got a copy of Burns's poems; so natural did they seem, with the ripple of the river, the aroma of the ploughed field and the heather, and the laugh and chatter of the fireside, that they restored her again to her natural state, surprising all the physicians, and she remained his confidential friend and adviser through life. She was a noble-minded, great, good woman and the poet's guardian angel. The neighbouring minister, Rev. Dr. Laurie, now invited Burns to the manse— the first respectable house, 'tis said, the poet had ever been in. In his bedroom he wrote and left a poem, praying for the minister's family, one verse of which says— When soon or late they reach that coast, O'er life's rough ocean driven, May they rejoice, no wanderer lost, A family in Heaven. The new poet now went up to Edinburgh to try his fortunes in the capital. The whole two days' journey from Ayr was a triumphal procession. In the city the supercilious dukes and earls, the stern-faced judges and professors, the heroes of the Bar, and all the languishing, fastidious beauties of the drawing-rooms of Edinburgh were delighted, enraptured, transported, as the peasantry of Ayr had been before them, with the beauty and fire and naturalness of the ploughman's poems, and all their petty sects and cliques and cotteries broke as they flocked and merged around him, rivaling with each other to make him the hero and the lion of their elite society. Never was there a better illustration of the truth: "One touch of Nature makes the whole world kin." Editor Mackenzie, in The Lounger, reviewed the poems, and pointed out the poet's power of delineating character, of painting passion, of describing scenery, and hailed him as an original poet with the true stamp of genius, and called upon his countrymen to recognise in Burns the greatest poet that had ever appeared in their land. Referring to his narrow escape from exile to Jamaica, he exhorted Government and people to retain and cherish this inestimable prodigy, and to repair his early wrongs and sufferings and neglect. And taking Burns absolutely, Mackenzie adjudged him worthy a niche in the Temple of Fame with all the greatest thinkers and songsters of earth. This criticism was right and true, and has been corroborated by posterity. The only mistake is, that it was not acted on at once; for a genius so rare, a prodigy so abnormal, the outcome, blossom, and fruition of a thousand years of interblending of the Saxon and the Celtic race, should have been supported freely by the State, for which he would repay it by everlasting glory and renown. The most aristocratic doors in Edinburgh now opened as on golden hinges at the poet's coming, and Mr. Burns was shaken by both hands. 'Tis said his bearing, conversation, manners, wit, and repartee revealed a finer genius than is preserved for us even in his finest poems. The man was more than his works. Here, in the first society of the land, he was at once master of the situation; he never lost his head, but was cool, and conscious of the original equality of all men, and scarcely deigned to flatter his entertainers by exhibiting symptom of being himself flattered." Professor Dugald Stewart declared that Burns was fit to shine in any department of life, just as brightly as in his poems. 66 While these high folks were taking stock of Burns, he was just as coolly taking stock of them. He had fixed a fair estimate of his own genius before going to Edinburgh; and now, in the full blaze of his popularity there, he wrote to Mrs. Dunlop that his self-estimate had not been increased by his success, nor would it be decreased by coming neglect; for he foresaw the high tide would have an ebb; and he had too much pride and too much genius to accept the toadying position the magnates of the capital would soon consider to be his proper ploughman's place. But this first visit to Edinburgh was also a financial success-a new edition of his poems was brought out, which cleared him £500. He generously handed his brother Gilbert £200 of it for the support of his mother. The remainder enabled him to make several tours through Scotland; and first of modern tourists, Burns revelled in romantic scenery. The romantic school of poetry-or poetry on outdoor objects and natural scenery, such as the rippling river, the singing birds, the autumn-tinted dells, the bleating lambs, the floating clouds, the moaning sea, the misty mountainswas first introduced by James Thompson's book on the four Seasons, about 1748. Romantic poetry first meant roaming poetry; and the word "romantic" might be better spelled "roamantic"-" to roam" first meant to wander on pilgrimage to the City of Rome. But Burns could concentrate as much on four pages as Thompson could in four cantos. Take one stanza of Burns from "The Vision": : Here, rivers in the sea were lost; There, mountains to the skies were tost; There, distant shone art's lofty boast, Or his picture of a streamlet :- 'Whiles o'er a linn the burnie plays, As through the glen it whimples; Yet Burns felt cold comfort in writing of Nature only; and while Thompson's "Seasons are forgotten, Burns's poems live on; for Burns, like Shakspere, treats most of Man-man is still the proper study for mankind—and brings in Nature only as a framework or background to his human pictures. Burns loved his kind too much to leave them out in the cold. He would take his early clownish chums of the forge or the plough with him to the finest drawing-rooms in Edinburgh, or return to meet them in a tavern after dining with a duchess. He was no respecter of persons- he never did, he never would, he never could, distinguish between people and people. To him all men were simply free and equal; merit and good heart making the only difference. When his several tours were over, Burns returned to Edinburgh for a second winter in 1787. He had a secret hope that after all the praise and flattery bestowed on him and on his poems something would be done for him, to raise his life from drudgery and obscurity, and put him in a position where his muse might have a chance to live and thrive. He had now reached the maximum and real crisis of his life. Up to this point every day was brighter and more hopeful than the one before; after this every day grew darker than its predecessor. Having gained the summit of the golden hill, he must either build a habitation there, or else let go, slip back, and shrink, repining at the hollowness of fame. That was the age of pensions, and a time when patrons in literature were still needed—the reading public being then too small to support an author by the sale of his works alone. And Burns had every right to expect a pension or a post. Two Prime Ministers, Pitt and Addington, knew of him and commended his genius, and left him languishing in poverty, while they lifted men with not a tithe of his talents into emolument and office. Burns was doomed to bitter disappointment. The magnates of the capital, the rulers of the land, had then no lasting interest in genius. They had seen the lion, they had paid their shilling, and to them it was of small concern whether the beast returned to his jungle or roved at large and hungry through the land. The novelty of his first appearance was over, and in his second winter in Edinburgh he received a colder welcome. The great doors opened harshly, but closed readily enough, as he went out. The high tide had ebbed. And no man could feel this more acutely than the sensitive poet Burns. Gloomy bursts of discontent at himself and at all the world, broke over him, and he became exceedingly despondent. He described himself as the sport and miserable victim of rebellious pride, dark imaginings, and Bedlam passions, and wishes he was dead. Then he calls on stubborn pride and unshrinking resolution to accompany him through this to him miserable life. But men who have to invocate such qualities as these generally possess them not; and although pride and resolution may come on invocation, they are apt to make a transitory stay, and mostly leave the wretch that needs them more forlorn and wretched than before. Burns soon discovered this himself. "I have wished a thousand times," he says, "to lay down life as an officer lays down a commission." The pride and resolution he invoked stood him in little stead in his hours of trial. At this time he wrote again to Mrs. Dunlop, for he was still a lion to be pointed at as he passed in the streets :-"Sometimes as I glide along with humble stealth through Princes Street, I skulk into a corner, lest the rattling equipage of some gaping blockhead should mangle me in the mire, and I am tempted to exclaim, 'What merits has he had, and what demerits have I had in some previous state of existence, that he should be ushered into this state of being with the sceptre of rule and the keys of riches in his puny fist, while I am kicked into the world the sport of folly and the victim of pride?'" All this second winter in Edinburgh, and all his afterlife, was filled with a bitterness and sourness previously unknown to his frank and boyish disposition. In all this coldness and despondency, the only light that cheered his heart was his amorous correspondence with the "Belindas," and "Clarindas," and other fair dames of Edinburgh. Burns has been often censured, by critics of the fossil school, for being so susceptible-so very easily impressed by femininity! But, we must take Burns as he was; not as he might, could, would, or should have been; not as you, or I, or he, or she might have made him. He is dead now; quite dead; stiff; we cannot change an item now; probably we could not have changed an item then; his account is closed. a little closer, we shall find that tendency was not an excrescence to be critics, but part and parcel of the man. different, he would not have been the same; had he been the same he would not have been different; and the fact is, he cared just as little for the cold-hearted conventionalities of his century as the bird upon the twig, that singeth for a new mate every spring. And the heart that showed its sympathy for the irresponsive Daisy, the Mountain Mouse, the Wounded Hare, and that mourned the Dying Ewe as a soldier mourns his comrade fallen in the war, how could that same heart be irresponsive or conceal its fellow-feeling for the beings But if we look this amorous lopped off by Had he been |