upon you; a hoax which I think not only silly, but an insult to the people of the town over which you worthily preside. I at once repudiated the letter, and characterised it as an impudent and cruel hoax. I am very much distressed that such a trick should have been so far successful."

The makers of artificial thunder, who might have given the real temple a short paragraph, now treated the spurious one to columns, and there was quite a renaissance of burlesque. The local and district papers were filled with letters breathing sanguinary reprisals on the hoaxer, and hinting at the suppression of the Habeas Corpus Act. The chief local worshippers of the National Bard were all suspected of the forgery, whether they loved him for the first Kilmarnock edition, which had so increased in value, or from the gastronomical motives kindly suggested by Mr Henley.

The mystery, for a time, remained unsolved, but at length the lawyers met and, by the system of Sherlock Holmes, traced the culprits to their lair. A typewritten letter like the one that deceived the Town Council naturally suggested a typewriter, and on examining the various machines in town the identical one was found. The chief conspirator, emulating Coriolanus, now came manfully forward and said-" Alone I did it!' This was the truth, but not all the truth, and the plea was accepted with a solatium of £50, and expressions of regret. The local papers called the hoax "an audacious and unscrupulous outrage," but it may be said for the Amalgamated Galoots

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They sat in folly side by side,

And caused much idle chaff,
But their excuse is good enough,
They caused the world to laugh."

JOHN AITKEN,

Author of Humours of Ayrshire.

BURNS AND THE BEGGARS.

IT

T is part of a poet's reward that he is able, by the force of his genius, to confer a kind of immortality on many things that might else be lost in oblivion. The light of his imagination first illuminates, then fixes in a permanent focus, features in the life of his time in a fashion that can never be forgotten. Thus he lays posterity under an obligation from which it can never be free and for which it should be eternally grateful. The poetry of Burns passes this high test of genius triumphantly; for one of the proofs of the enduring merit of his power over the minds of men clearly lies in the faithful remembrance with which we cherish to-day the portrait of the Cottar with his simple faith, or the lovely landscape of the Doon; nor can we forget, because he has enshrined them in immortal verse, the worth and independence of Scottish character, the value and reality of Scottish religion, and the life and manners of Scottish peasantry in the eightheenth century. To him, along with one other, falls the honour of having unfolded, so that he who runs might read, the secret greatness of those qualities which have created an historic race in Northern latitudes.

We find a further illustration of this fact in the happy and characteristic fashion in which Burns has deftly caught and preserved for us some of the most picturesque features of what was already in his day a dying race we mean that race which acknowledged no King, which claimed no country for its own, which regarded no law save that of hunger, which bowed before no authority save that of misfortune, and which claimed no fellowship save that of a common want. In bygone days the beggars of Scotland had been a hardy and a numerous people, healthily free from many of the vices which disgraced and degraded their successors. But in Burns's time, as his Cantata "The Jolly Beggars" reveals, they had fallen upon evil fortune

and dwindled until only the last, and worst, and most parasitic type remained.

In the chance which led the Poet to Poosie Nancy's on that winter night when the wild blast of Boreas had driven to their humble shelter for an evening's merriment the "randie gangrel bodies" of the road, we must recognise the good hand of Fortune. It gave him the opportunity, which he was quick to seize, of recording for the future, where otherwise lay complete forgetfulness, some of the best elements in this fast-disappearing race, who

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Herded together by the "bitter skyte" of hailstones and the bite of infant frosts," he found a mixed assembly. Here was the Sons of Mars with the " auld red rags signs of his former glory-still hanging unwillingly upon him; beside him the Merry Andrew that "tumbles for sport," and is a fool by profession; the "raucle carlin wha kent fu' weel to cleek the sterling," but who could yet sing with infinite pathos the ballad of the "waefu' woodie "; the "pigmy scraper, wi' his fiddle, wha used at trysts and fairs to driddle," but who lacks the courage to face a "sturdy caird" armed with his rusty rapier. Truly a "mountebank squad! They had little in common save rags, roguery, and unsavouriness, yet they provided Burns with an inspiration for his Muse.

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Is it too much to assert that he saw in this company the last remnant of what was once an honourable race ? The time had been when the Wight o' Homer's craft" had lived without reproach or shame. Once the wandering minstrel, even when infirm and old," had needed not to beg "his, bread from door to door." For him the gate

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stood always open in welcome, and lords or commons wearied not in listening to his lay. Then a gentle trade indeed " it was 'to carry the gaberlunzie on." Compassion was lavished upon the blind Sons of Tobit and Timaeus; nor did authority look sternly upon poor Tom o' Bedlam who enlivened the countryside with his mad song.

The cripple or paralytic was carried from farm to farm with the same care and regularity as the stage conveyed its travellers from one post to another. All these found crust and clothing and kindness wherever they chanced to wander. The Lords of Little Egypt lived in something that resembled a regal state, while cairds and tinklers, fiddlers and gaberlunzies, minstrels and mountebanks, rejoiced in an easy tolerance. No one counted it a disgrace when a Scottish King assumed the "blue-gown badge and claithing." The " aumos dish ". a wooden vessel carried for broken meats and oatmeal-the " mealy bags and knapsack a' in order," the horn or fiddle or staff, even the orra duds were a passport to the pity and the pockets of a generation which had not forgotten to be charitable. But now

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"Old times were changed, old manners gone;

The bigots of the iron time

Had called his harmless art a crime,"

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and with the minstrel every wanderer passed beneath the frown and ban of Society. The better and more honest types soon vanished and, as Burns wrote in A Winter Night," the sons of affliction became brothers" in distress.' One feature, however, remained which was worth preserving. The vigilant eye of the Poet perceived it as he watched the carouse of the beggarly rant that filled the kitchen. Prowling tinklers they might be, thievish cairds, mis-shapen fiddlers, rough, daft, or wretched, but the freemasonry of the road had handed down to them from their forebears a traditional gift of song. With this they were able and wont to defy Daddy Care" with such success that they could bid him Whistle o'er the lave o't." The last vestiges of an ancient minstrelsy lingered in their recollection. Of each one it might be said—

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"He had nae wish but to be glad,
Nor want but when he thirsted,

He hated nought but to be sad,
And thus the Muse suggested
His sang that night."

Perhaps none but a genuine poet could have detected the native gift which lay hidden beneath such an unpromising exterior, or discovered that the "Jolly Beggars" drew their melody from so reputable a spring. His own fate had taught him to honour

"The bard of no regard

Wi' gentle folks and a' that,"

just as his unstilted and unstinted genius enabled him to recognise a fellow-poet in the one who could say— "I never drank the Muse's stank (pool),

Castalia's burn, and a' that;

But there it streams, and richly reams,
My Helicon I ca' that."

The true test of the singer's power lay in the fascination which, like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, he exercised over "the glowran byke (staring swarm)" that, following, he drew frae town to town."

So then Burns adds another debt to the many which we owe him. He has fixed for ever this one last glimpse of a fading and fugitive company. Would any other have brought to the task such large-heartedness, such quick sympathy? Was there not in Burns something that drew him into instinctive fellowship with the flotsam and jetsam of Society? Scattered through his poems we have lines which seem to bear this out. Thus, in the Epistle to Davie, he says the best o'chiels are whiles in want," showing that he knew too well the pinching poverty which lightened the never heavy wallet of the beggar. In the same poem he numbers himself among those wha drudge and drive thro' wet and dry," fathoming yet another experience of the vagrant. And had he not also the Wanderlust in his own veins ? For in the Second Epistle he exclaims

"Of a' the thoughtless sons of men.

Commen' me to the hardie clan,

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Nae thought, nae view, nae scheme of livin',

Nae cares to gi'e us joy or grievin’—

But just the pouchie put the nieve in

An' while aught's there."