of some "ancient mariner " with a habit of buttonholing an unfortunate individual from among the people who chanced to come his way. What we have been searching for all these years is the something or somebody that can furnish us with more details of the "cinder" dialogue between Syme and the innominate "whose beard with age was hoar"-and we are searching still.

EDITOR.

THE LATE PRINCIPAL DENNEY

ON BURNS.

[It is with feelings of sincere regret that we record the death of Professor Denney, Principal of the U.F. Church College, Glasgow, which took place on 12th June last. The deceased was a gentleman of super-eminent abilities, and had achieved the highest honours in the Church of which he was one of the most outstanding dignitaries. He was a lifelong abstainer and fervid Temperance Reformer. We had intended to extend our reply in the Chronicle, but we think we can best respect his memory by leaving the subject as he left it. The article appeared in the Glasgow Herald of 25th January last, and it is by the courtesy of that valuable journal that we are enabled to reproduce it.]

TH

BURNS AND PRESENT DISTRESS.

BY THE REV. PRINCIPAL DENNEY, D.D.

HE War, which is bringing into relief aspects hitherto unnoticed of almost everything, may perhaps give a fresh turn even to the speeches at Burns Clubs. Lord Cockburn pronounced Walter Scott's sense a still more wonderful thing than his genius, and we may say the same of our great Poet. When he simply talks sense, it is with a finality both of insight and expression against which there is no standing up. This applies to much of his humorous and satirical verse, and it is perhaps not maligning one's fellow-countrymen to suggest that Burns owes as much of his popularity in Scotland to his unimpeachable intellectual solidity as to his rarer poetic powers. A more sensible man never lived nor spoke.

But the strongest sense may at times be deflected or tainted, and it was so in different ways both in Scott and Burns. A poet is the natural representative of the natural man, and has an instinctive delight in the natural virtues. He likes the goodness which is untaught, spontaneous, generous, independent of reflection and

comparison. He suspects the goodness which is selfconscious, which knows that it is not conforming to widely accepted standards, but deliberately protesting against them. This non-conforming conscience is his bête noire, and he assails it with all the resources of his genius. As it readily lapses into Pharisa ism, his task is not difficult. If he is magnificently superior to it, as Shakespeare was, he may mock it with genial humour, and never do goodness any harm. "Because thou art virtuous, shall there be no more cakes and ale?" But if he is not so magnificently superior-if the non-conforming conscience of his scciety is powerful enough to insult him-still more, if it is powerful enough to reach his own conscience and to convince him of real faults-then the humour, if the poet can still command it, is apt to be savage rather than genial, and the good sense loses its balance. This explains a good deal in Burns. It was unfortunate for him that in indulging his satirical sense he got into false relations with himself and with a higher law than that of ecclesiastical courts or social conventions. He cultivated a kind of moral bravado which is just as much hypocrisy as the hypocrisy of Holy Willie, and not less prejudicial to genuine goodness. "You know," he wrote to a friend, that I can sin, but dare not lie." But when a man's sins are open beforehand, when he flaunts them in everybody's face with conscious defiance, it is snatching a reputation for virtue very cheap to say that he dare not lie about them. To lie about them, to pretend that they are not there, is the one thing which he has put out of his power. It is the melancholy fact that Burns practised this miserable moral attitudinising all his life. He did it about drinking, and he did it about his unspeakable relations to women. He sometimes exhibits the painful spectacle of the Pharisaism of profligacy-the prodigal son, not penitent, but swaggering round the farm with a great spread of moral shirt-front, as though he were setting an example to his cold-blooded brother. Of course, this was not how he thought of himself in his heart of hearts; in the most

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moving poem of his first volume, the "Bard's Epitaph' -a history, as Wordsworth calls it, in the shape of a prophecy-he completely drops the bravo and speaks the final humble truth. Nobody who reads it will judge him. But the bravado had been there, and its effects, both on himself and others, were deplorable.

Sir Walter Raleigh has lately described Shakespeare as the creed of England. It is a felicitous thought, and it is true, even when we test it in detail. There is a long gallery of drinkers in Shakespeare, every one drawn to the life; people like Stephano, Sir Toby, Pistol, Cassio, "the third part of the world," Lepidus, and many more. There is no savour of Puritanism in the way in which they are depicted, yet no one could say the impression they make on the mind is other than morally wholesome. They express the creed of England about drinking, and it is a sound and manly creed. But who would venture to say as much for the representations of drinking in Burns? Making every allowance for the element of extravagance, without which drinking songs could not be written at all, and prizing above all price the humour of the opening stanzas in "Death and Doctor Hornbook," and much besides, we must relucts .tly admit that our National Poet has provided us with a far less wholesome creed than Shakespeare has made uthoritative for our neighbours. And there is no denying that his practice squared with his creed. He drank to the last. He drank, as he said himself, when with every bout he gave away a slice of his constitution. If repentance could trammel up the consequences of evil we might urge that he repented. But what is his own description of the case: Whiles, but aye ower late, I think braw sober lessons.”

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One can hardly help wondering to-day whether in this Burns is to prefigure the fate of his people. There were two things in which he was always absolutely sincere, and in which he never posed more than pose is inevitable in idealising. The one was the incomparable value of a pure and happy family life; the other was his love of

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country. Both are signally illustrated in the "Cottar's Saturday Night," which, though both its merits and its popularity are to a large extent conventional, is yet, as Lockhart truly says, that one of all his poems the exclusion of which from the collection would be most injurious to the character of the man. But his patriotism and his sense for home did not save him from the ignoble elements of his creed, and though they are still powerful among us, it seems uncertain whether they will save the nation. Mr Lloyd George made a deep impression lately in the House. of Commons by a speech in which he rehearsed the too lates of the Asquith Government. Is he going to add to the number the last and most fatal by deferring the day of reckoning with the power which wrecked the life of Burns, which is ceaselessly wrecking characters and homes, and is capable, if let alone, of wrecking the country? Is it to be the epitaph of Scotland, as well as of the greatest genius with which heaven has ever illustrated our poor Sparta "Whiles, but aye ower late, I think braw sober lessons?" Neuve Chapelle and Loos apparently were not enough; Kut and Gallipoli were not enough; what will be enough to make us face our deadly peril in dead earnest ?

Benrig, Kilmaurs, 26th January.

The concluding sentences of the Rev. Principal Denney's article under the above heading, which appeared in the Herald of 25th curt., are, like the proverbial postscript of a lady's letter, more illuminating than the rest of the text. The first impression after perusing it is one of blank wonder at the logical gymnastics by which he establishes such a direct connection between Robert Burns and Mr Lloyd George's shortcomings as a temperance legislator. If his intention was to use the failings of Burns as a stalking-horse to get within gunshot of that statesman he might have chosen a more fitting date than that on which Scotsmen everywhere are wont to meet to do the Poet honour. This is of course a matter of taste, on which every man is his own judge. Even the ubiquitous John Smith, of perennial parish fame, is universally exempted from derogatory remarks on the particular date on which his virtues