self with them or their creed. Their "cauld harangues on practice and on morals" did not satisfy his fervid emotional nature. He hated a Deist and he was no Materialist, for we have his own word for it that "an irreligious poet is a monster.' He reverently recognised the Omnipotent Power in the phenomena and wondrous works of nature, and he never uttered a single word, either in his poetry or prose, controverting or slighting the eternal verities of true religion. Nor did he allow any foolish pride of intellect to lead him to take refuge in Agnosticism. My idle reasonings," he confides to Mrs. Dunlop, "sometimes make me a little sceptical, but the necessities of my heart always give the cold philosophising the lie."

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Had he formulated an inclusive creed of his own, we venture to say that its first article would have been a fervent acknowledgment of the Divine Power which governs the Universe, whose Being is part of the eternal mysteries of the spiritual world, and therefore beyond reach of the reasoning faculties of man. There is ample material for the reconstruction of his creed if we are content to take his impulsive deductions from these "cold philosophisings" to be firm and settled convictions; but in face of their obvious inconsistency and lack of cohesion, they cannot justly be placed in that category. Not that any of them have the slightest trace of insincerity. He was an earnest and diligent inquirer after religious truth; and as every avenue of thought in that direction inevitably brought him up against the impassable bourne of the "undiscovered country," his mind was in a chronic state of flux, and he perforce expressed himself as the passing mood dictated. He was in this respect, as R. L. Stevenson says of him in another connection, "all his life on a voyage of discovery," and never reached a haven of rest.

A favourite quotation with Burns was this passage from Blair's poem on "The Grave

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Tell us, ye

dead! will none of you, in pity To those you left behind, disclose the secret What 'tis you are and we must shortly be."

And in that noble letter which he addressed to Robert Muir when the latter was on his deathbed, he (quoting from Milton) speaks of the mysteries beyond the veil as enveloped in the "gloom profound " of primeval Chaos. He then goes on to philosophise-" If we lie down in the grave, the whole man a piece of broke machinery, to moulder with the clods of the valley, be it so; at least there is an end of pain, care, woes, and wants; if that part of us called Mind does survive the apparent destruction of the man, he goes to a great unknown Being who could have no other end in giving him existence but to make him happy, who gave him his passions and instincts, and well knows their force." In this letter, so far as our memory serves us, he for the first time expresses his conviction that " an honest man has nothing to fear," which he repeated again and again to other correspondents, when the future world happened to be the subject of discussion. This brief summation of the Christian character is no echo of Confucianism, devoid of all spiritual faith, as is the materialism which pervades the teaching of the Chinese moralist. Turning again to the Dunlop correspondence, we find the following:-"I will go further, and affirm that from the sublimity, excellence, and purity of his doctrine and precepts, unparalleled by all the aggregated wisdom and learning of many preceding ages, therefore Jesus Christ was from God." Incorporated with the "current beliefs " were the doctrines derived from the aweinspired emotions which form the foundation of all religion, and those which are the outcome of speculative human thought which, by their very nature, conduce to diversity of opinion. We have no means of judging where he drew the line of distinction, but we do know that he sincerely believed in the doctrines to which he

gave adhesion, the test he applied being their influence for good or evil on the life and thought of erring humanity. With him beliefs were but means to an end, and that end the Christian life. Addressing his Motherconfessor in 1792, he used these words, "I am so convinced that an unshaken faith in the doctrines of religion is not only necessary by making us better men, but also by making us happier men, that I shall take every care that every little creature that shall call me father shall be taught them." Two years later he uses almost the same words to Cunningham, "I will deeply embue the mind of every child of mine with religion."

On the supernatural side of his beliefs he is consistently reticent, and the outline of his creed which appears in the Clarinda correspondence does not add materially to our information. He had "reasoned and doubted to a very daring pitch," he tells us, only to discover the weakness of human power in contact with the Unknown and Unknowable-a confession of itself proof conclusive that religious feeling was exceptionally strong within him. All his life he devoutly hoped and feared, well knowing that his honest doubt would be misconstrued by the doctrinaires of his own and succeeding generations, and consoling himself with the reflection that every earnest and unprejudiced inquirer after truth has had a similar experience. He recognised no difference between the ethics of his religion and of his politics, and this often leaves the reader in doubt under which of these heads the sentiments expressed ought to be placed. In another of his eighty odd letters to Mrs. Dunlop occurs this short summary of his "creed "whether religious or political we are left to guess. "Whatever mitigates the woes or increases the happiness of others, this is my criterion of goodness; and whatever injures society at large or any individual in it, this is my measure of iniquity," to which the broad-minded, orthodox lady replied that there was no reason to fear

that her religion and his would ever run counter to each other. Of the same complexion is this passage in a letter to Peter Hill, another of his Edinburgh friends, "God knows I am no saint; I have a whole host of sins and follies to answer for; but if I could (and I believe I do it as far as I can) I would wipe away all tears from all eyes." It is four score and five years since Thomas Carlyle wrote of Burns that " he could have governed, debated in National Assemblies, and politicised as few could," had opportunity been extended to him. Whether these quotations refer to his politics or his religion matters little; they announce his doctrine of the Brotherhood of Man, whose foundation is the charity which covereth a multitude of sins.

In the foregoing, it will be observed, we have dealt only with the prose compositions of Burns, for the sufficient reason that they are not so widely known as his poetry, corroborative passages from which will occur to every reader who has even a passing acquaintance with their text. D. M'NAUGHT.

THE STYLE OF BURNS.

I presume that human speech emerged at the same time as the primeval man first felt the need of communicating the thought of his brain or the emotion of his heart to his comrade, or to his human foe, or, still more probably, to his mate. Grunt, grimace, or gesture -whatever form speech first took, it was an instrument, an instrument born of human necessity, and the test of its greatness or beauty was to be found not in itself, but in the result it secured. Does it do its work, does it accomplish that for which it was designed, is it efficient? -that is the test of greatness for all instruments, and no less for human speech. Words are beautiful only if they are adequate. A sense for beauty in style is no more than a power to understand when expression is exactly what the occasion requires. Words in themselves are neither beautiful nor ugly; it is their use which gives them quality.

This conception of style as the more or less of efficiency in expression will carry the plain man far enough in his endeavour to estimate greatness in the speech of others or to confer something of greatness on his own. All he has to do is to explore fully the mental or the emotional situation under review, and to judge the adequacy of the words used to exploit it. A big enough job sometimes, but one for the doing of which we need assume no more than the free play of plain sense and a little experience in the adaptation of means to ends. It is a pestilent notion which regards literary criticism as involving the possession by the critic of a special sense called the æsthetic. The only sense that counts for anything in the matter is common sense, common because all men have something of it.

The truth is that the plain man who has lived intensely