Grahame, was, by all accounts, equally what the Tam of the poet appears, -Jolly, careless, rustic, who took much more interest in the contraband traffic of the coast, than the rotation of crops. Burns knew the man well; and to his dying day, he, nothing loath, passed among his rural compeers by the name of Tam o' Shanter. A few words will bring us to the close of Burns's career at Elliesland. Mr. Ramsay of Ochtertyre, happening to pass through Nithsdale in 1790, met Burns riding rapidly near Closeburn. The poet was obliged to pursue his professional journey, but sent on Mr. Ramsay and his fellow-traveller to Elliesland, where he joined them as soon as his duty permitted him, saying, as he entered, "I come, to use the words of Shakspeare, stewed in haste." Mr. Ramsay was "much pleased with his uxor Sabina qualis, and his modest mansion, so unlike the habitation of ordinary rustics." The evening was spent delightfully. A gentleman of dry temperament, who looked in accidentally, soon partook the contagion, and sat listening to Burns with the tears running over his cheeks. "Poor Burns!" says Mr. Ramsay," from that time I met him no more." The summer after, some English travellers, calling at Elliesland, were told that the poet was walking by the river. They proceeded in search of him, and presently, "on a rock that projected into the stream, they saw a man employed in angling, of a singular appearance. He had a cap made of a fox's skin on his head; a loose great-coat, fastened round him by a belt, from which depended an enormous Highland broadsword. It was Burns. He received them with great cordiality, and asked them to share his humble dinner." These travellers also classed the evening they spent at Elliesland with the brightest of their lives. Towards the close of 1791, the poet, finally despairing of his farm, determined to give up his lease, which the kindness of his landlord rendered easy of arrangement; and procuring an appointment to the Dumfries division, which raised his salary from the revenue to £70 per annum, removed his family to the county town, in which he terminated his days. His conduct as an excise officer had hitherto met with uniform approbation; and he nourished warm hopes of being promoted, when he had thus avowedly devoted himself altogether to the service. He left Elliesland, however, with a heavy heart. The affection of his neighbours was rekindled in all its early fervour by the thoughts of parting with him; and the roup of his farming-stock and other effects, was, in spite of whisky, a very melancholy scene. The competition for his chattles was eager, each being anxious to secure a memorandum of Burns's residence among them. It is pleasing to know, that among other "titles manifold" to their respect and gratitude, Burns had superintended the formation of a subscription library in the parish. His letters to the booksellers on this subject do him much honour: his choice of authors (which business was naturally left to his discretion) being in the highest degree judicious. Such institutions are now common, almost universal, indeed, in all the rural districts of southern Scotland; but it should never be forgotten that Burns was among the first, if not the very first, to set the example. "He was so good," says Mr. Riddel," as to take the whole management of this concern; he was treasurer, librarian, and censor, to our little society, who will long have a grateful sense of his public spirit, and exertions for their improvement and information." Once, and only once, did Burns quit his residence at Elliesland to revisit Edinburgh. His object was to close accounts with Creech; that business ac complished, he returned immediately, and he never again saw the capital. He thus writes to Mrs. Dunlop :-" To a man who has a home, however humble and remote, if that home is, like mine, the scene of domestic com- . fort, the bustle of Edinburgh will soon be a business of sickening disgust— “Vain pomp and glor of the world, I hate you !” "When I must skulk into a corner, lest the rattling equipage of some gaping blockhead should mangle me in the mire, I am tempted to exclaim, what merits had he had, or what demerits have I had, in some state of pre-existence, that he is ushered into this state of being with the sceptre of rule, and the key of riches in his puny fist, and I kicked into the world, the sport of folly or the victim of pride . . . . often as I have glided with humble stealth through the pomp of Prince's Street, it has suggested itself to me as an improvement on the present human figure, that a man, in proportion to his own conceit of his consequence in the world, could have pushed out the longitude of his common size, as a snail pushes out his horns, or as we draw out a perspective." CHAPTER VIII. CONTENTS.-IS more beset in town than country-His early biographers, (Dr. Currie not excepted), have coloured too darkly under that head—It is not correct to speak of the poet as having sunk into a toper, or a solitary drinker, or of his revels as other than occasional, or of their having interfered with the punctual discharge of his official duties—He is shown to have been the affectionate and beloved husband, although passing follies imputed; and the constant and most assiduous instructor of his children-Impulses of the French Revolution -Symptoms of fraternizing— The attention of his official superiors is called to them-Practically no blow is inflicted, only the bad name-. -Interesting details of this period Gives his whole soul to song making-Preference in that for his native dialect, with the other attendant facts, as to that portion of his immortal lays. "The King's most humble servant, I THE 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 meetings in 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 horribly 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, 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 "The above answer to an invitation was written extempore on a leaf torn from his Ex cise-book.-Cromek's MSS 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 pardon, where alone effectual pardon could be found;-and who died ere he had reached that term of life up to which the passions of many, who, their mortal career being regarded as a whole, are honoured as among the most virtuous of mankind, have proved too strong for the control of reason. We have already seen that the poet was careful of decorum in all things during the brief space of his prosperity at Elliesland, and that he became less so on many points, as the prospects of his farming speculation darkened around him. It seems to be equally certain, that he entertained high hopes of promotion in the excise at the period of his removal to Dumfries; and that the comparative recklessness of his later conduct there, was consequent on a certain overclouding of these professional expectations. The case is broadly stated so by Walker and Paul; and there are hints to the same effect in the narrative of Currie. The statement has no doubt been exaggerated, but it has its foundation in truth; and by the kindness of Mr. Train, supervisor at Castle Douglas in Galloway, I shall presently be enabled to give some details which may throw light on this business. Burns was much patronised when in Edinburgh by the Honourable Henry Erskine, Dean of the Faculty of Advocates, and other leading Whigs of the place much more so, to their honour be it said, than by any of the influential adherents of the then administration. His landlord at Elliesland, Mr. Miller of Dalswinton, his neighbour, Mr. Riddel of Friars-Carse, and most of the other gentlemen who showed him special attention, belongs ed to the same political party; and, on his removal to Dumfries, it so hap pened, that some of his immediate superiors in the revenue service of the district, and other persons of standing authority, into whose society he was thrown, entertained sentiments of the same description. Burns, whenever in his letters he talks seriously of political matters, uniformly describes his early jacobitism as mere "matter of fancy." It may, however, be easily bélieved, that a fancy like his, long indulged in dreams of that sort, was well prepared to pass into certain other dreams, which likewise involved feelings of dissatisfaction with "the existing order of things." Many of the old elements of political disaffection in Scotland, put on a new shape at the outbreaking of the French Revolution; and jacobites became half jaco bins, ere they were at all aware in what the doctrines of jacobinism were to end. The Whigs naturally regarded the first dawn of freedom in France with feelings of sympathy, delight, exultation. The general, the all but universal tone of feeling was favourable to the first assailants of the Bour bon despotism; and there were few who more ardently participated in the general sentiment of the day than Burns. The revulsion of feeling that took place in this country at large, when wanton atrocities began to stain the course of the French Revolution, and Burke lifted his powerful voice, was great. Scenes more painful at the time, and more so even now in the retrospect, than had for generations afflicted Scotland, were the consequences of the rancour into which party feelings on both sides now rose and fermented. Old and dear ties of friendship were torn in sunder; society was for a time shaken to its centre. In the most extravagant dreams of the jacobites there had always been much to command respect, high chivalrous devotion, reverence for old affections, ancestral loyalty, and the generosity of romance. In the new species of hostility, every thing seemed mean as well as perilous; it was scorned even more than hated. The very name stained whatever it came near; and men that had known and loved each other from boyhood, stood aloof, if this influence interfered, as if it had been some loathsome pestilence. There was a great deal of stately Toryism at this time in the town of Dumfries, which was the favourite winter retreat of many of the best gentlemen's families of the south of Scotland. Feelings that worked more violently in Edinburgh than in London, acquired additional energy still, in this provincial capital. All men's eyes were upon Burns. He was the standing marvel of the place; his toasts, his jokes, his epigrams, his songs, were the daily food of conversation and scandal; and he, open and careless, and thinking he did no great harm in saying and singing what many of his superiors had not the least objection to hear and applaud, soon began to be considered among the local admirers and disciples of King George the Third and his minister, as the most dangerous of all the apostles of sedition, and to be shunned accordingly. The records of the Excise-Office are silent concerning the suspicions which the Commissioners of the time certainly took up in regard to Burns as a political offender-according to the phraseology of the tempestuous period, a democrat. In that department, as then conducted, I am assured that nothing could have been more unlike the usual course of things, than that one syllable should have been set down in writing on such a subject, unless the case had been one of extremities. That an inquiry was instituted, we know from Burns's own letters-but what the exact termination of the inquiry was, will never, in all probability, be ascertained. According to the tradition of the neighbourhood, Burns, inter alia, gave great offence by demurring in a large mixed company to the proposed toast," the health of William Pitt;" and left the room in indignation, because the society rejected what he wished to substitute, namely, "the health of a greater and a better man, George Washington," I suppose the warmest admirer of Mr. Pitt's talents and politics would hardly venture now-a-days to dissent substantially from Burns's estimate of the comparative merits of these two great men. The name of Washington, at all events, when contemporary passions shall have finally sunk into the peace of the grave, will unquestionably have its place in the first rank of heroic virtue, a station. which demands the exhibition of victory pure and unstained over temptations and trials extraordinary, in kind as well as strength. But at the time when Burns, being a servant of Mr. Pitt's government, was guilty of this indiscretion, it is obvious that a great deal "more was meant than reached the ear." In the poet's own correspondence, we have traces of another occurrence of the same sort. Burns thus writes to a gentleman at whose table he had dined the day before :-" I was, I know, drunk last night, but I am sober this morning. From the expressions Captain made use |