xious, sleepless hours these ties frequently give me. I see a train of helpless little folks; me and my exertions all their stay; and on what a brittle thread does the life of man hang! If I am nipt off at the command of fate-even in all the vigour of manhood, as I am, such things happen every day-gracious God! what would become of my little flock? 'Tis here that I envy your people of fortune."

comes the wretch upon you, and will not allow your indignation or contempt one moment's repose."

It cannot be denied that Burns had a fancy fruitful in images of misery-that he looked on earth, and thought the water nought and the ground barren, and believed its surface to be infested with a hundred dolts and scoundrels for one wise and honest man." Sunday," says the Poet to Mrs. Riddell, "closes a period of our curst revenue business, and may probably keep me employed with my pen till noon-fine employment for a poet's pen! There is a species of the human genus that I call the gin-horse class: what amiable dogs they are! round, and round, and round they go. Mundell's ox that turns his cotton-mill is their exact prototype-without an idea or wish beyond their circle; fat, sleek, stupid, patient, quiet, and contented; while here I sit, altogether Novemberish, a damned melange of fretfulness and melancholy, not enough of the one to rouse me to passion, nor of the other to repose me in torpor; my soul flouncing and fluttering round her tenement like a wildfinch caught amid the horrors of winter and newly thrust into a cage. Well, I am persuaded it was of me the Hebrew sage prophesied when he foretold: 'And behold, on whatsoever this man doth set his heart, it shall not prosper!'

The poet was now and then in a more sportive mood; despondency was lifted from him like a | cloud, and his mind lay in sunshine for an hour or so, till reflection darkened it down again. He loved to ponder on the fate of men of genius. "There is not," he said to Helen Craik, of Arbigland, "among all the martyrologies that ever were penned, so rueful a narrative as the lives of the poets. In the comparative view of wretches, the criterion is not what they are doomed to suffer, but how they are formed to bear. Take a being of our kind; give him a stronger imagination and a more delicate sensibility-which, between them, will ever engender a more ungovernable set of passions than are the usual lot of man; implant in him an irresistible impulse to some idle vagarysuch as arranging wild flowers in fantastical nosegays, tracing the grasshopper to his haunt by his chirping song, watching the frisks of the little minnows in the sunny pool, or hunting after the intrigues of butterfly's-in short, send A circumstance occurred in the winter of this him adrift after some pursuit which shall eter- year to strengthen those gloomy presentiments. nally mislead him from the paths of lucre, and Burns, accompanied by his friends, the Richardyet curse him with a keener relish than any man sons of Dumfries, went to Moffat, a distance of living for the pleasures that lucre can purchase; fifteen inues, to spend the day and dine. The lastly, fill up the measure of his woes by bestow-morning was rough and cold; the bridge, too, ing on him a spurning sense of his own dignity and you have created a wight nearly as miserable as a poet."

Burns looked with a mistrusting eye towards future fortune; he saw no outlet for his ambition; poetry had done all for him that poetry was likely to do; and he desired distinction without the means of gratifying it. He sometimes lamented to friends that he could not find his way into the House of Commons; he felt a strong call towards oratory, and all who heard him speak and some of them were excellent judges admitted his wonderful quickness of apprehension and readiness of eloquence. He seemed inclined to believe that misfortune had marked him out for her own, and that evil was the only certainty in life.-"In this short, stormy, day of fleeting existence," he observes to Miss Benson, "when you now and then meet with an individual whose acquaintance is a real acquisition, there are all the probabilities against you that you will never meet with that character more. On the other hand, if there is any miscreant whom you hate, or creature whom you despise, the ill run of chances will be so against you that, in the jostlings and turnings of life, pop, at some unlucky corner, eternally

over the Kinnel was tottering and unsafe, and they were obliged to pass the flooded water, which they accomplished not without difficulty and danger; the Poet was in one of his sunniest moods, and laughed alike at storm and stream, and in this temper the party sat down to dinner. "We were all in high spirits," said Archibald Richardson, "and were waited on by a young man not unknown to us, of the name of Glendinning, who said he was to be married in a day or two. This gave a new turn to the conversation. Burns descanted with much humour and uttered many merry jokes on matrimony: the bridegroom smiled, and was pleased to be noticed, and we were in the full tide of enjoyment, when, on removing the last dish, he took a step towards the door, dropped down at our feet, and died without uttering a word. I never saw a man so much affected as the Poet was; the brightness of his cye was gone at once: his face darkened; he rose and he sat down: he looked at my brother and he looked at me; he refused wine, nor did he speak above his breath for the remainder of the evening; he seemed afraid of offending the spirit of the dead. In this mood we journeyed home: and Burns afterwards declared

to me, that the death of Glendinning coloured with sadness some of his best compositions."

During the year 1795, rumour was busy with the name of Burns. Those-and I am sorry to say they were not few-who longed for his halting, whispered about that he was become a lover of low company-a seeker of consolation against imaginary woes, in the bottle; and that in his Howff, as he called the Globe tavern, he forgot what was due to his dignity of mind and his domestic peace; nay, they hesitated not to insinuate that his very genius was sunk and fallen, like Milton's Satan, from its original brightness. Much of this required no refutation. Burns was fallen off, indeed!-not in brightness of genius, but in vigour and health. His walks were shorter, his rests more frequent; his smile had something of melancholy in it, and amid the sons of men he looked like one marked out for an early grave. My friend, Mrs. Hyslop-daughter of Mr. Geddes of Leith-happened to meet him one day in the streets of Dumfries, and was affected by his appearance. He stooped more than was his wont; his dress, about which he used to be rather nice, was disordered and shabby, and he bore on his face the stamp of internal sorrow. The meeting was cordial and warm; on parting he wrung her brother, who accompanied her, earnestly by the hand, turned half away from him, and said, "I am going to ruin as fast as I can; the best I can do is to go consistently."

ples of heroic virtue, as they live in the pages of the English historians. I would ask any person of common candour, if employments like these are consistent with habitual drunkenness? It is not denied that he sometimes mingled with society unworthy of him; he was of a social and convivial nature. In his morning hours, I never saw him like one suffering from the effects of last night's intemperance." Almost the last words that Gray uttered to me before he went to India were about Burns:-"I was sometimes surprised," he said, “at the vigour and elegance of Robert's versions from the Latin. I told him he got help; he looked up in my face and said, 'Yes, my father helps me.""

The testimony of Findlater is equally decisive: "My connexion with Burns," he observed, "commenced immediately after his admission to the Excise, and continued to the hour of his death. In all that time the superintendence of his behaviour, as an officer of the revenue, was a branch of my especial province, and I was not an inattentive observer of the general conduct of a man and a Poet so celebrated by his countrymen. He was exemplary in his attention, and was even jealous of the least imputation on his vigilance. It was not till near the latter end of his days that there was any falling off in this respect; and this was well accounted for by the pressure of disease and accumulating infirmities. I will further avow that I never saw him-which was very freAt this period some of the lofty aristocracy quently while he lived at Ellisland, and still of the country shunned the Poet's company, more so, almost every day, after he removed to not for his conduct as a man, but for his senti- Dumfries-in hours of business, but he was ments as a politician. That Burns was fre- quite himself, and capable of discharging the quently in the company of the tradesmen of duties of his office; nor was he ever known to Dumfries, and joined in their socialities, is per- drink by himself, or seen to indulge in the use fectly true; his small income hindered him from of liquor in a forenoon. I have seen Burns in seeking loftier society: he who has only a shil- all his various phases-in his convivial moments, ling in his pocket must be contented with hum- in his sober moods, and in the bosom of his ble friends. But it is untrue that this was the family. Indeed, I believe I saw more of him only company he kept; some of the first gen- than any other individual had occasion to see, tlemen in the land were still his friends; he and I never beheld anything like the gross was a welcome and an invited guest at their enormities with which he has been charged. That tables, and might be seen walking with their when he sat down in the evening with friends wives and their daughters, when his health whom he liked he was apt to prolong the social enabled him to go abroad. hours beyond the bounds which prudence would dictate, is unquestionable; but in his family, I will venture to say, he was never seen otherwise than as attentive and affectionate in a high degree."

The best answer, which such malevolent representations could receive, has been given by Gray and Findlater; both of these gentlemen lived near the Poet; they were wise and sensible men, and incapable of misrepresentation.— “It came under my own view professionally," said the former, "that Burns superintended the education of his children with a degree of care that I have never seen surpassed. In the bosom of his family he spent many an hour, directing the studies of his eldest son, a boy of uncommon talents. I have frequently found him explaining to this youth, then not more than nine years of age, the poets from Shakspeare to Grey, or storing his mind with exam

The recollections of my friend Dr. Copland Hutchison are equally in the Poet's favour:"I lived in Dumfries," he observed in a late conversation, "during the whole period that Burns lived there; I was much about, and saw him almost daily, but I never saw him even the worse of liquor; he might drink as much as other men, but certainly not more.”

Professor Walker, a gentleman of unquestioned candour, was two days in the Poet's company, during November, 1795.—“I went to

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sent her carriage for him to the cottage where he lodged, as he was unable to walk.

"Thank you, my dear, for your kind attention; but oh! let him shine!-he will not shine long for me!"

With how little advantage to his health he bathed in the Solway may be gathered from his letter to Cunningham, of the 7th July."Alas! my friend, I fear the voice of the Bard will soon be heard among you no more! For these eight or ten months I have been ailing, sometimes bedfast and sometimes not; but these last three months I have been tortured with an excruciating rheumatism, which has reduced me to nearly the last stage. You would actually not know me if you saw me. Pale, emaciated, and so feeble as occasionally to need help from my chair-my spirits fled! fled!—but I can no more on this subject.-I beg of you to use your utmost interest, and that of all your friends, to move our Commissioners of Excise to grant me my full salary. If they do not grant it, I must lay my account with an exit truly en poete--if I die not of disease, I must perish with hunger." The Excise refused this last humble boon.

"I was struck," said she, “with his appearance on entering the room: the stamp of death was impressed on his features. He seemed already touching the brink of eternity. His first words were, Well, madam, have you any commands for the other world?' I replied that it seemed a doubtful case which of us should be there soonest, and that I hoped he would yet live to write my epitaph. (I was then in a poor state of health.) He looked in my face with an air of great kindness, and expressed his concern at seeing me look so ill, with his usual sensibility. At table he ate little or nothing, and he complained of having entirely lost the tone of his stomach. We had a long and serious conversation about his present state, and the approaching termination of all his earthly prospects. He spoke of his death, with firmness as well as feeling, as an event likely to happen very soon, and which gave him concern chiefly from leaving his four children so young and unprotected, and his wife in the hourly expecta- On the 10th of July, he thus writes to his tion of lying-in of a fifth. He shewed great brother Gilbert :-"It will be no very pleasing concern about the care of his literary fame, and news to you to be told that I am dangerously particularly the publication of his posthumous ill, and not likely to get better. An inveterate works. He said he was well aware that rheumatism has reduced me to such a state of his death would occasion some noise, and that debility, and my appetite is so totally gone, that every scrap of his writing would be revived I can scarcely stand on my legs. God help my against him, to the injury of his future repu- wife and children! If I am taken from their tation; that letters and verses, written with un-head, they will be poor indeed. Remember me guarded freedom, would be handed about by to my mother." To his wife he writes," No vanity or malevolence, when no dread of his flesh nor fish can I swallow; porridge and milk resentment would restrain them, nor prevent are the only things I can taste. I am very malice or envy from pouring forth their venom happy to hear by Miss Jessie Lewars that you to blast his fame. The conversation was kept up are all well. My very best compliments to her with great evenness and animation on his side. and to all the children. I will see you on SunI had seldom seen his mind greater, or more day. Your affectionate husband, ROBERT collected. There was frequently a considerable BURNS." He likewise wrote to James Armour degree of vivacity in his sallies, and they would of Mauchline, his father-in-law, saying that his probably have had a greater share, had not the dear wife was nigh her confinement; that his concern and dejection, I could not disguise, days were numbered, for he felt himself dying, damped the spirit of pleasantry he seemed wil- and requesting that Mrs. Armour might hasten ling to indulge. We parted about sun-set on to Dumfries, to speak and look comfort to them. the evening of the 5th of July; the next day I saw him again, and we parted-to meet no

more!"

The house which he occupied at The Brow is at a little distance from the sea, and its windows opened towards the west; at one of these it was the Poet's practice to sit during the afternoon, looking at the visiters as they passed, and at the sun as it descended on the distant hills. One fine evening two young ladies called to see him the sun streamed brightly on him through the glass, when one of them (Miss Craig-afterwards Mrs. Henry Duncan) was afraid the light might be too much for him, and rose, with the view of letting down the window-blinds. Burns immediately guessed what she meant to do, and, regarding the young lady with a look of great benignity, said,

Burns had formerly, when his hopes were higher and his health good, made it almost a quarrel with Thomson that he had sent him five pounds in acknowledgment of his songs. His situation, in all respects, was changed now; he had to bend his proud heart to beg from the Excise the continuance of his pay; and he had to lay himself under obligations to Stobie, who generously performed his duties gratis. He had no money in his pocket, and little food in his house; and, to aggravate these evils, one Williamson, to whom he owed the price of the cloth of his volunteer regimentals, threatened to sue him for the amount. The Poet was alarmed at this; and on the 12th of July wrote to Thomson, saying, "After all my boasted independence, curst necessity compels me to implore you for five pounds. A cruel haberdasher, to whom