between the New-Light and Auld-Light clergy. A sordid enough story we should call it now, but it was not such then and there, when and where people were much nearer the earth than we, though no less earthy, Jean was not to blame, or if she was, Burns forgave her afterwards and gave up what must have been a fascinating dream to him-marriage with the clever and affectionate Clarinda, Mrs. McLehose, when she should have secured a divorce-and "made a decent woman of her," in a re-birth of affection.

Passionately Burns threw himself into the battle for the New-Lights. They represented liberality. They were not strict constructionists of the Mosaic law. They looked leniently upon life. They did not frown at fun. They were in modified revolt against that terrible Calvinism, which could never have been bearable in Scotland, save for whiskey. The iron theocracy was mitigated only by intoxication. The Auld-Lights brought Burns' friend Gavin Hamilton to book for some breach of discipline; there was a trial; Hamilton came off triumphant and Burns burst forth in satire"Holy Willie's Prayer," "The Twa Herds," "The Holy Fair," "The Address to the Unco Guid." And satire never burned deeper-not even the satire of Voltaire. Hyprocisy has been the target of almost all of the great poets at one time or another, but Burns has given us the incarnation of Hypocrisy perfectly and completely scarified for all time.

Here were sweet and bitter from the same wondrous well of genius. How may one do more than merely allude to the sweetness, the humanity, the rich, broad humor, the keen clear observation, the richness and yet succinctness, the kindness even to dumb animals, the good word even for the De'il, the philosophy, the grotesquerie of the poems first named. It cannot be told save in quotation and to tell a tithe of it one would have to quote all night.

"The Cotter's Saturday Night" is the wide world idyl of home-the sanest poem of all poems ever writ, for Burns poured into it all the blessed memory of his own home. It is a picture of poverty, but oh, what a richness there beyond all wealth of Ormus and of Ind. It is the very ideal of home, the English word for which the other languages have no exact equivalent. "Halloween" is a poem that is steeped in life at play over the mystery of love. Its humor is such that you cut it and it bleeds laughter exactly like that which rings in ears of memory from our own hay-rides and husking bees of the years which the locust hath eaten.

"The Mouse," the "Daisy," later the Hare, auld Mailie, the pet yowe, the mare, the birds, the cattle, even the foxes in winter-truly, as one has said, here Burns is not second to him of Assisi in love for his little brothers, the beasts and plants, the very humblest of God's creatures. And the lesson he learned from a louse on a lady's bonnet is more worth to the world, I do believe, than the one Newton drew, of the ache of sphere for sphere, from the impact of an apple on his nose. Read "The Jolly Beggars" to-day and then turn to our modern realists-Gorki for example. The one is human, the other diabolic. The Beggars are all poets at least, wicked though they be. They have hearts. They have laughter of this world, not like that of dead men in hell. They are lovable, not horrible. And that poem is palpitant with dramatic power. I am not sure that "The Twa Dags" are not vastly more doggy than Jack London's. They are as much true beasts as those in Kipling's jungle. They talk good sense, good economics, and, in a sense, good will, for the whole dialogue shows us that the social system does not make for happiness anywhere. And their views are an unsurpassed commentary upon the land question. Upon the whole the debate is "a draw," with the verdict in favor of what a man is, not what he has. Rich man not less than poor man is caught and ground and soul-spoiled

and soiled in the gin of a system based upon one man's toll upon the labor of another.

Having scalded his enemies in vitriol, they pilloried him in the kirk, enforcing a public penance upon him. and Jean, she in the role of Hester Prynne of the "Scarlet Letter;" the girl's father sets the law upon him and he is in hiding when the Kilmarnock edition of his poems appears. A copy of the volume is worth its weight in gold to-day. And it was printed to raise nine pounds sterling to enable the poet to get away to Jamaica. Off to the Indies he had been, too, but for a letter from Dr. Blacklock of Edinburgh. His passage was paid. And the urge was on him because of the death of a new love-Highland Mary. He had clean forgot his Jean, or remembered her only with bitterness. Though he married Jean later, he never forgot Mary Campbell and years after he voiced his memory in two songs that express for all men all lost loves for all times-the unapproachable ballad of dear dead

woman.

Through Dr. Blacklock Burns went to Edinburgh. He was the lion, and at first he liked the lioning, but in a little time he began to eat his own heart, which is profitable to a poet, but not pleasing to the man. He was well received by Dugald Stewart, Lord Monboddo, Hugh Blair-lights of the Northern Athens, but all echoes, reflections rather, of greater men in London. Though they did not know it, Burns o'ertopped them all. One little, unnoticed boy met him, and that boy was destined to claim almost equal love and admiration with him from Scotland and the world. The boy was Walter Scott. But Burns felt the patronage of the big men of "Auld Reekie." He carried himself well, but he was not deceived as to his status and so he looked up his humble friends. In the taverns and in the Masonic lodge, breeding place of liberal thought, he was the leader. There were wit and wisdom and whiskey, and-women of course. Burns took his fling

at all things Tory, in Church as well as State. And feeling his own worth, he could even be jealous-angry at Glencairn, to whom he has left such a noble tribute of friendship, because that noble paid attention, in his presence, to some dunder-pate. There was need of money. There was talk of a new edition of the poems. Burns applied for a place in the Excise. In April, 1787, came the second edition of the poems, but the publisher, Creech, was poor pay. Back to Mossgiel by way of the Border; and that excursion did him little good for it was well washed with liquor most of the way, and so, later, with his trip to the Highlands where he refreshed all his Jacobic traditions and gave them expression most inopportunely for a man looking for a place under the Hanoverians. But through it all he was brooding divine poesy.

Back to Edinburgh in the winter of 1787-and now neglected. More embittered than ever, though he got a settlement from Creech, he sent £180 to Gilbert, married Jean, boasted blithely, "I hae a wife o' my ain," and rented Ellisland, near Dumfries. Finally came the place in the Excise, at £50 a year. 'Tis good to know he was a poor Exciseman, that he passed the hint to many a dealer to have the stuff out of the way by the time he and the inspector came around. Only the "wife and weans" induced him to hold the job. He had to watch the farm and ride a wide circuit, and the farmthe farm did not pay. Burns, like all the rest of the world, worked for the landlord.

And all this time he was pouring forth a stream of song sufficient to drown a world in loveliness. He did it for love of love and Scotland. He would take no pay for the work. At Ellisland he wrote "Tam O'Shanter" in an ecstacy described by his wifean ecstacy that continues to be catching 125 years after. The ride is the immortal ride of all rides. This is the high water mark of the Burns genius. It is swift and direct as an arrow. It is the climax of kindly caricature.

It is fun as sweet as it is broad. It is a great moral lesson, too, and driven home with a laughter more loving than that of Rabelais. Here is the best and the worst of drinking. The eldritch comic in this performance is unmatched in all literature. It is a great poem in this, that it promotes both toping and temperance. You can't properly read it and explicate its moral against drink and "cutty-sarks" without a swig or two of the blend of old Glenlivet or eke of Haig and Haig.

Ellisland failing, Burns went to Dumfries in the Excise. Life was gay-in a fashion-the primrose way was a way of withering primroses. Burns was exiled from the country, from nature. He was no townsman. He had a sharp tongue and he said things he shouldn't have said, at the taverns. He said things that sounded like treason to the loyal natives. He responded to a toast to Pitt with one "to George Washington, a better man." He sent to the library a copy of DeLolme's "British Construction" with a suggestion that it be "taken as a creed of British liberty—until we find a better." He wrote an ode in honor of Washington's birthday and, in "The Tree of Liberty" he approved strongly the guillotining Louis XVI. Burns was a Jacobite by romantic tradition, but he was a Republican by his reason. He thought he was a Republican at least, but what he really was, was democrat-a small d democrat.

Alexander Smith, an earlier Stevenson, says Burns was Jacobite from sentiment, radical from discontent. This is utterly to misread the man and the poet. He was Jacobite because he loved the lost cause, because the Stuarts were unfortunate, and misfortune never appealed to him in vain. But he was not discontented when he wrote the lines to the Mouse or those to the Daisy or to Auld Mailie or Maggie, or the Hare. All these poems breathe sympathy for every living thing. Every poem that Burns has written celebrates the common people and the common virtues; even if he praises