of the perpetrators of what has been called a "heartless hoax." The French peril was, no doubt, a very real bugbear. It was daring, and perhaps cruel, to make sport of it. Men, nevertheless, who have not forgotten that they once were young, are not likely to be too hard upon Allan and his fellow-conspirator. The trick, it is worth noting, was highly successful, and it remained a secret for more than half a century. It was cleverly conceived, boldly put in practice, and thoroughly carried out.

To moralise over it were profitless, but it does derive a certain amount of significance from after-events. It was one of the first symptoms of a constitutional constitutional tendency-so-called advisedly-which, left unchecked in early life, developed into a moral flaw. Allan's next practical joke was passing off as genuine Remains of Nithsdale and Galloway Song, and allowing Cromek to publish as such a number of ballads and lyrics of his own composition. He was then a man of twenty-five, and of probably mature judgment concerning ordinary matters of right and wrong. Allan's son, Peter, tells the history of the hoax, with manifest filial pride in his father's cleverness. It was no after-thought. At the beginning of the Cromek acquaintance, he having "jumped at the idea of rivalling Percy, Ritson, and Scott," "the idea of a volume of imitations passed upon Cromek as genuine remains, flashed across the Poet's mind in a moment." "Cromek foresaw a volume of genuine verse. He never suspected a cheat, or, if at all, not at this time." Once he must have posed Allan, by asking him the names of the poets Nithsdale and Galloway had produced. That Cromek came to know, or to divine the secret of the alleged Remains is morally certain. Why else should he have cautioned Allan-" BE CAUTIOUS not to divulge the secrets of the PRISON HOUSE." We now know from Allan himself that "every article but two little scraps was contributed by me." Virtually all the cognoscenti of the time knew the real poet of the Remains-Scott, Percy, Hogg, Jeffrey (who told Scott he was convinced of the fraud, but did not think it worthy of exposure) and Wilson

The Remains were published in 1810; nine years afterwards, (December, 1819) "Christopher North" reviewed them in Blackwood. Cromek is there said to be enthusiastic but credulous, and ignorant of poetry. The Appendix upon district customs is, without any doubt, ascribed to Cunningham, and to him also "the best of the poetry belongs." In the course of Wilson's destructive analysis of the probabilities of the invented story, the plot is pulled to pieces, and-" independently of all this, the poems speak for themselves, and for Allan Cunningham." The stories attached to certain songs are quoted with the Addendum, "which we know to be Allan Cunningham's." By that time, in fact, Allan had avowed the authorship of the "Mermaid." It is now amusing enough to read Allan's comment upon one specimen of his own work: "A fairer specimen of romantic Scottish love than is contained in this song is rarely to be met with. It was first introduced to Nithsdale and Galloway, about thirty years ago, by a lady whose mind was deranged." Peter says of the Blackwood article that " nothing can be more discriminatingly beautiful than the language of the review throughout." Neither he nor Wilson, nor apparently anyone else—it was years afterwards that Scott dubbed the arch-impostor "honest Allan "-saw in the Remains business any question of right and wrong. Peter concentrated his view of the volume, the review, and the whole circumstances, upon the single point of his father's rank and reputation as a poet. By trickery the glory was displayed, and the exposure of the trick robbed the glory of not a single ray.

In the midst of such acclaim one is almost afraid that the mere suggestion of a possible moral view might be dubbed Puritanical, or worse. What has the art of poetry to do with morals ? In 1847, it may be diffidently mentioned, the editor of Chambers's Journal did advert to something of the sort in connection with Peter and the above-noted Introduction. He says, rather sheepishly: "From peculiar habits of feeling we never have been able to look on the proceeding quite in the sportive light in which

it is usually regarded; but, at the worst, it was no heavy subtraction from the really estimable character of Cunningham. . . The best of 'honest Allan' is here." The name, be it observed, sticks in the very face of the evidence that it is a ludicrous misfit, and the code of Scots ethics shrinks into "peculiar habits of feeling!"

EDWARD PINNINGTON.

(To be continued.)

ROBERT BURNS.

A "Blast o' Januar' win'" has brought
His birthday round again,
And gather round the festive board
The wale o' Scotia's men :
Grey-bearded sires, and ladies fair,

And chiels wi' cleric gown,

Wi' strappin' lads frae "Banks o' Ayr,”
An' maids frae "Bonnie Doon ;"
And to the immortal scroll of fame
Each thought in fancy turns,
Where high in radiant letters flame
The name of "Robert Burns."

Through foreign lands, ayont the foam,
Ilis fame and worth have spread,
His songs will aye be sung at home
Whilst laverocks sing o'erhead;

And eyes that are grown old and dim
Will brighten as of yore,

When fond remembrance points to him
Who treads these haunts no more.

The exile on a foreign strand,

His restless spirit yearns

To view again the rugged land

Of Wallace, Bruce, and "Burns. "

JOHN HOSE, Riccarton.

HIGHLAND MARY: A SUMMATION.

N

OTWITHSTANDING all that has been written about Highland Mary-and she has been more written about than any other Burns heroine-very little that is certain is known regarding her. Put to purgation, the following is the meagre array of facts which we are prepared to swear to :

(1) She was born somewhere in the West Highlands.

(2) She was a servant-maid in the household of Gavin Hamilton, Mauchline, when Burns resided at Mossgiel.

(3) She left Mauchline about the time Burns had resolved to emigrate, and returned to her home in the West Highlands.

(4) She died of fever, at Greenock, in the autumn of 1786. Mystery surrounds her personal history, and Burns himself has left little upon the record to dispel it. On the contrary, it is evident that his desire was to draw the veil closer round the shadowy figure of the Highland maiden who impinged upon his orbit more like a meteor than a "lingering star ”—shining in brightest effulgence for a brief period, and disappearing suddenly into the darkness from which she had emerged. Tradition has thrown a light, more or less glimmering and uncertain, on her lifehistory; but, at best, the bulk of what has been received as fact by her chroniclers is only probability, resting upon evidence which is purely circumstantial. Burns's early biographers say very little about Highland Mary. Heron neither mentions nor alludes to her; Currie adds nothing to what he found written by Burns himself save the trite inference that "the object of this passion died early in life, and the impression left on the mind of Burns seems to have been deep and lasting;" what Cromek asserts in his Reliques will be treated of further on; and Hamilton Paul

confines himself to the diffuse statement that Burns's first and last interviews with Highland, Mary took place in the vicinity of Tarbolton and Mauchline, to which he appends an imaginative poetical prose description (very probably suggested by what had appeared in Cromek) of the precise scene of "the last fareweel," which he locates at the spot "where the Fail disembogues itself into the Ayr "- "there or thereabout," he cautiously adds as a saving clause. All in the way of direct evidence we get from Gilbert Burns is the opinion that Highland Mary was the inspirer of the song, "Sweet Afton;" "but," he continues, "Dr Currie says that it was written in honour of Mrs Stewart, of Stair, and he must not be contradicted"—a suggestive addendum, we may remark in passing, which doubtless explains Gilbert's unaccountable silence on certain more weighty representations which obtained currency on the authority of Currie, who knew less at first-hand of the Dumfries period of the Poet's career than his brother professed to be possessed of.

The foregoing practically includes all the information avail-able when Scott Douglas and Robert Chambers began their investigations. In January, 1850, the former read a paper to the Society of Antiquaries, Edinburgh, in which he put it beyond doubt that the earlier biographers had been misled; that the Highland Mary incident did not happen in the early youth of the Poet, but during the Mossgiel period of his life, the Bible he presented to her bearing 1782 as the date of publication, and the halfobliterated inscription on it also testifying that it was written at "Mossgavil" (the old name of Mossgiel), on the actual tenancy of which the two brothers did not enter till the beginning of 1784. How did the misconception arise? Let us see what Burns himself has to say on the subject.

a copy of "

Three years after her death (December 13th, 1789) he sent Mary in Heaven to Mrs Dunlop, to which he appended the following hysterical apostrophe :

“There should I, with speechless agony of rapture, again recognise my lost, my ever dear Mary, whose bosom was fraught with truth, constancy, and love."