive elegy over his grave. Dumfries was then, as it still is, a small town, beautifully situated on the banks of the Nith, in a green, rich valley, bounded by the huge Criffel to the south, and the high Queensberry Hill to the north. Its society Its society was then, as still, when compared with towns of the same size in Scotland, of rather a refined and intellectual sort, although much more convivial than at present in its habits. In this "Queen of the South,' as it is often called, Burns set up the staff of his rest-if the term rest can be applied to the four most miserable of his few and unhappy years. A little after he came to Dumfries, he paid a final visit to Edinburgh, and had a last interview with Clarinda, then preparing to join her husband in the West Indies. Returned, his grief evaporated in some beautiful songs; and he directed his attention to French politics, and to a new object of Platonic flirtation, the accomplished Maria Woodley-Mrs Riddell—a lady of taste and talent, although noted for her caprice. The times had become electric and portentous. It was the hour-memorable for ever in the history of men-when, in the language of a poet kindred to Burns in enthusiasm for liberty, if not in masculine strength of genius "Great France sprang forth, And seized, as if to break the ponderous chains and when her effort was welcomed with a shout of applause from all the ardent and enthusiastic spirits in Europe. Burns' heart-a heart crushed and withered under the pressure of poverty, pride, and a galling sense of aristocratic neglectleapt up when he saw the beautiful rainbow of the French Revolution bridging the sky. Having assisted in capturing a smuggling vessel in the Solway Frith, he sent a present of the cannon found in her to the French Government-the act of a rash enthusiast, not of a deliberate traitor, but which was long remembered and resented against the poet. In 1792, George Thomson, then a clerk in Edinburgh, along with some other amateurs, projected a collection of Scotch songs, and asked the aid of Burns. The poet, who had previously contributed many precious lyrics to Johnson's Scots Musical Museum, eagerly closed with the proposal, and, from that time to his death, scarcely a month passed without some immortal drop of song falling from his pen on Thomson's favoured page. He did all this for nothing; and yet, surely the labour was its own reward; and the composition of these songs was a secret spring of consolation to his chafed and embittered soul, and probably restrained him sometimes from the rashest actions, and soothed the fiercest thoughts. The old inspiration of the days of Mossgiel refused now to |