At another party, the society had suffered considerably from the prosing of a certain well-known provincial Bore of the first magnitude; and Burns, as much as any of them, although overawed, as it would seem, by the rank of the nuisance, had not only submitted, but condescended to applaud. The Grandee being suddenly summoned to another company in the same tavern, Burns immediately addressed himself to the chair, and demanded a bumper. The president thought he was about to dedicate his toast to the distinguished absentee: "I give," said the Bard, “I give you the health, gentlemen all,-of the waiter that called my Lord out of the room." He often made extempore rhymes the vehicle of his sarcasm: thus, for example, having heard a person, of no very elevated rank, talk loud and long of some aristocratic festivities in which he had the honour to mingle, Burns, when called upon for his song, chanted some verses, of which one has been preserved :— "Of lordly acquaintance you boast, And the dukes that you dined wi' yestreen, Yet an insect's an insect at most, Tho' it crawl on the curl of a queen." I believe I have already alluded to Burns's custom of carrying a diamond pencil with him in all his wanderings, and constantly embellishing inn-windows and so forth with his epigrams. On one occasion, being storm-stayed at Lamington, in Clydesdale, he went to church; and the indig living witness of the incident-John Syme of Ryedale. "I particularly remember (said Chambers) the old gentleman glowing over the discomfiture of a too considerate Amphitryon who, when entertaining the narrator along with Burns and some others, lingered with screw in hand over a fresh bottle, which he evidently wished to be forbidden to draw -till Burns transfixed him by a comparison of his present position with that of Abraham lingering over the filial sacrifice."—"Life and Works of Burns," 1856, vol. iv., p. 155.] nant beadle, after the congregation dispersed, invited the attention of the clergyman to this stanza on the window by which the noticeable stranger had been sitting: "As cauld a wind as ever blew ; A cauld kirk, and in't but few ; Sir Walter Scott possesses a tumbler, on which are the following verses, written by Burns on the arrival of a friend, Mr. W. Stewart, factor to a gentleman of Nithsdale. The landlady being very wroth at what she considered the disfigurement of her glass, a gentleman present appeased her, by paying down a shilling, and carried off the relic. "You're welcome, Willie Stewart, You're welcome, Willie Stewart; There's ne'er a flower that blooms in May, Come, bumpers high, express your joy, May foes be strang, and friends be slack, May woman on him turn her back, That wrangs thee, Willie Stewart!" [The gentleman of Nithsdale for whom "Willie Stewart acted as factor was the Rev. James Stuart Menteith of Closeburn Hall. Willie's sister was the wife of Mr. Bacon, landlord of the Inn at Brownhill where Burns was accustomed frequently-perhaps too frequently-to bait when on his excise journeys. The factor had a pretty daughter, who often assisted her aunt in the business of the Inn, and the poet celebrated her charms in a lively song, "O lovely Polly Stewart." If proof were wanting of the intimacy that subsisted between Burns and the father of Polly, the fol lowing hitherto unpublished verses, here taken from the poet's holograph, should evince it : In honest Bacon's ingle neuk, Here maun I sit and think; I see, I see there is nae help, Till some day, laigh eneugh, I yelp- Yestreen, alas! I was sae fou, Satan! I fear thy sooty claws, I hate thy brunstane stink, In vain I wad forget my woes For, past redemption d-mn'd in prose, For you, my trusty, weel-tried friend, May heav'n still on you blink! Sweet as a dry man's drink! ROBT. BURNS."] Since we are among such small matters, perhaps some readers will smile to hear, that Burns very often wrote his name on his books thus—“ Robert Burns, Poet ;" and that Allan Cunningham remembers a favourite collie at Elliesland having the same inscription on his collar. TH CHAPTER VIII. "The King's most humble servant, I Or else the devil's in it." HE four principal biographers of our poet, Heron, Currie, Walker, and Irving, concur in the general statement, that his moral course, from the time when he settled in Dumfries, was downwards. Heron knew more of the matter personally than any of the others, and his words are these:-"In Dumfries, his dissipation became still more deeply habitual. He was here exposed, more than in the country, to be solicited to share the riot of the dissolute and the idle. Foolish young men, such as writers' apprentices, young surgeons, merchants' clerks, and his brother excisemen, flocked eagerly about him, and from time to time pressed him to drink with them, that they might enjoy his wicked wit. The Caledonian Club, too, and the Dumfries and Galloway Hunt, had occasional "The above answer to an invitation was written extempore on a leaf torn from his pocket-book."-Cromek's MSS. 2 [Mrs. Burns remarked on hearing this read to her:-"There is much nonsense here. Dr. Mundel, Dr. Brown, and Dr. Copeland, occasionally looked in upon him. As to writers' apprentices, the bard never associated with persons so juvenile! Mr. Kerr, afterwards Clerk of the Peace, and Provost of Dumfries, was a friend of Lewars, and with him Burns might meet at times. But he was always respectable and careful in his choice of company, and a fit associate for the best.” meetings at Dumfries after Burns came to reside there, and the poet was of course invited to share their hospitality, and hesitated not to accept the invitation. The morals of the town were, in consequence of its becoming so much the scene of public amusement, not a little corrupted, and, though a husband and a father, Burns did not escape suffering by the general contamination in a manner which I forbear to describe. In the intervals between his different fits of intemperance, he suffered the keenest anguish of remorse and horrible afflictive foresight. His Jean behaved with a degree of maternal and conjugal tenderness and prudence, which made him feel more bitterly the evils of his misconduct, though they could not reclaim him." This picture, dark as it is, wants some distressing shades that mingle in the parallel one by Dr. Currie; it wants nothing, however, of which truth demands the insertion. That Burns, dissipated enough long ere he went to Dumfries, became still more dissipated in a town, than he had been in the country, is certain. It may also be true that his wife had her own particular causes, sometimes, for dissatisfaction. But that Burns ever sunk into a toper-that he ever was addicted to solitary drinking—that his bottle ever interfered with his discharge of his duties as an exciseman—or that, in spite of some transitory follies, he ever ceased to be a most affectionate husband-all these charges have been insinuated—and they are all false. His intemperance was, as Heron says, in fits; his aberrations of all kinds were occasional, not systematic; they were all to himself the sources of exquisite misery in the retrospect ; they were the aberrations of a man whose moral sense was never deadened, of one who encountered more temptations from without and from within, than the immense majority of mankind, far from having to contend against, are even able to imagine ;-of one, finally, who prayed for |