ciety of his graver friends. Too many of his hours were now spent at the tables of persons who delighted to urge conviviality to drunkenness, in the tavern, in the brothel, on the lap of the woman of pleasure. He suffered himself to be surrounded by a race of miserable beings who were proud to tell that they had been in company with Burns, and had seen Burns as loose and as foolish as themselves. He now also began to contract something of new arrogance in conversation. Accustomed to be among his favourite associates what is vulgarly but expressively called the cock of the company,' he could scarcely refrain from indulging in similar freedom and dictatorial decision of talk, even in the presence of persons who could less patiently endure his presumption. Thus passed two winters, and an intervening summer, of the life of Burns. The subscription-edition of his poems, in the meantime appeared; and although not enlarged beyond that which came from the Kilmarnock press, by any new pieces of eminent merit, did not fail to give entire satisfaction to the subscribers. He at one time, during this period, accompanied for a few weeks, into Berwickshire, Robert Ainslie, Esq., a gentleman of the purest and most correct manners, who was accustomed to soothe the toils of a laborious profession, by an occasional converse with polite literature, and with general science. At another time he wandered on a jaunt of four or five weeks through the Highlands, in company with the late Mr William Nicol,-a man who had been before the companion and friend of Dr Gilbert Stuart,-who in vigour of intellect, and in wild yet generous impetuosity of passion, remarkably resembled both Stuart and Burns,-who, for his skill and facility of Latin composition, was perhaps without a rival in Europe,— but whose virtues and genius were clouded by habits of Bacchanalian excess."

192

66

We now behold Burns richer than perhaps he had ever dreamed of being in worldly substance; richer too in fame and in all that constitutes the external semblance of happiness; but poorer and more miserable at least than he had ever dreaded he might become: for he is now maddened with the fever of mere worldly ambition, and through long years the disease will rack him with unprofitable sufferings, and weaken his strength for all true and nobler aims." “He was now at last to fix upon a plan for his future life. He talked loudly of independence of spirit, and simplicity of manners; and boasted his resolution to return to the plough. Yet still he lingered in Edinburgh, week after week, and month after month,-perhaps expecting that one or another of his noble patrons might procure him some permanent and competent annual income, which should set him above all necessity of future exertion to earn for himself the means of subsistence,-perhaps unconsciously reluctant to quit the pleasures of that voluptuous town-life to which he had for some time too willingly accustomed himself. An accidental dislocation or fracture, confining him for some weeks to his apartment, left him leisure for serious reflection; and he determined to retire from town without longer delay. None of all his patrons interposed to divert him from his purpose of returning to the plough, by the offer of a small pension, or any sinecure place of moderate emolument, such as might have given him competence without withdrawing him from his poetical

2 Carlyle.

studies. It seemed to be forgotten that a ploughman thus exalted into a man of letters, was unfitted for his former toils, without being regularly qualified to enter the career of any new profession; and that it became incumbent upon those patrons who had called him from the plough,—not merely to make him their companion in the hour of riot,— not simply to fill his purse with gold for a few transient expenses,—but to secure him, as far as was possible, from being ever overwhelmed in distress, in consequence of the habits of life into which they had seduced him. Perhaps, indeed, the same delusion of fancy betrayed both Burns and his patrons into the mistaken idea that,—after all which had passed, it was still possible for him to return to the homely joys and simple toils of undissipated rural life.

"In this temper of mind, and state of his fortune, a farm and the excise were the objects upon which his choice ultimately fixed for future employment and support. Mr Alexander Wood, the surgeon who attended him during the illness occasioned by his hurt, no sooner understood his patient's wish to seek a resource in the service of the excise, than he effectually recommended the poet to the commissioners of excise; and the name of Burns was enrolled in the list of their expectant officers. Peter Millar, Esq., of Dalswinton, deceived, like Burns himself, and Burns's other friends, into an idea that the poet and exciseman might yet be respectable and happy as a farmer, generously proposed to establish him in a farm, upon conditions of lease which prudence and industry might easily render exceedingly advantageous. Burns eagerly accepted the offers of this benevolent patron; and two of the poet's friends were invited to survey a farm in Dumfriesshire which Mr Millar offered. A lease was granted to him at that annual rent which his own friends declared the due cultivation of his farm might easily enable him to pay; what yet remained of the profits of his publication was laid out in the purchase of farm-stock; and Burns, with his Jane,-whom he had now married,--took up their residence upon his farm. For a time all went well. The neighbouring farmers and gentlemen, pleased to obtain for an inmate among them the poet by whose works they had been so highly delighted, kindly sought his company and invited him to their houses. He himself found an inexpressible charm in sitting down beside his wife at his own fire-side,-in wandering over his own grounds,-in once more putting his hand to the spade and the plough,-in forming his inclosures, and managing his cattle. Even his engagements in the service of the excise did not, at the very first, threaten necessarily to debase him by association with the mean, the gross, and the profligate, to contaminate the poet, or to ruin the farmer.3

"But it could not be: it was not possible for Burns now to assume that soberness of fancy and passions,-that sedateness of feeling,-those habits of earnest attention to vulgar cares,-without which success in his new situation was not to be expected. A thousand difficulties were to be encountered and overcome,-much money was to be expended,— much weary toil was to be exercised, before his farm could be brought into a state of cultivation, in which its produce might enrich the occupier. The prospect before him was, in this respect, such as might well

3 Monthly Magazine. No. XIX.

have discouraged the most stubbornly laborious peasant, the most sanguine projector in agriculture; and much more, therefore, was it likely that this prospect should quickly dishearten Burns, who had never loved labour, and who was, at this time, certainly not at all disposed to enter into agriculture with the enthusiasm of a projector. Besides all this," says the writer in the Monthly Magazine, "I have reason to believe that the poet had made his bargain rashly, and had not duly availed himself of his patron's generosity. His friends from Ayrshire were little acquainted with the soil, with the manures, with the markets, with the dairies, with the modes of improvement in Dumfriesshire : they had set upon his farm rather such a value of rental as it might have borne in Ayrshire, than that which it could easily afford in the local circumstances in which it was actually placed. He himself had inconsiderately submitted to their judgment, without once doubting whether they might not have erred against his interests; and the consequence was, that he held his farm at too high a rent, contrary to his landlord's intention. The business of the excise too, as he began to be more and more employed in it, distracted his mind from the care of his farm, led him into gross and vulgar society, and exposed him to many unavoidable temptations to drunken excess such as he had no longer sufficient fortitude to resist. Amidst the anxieties, distractions, and seducements, which thus arose to him, home became insensibly less and less pleasing; even the endearments of his Jane's affection began to lose their hold on his heart; and he became every day less and less unwilling to forget in riot those gathering sorrows which he knew not to subdue. Mr Millar, and some other of his friends, would gladly have exerted an influence over his mind, which might have preserved him, in this situation of his affairs, equally from despondency and from dissipation. But Burns's temper spurned all control from his superiors in fortune. He resented, as an arrogant encroachment upon his independence, that tenor of conduct by which Mr Millar wished to turn him from dissolute conviviality, to that steady attention to the business of his farm without which it was impossible to thrive in it. His crosses and disappointments drove him every day more and more into dissipation; and his dissipation tended to enhance whatever was disagreeable and perplexing in the state of his affairs. He sunk by degrees into the boon companion of mere excisemen; and almost every drunken fellow who was willing to spend his money lavishly in the ale-house could easily command the company of Burns. The care of his farm was thus neglected; waste and losses consumed his little capital; he resigned his lease into the hands of his landlord; and finally retired with his family to the town of Dumfries, determining to depend entirely for the means of future support upon his income as an excise-officer."

Yet during these unfortunate years of farming his talents and powers of observation seem to have suffered no eclipse; his fancy remained unimpaired; and many of his finest compositions were the production of this period of his life,-particularly his wild and humorous tale of Tam o'Shanter,' and those exquisite songs, and re-castings of old Scottish ballads which he contributed to Thomson's collection of national songs and melodies, and for which, in the pride of conscious inspiration, he refused to accept of any pecuniary emolument, choosing rather to make his task a labour of love only.

The crisis of Burns's life was now arrived. From the period of his removal to Dumfries his dissipation became still more deeply habitual. Mr Carlyle has touched upon the last years of the unfortunate poet's life with great beauty of thought, and a profound discrimination of the moral and intellectual features of the sinking man. "Flushed with irregular excitement, exasperated alternately by contempt of others, and contempt of himself, Burns was no longer regaining his peace of mind, but fast losing it for ever. There was a hollowness at the heart of his life, for his conscience did not now approve what he was doing. Amid the vapours of unwise enjoyment, of bootless remorse, and angry discontent with fate, his true loadstar, a life of poetry with poverty, nay, with famine if it must be so, was too often altogether hidden from his eyes. And yet he sailed a sea, where, without some such guide, there was no right steering. Meteors of French politics rise before him, but these were not his stars. An accident this, which hastened, but did not originate, his worst distresses. In the mad contentions of that time, he comes in collision with certain official superiors; is wounded by them; cruelly lacerated, we should say, could a dead me-chanical implement, in any case, be called cruel: and shrinks in indignant pain, into deeper self-seclusion, into gloomier moodiness than ever. His life has now lost its unity: it is a life of fragments; led with little aim beyond the melancholy one of securing its own continuance,-in fits of wild false joy, when such offered, and of black despondency when they passed away. His character before the world begins to suffer calumny is busy with him; for a miserable man makes more enemies than friends. Some faults he has fallen into, and a thousand misfortunes; but deep criminality is what he stands accused of, and they that are not without sin, cast the first stone at him! For is he not a well-wisher of the French revolution, a Jacobin, and therefore in that one act guilty of all? These accusations, political and moral, it has since appeared, were false enough; but the world hesitated little to credit them. Nay, his convivial Mecænases themselves were not the last to do it. There is reason to believe that, in his later years, the Dumfries aristocracy had partly withdrawn themselves from Burns, as from a tainted person, no longer worthy of their acquaintance. That painful class, stationed in all provincial cities, behind the outmost breastwork of gentility, there to stand siege and do battle against the intrusions of Grocerdom and Grazierdom, had actually seen dishonour in the society of Burns, and branded him with their veto: had, as we vulgarly say, cut him! We find one passage in this work of Mr Lockhart's, which will not out of our thoughts: A gentleman of that county, whose name I have already more than once had occasion to refer to, has often told me that he was seldom more grieved, than when riding into Dumfries one fine summer evening about this time to attend a county ball, he saw Burns walking alone, on the shady side of the principal street of the town, while the opposite side was gay with successive groups of gentlemen and ladies, all drawn together for the festivities of the night, not one of whom appeared willing to recognise him. The horseman dismounted, and joined Burns, who on his proposing to cross the street said: "Nay, nay, my young friend, that's all over now;" and quoted, after a pause, some verses of lady Grizzel Baillie's pathetic ballad :

"His bonnet stood ance fu' fair on his brow,

His auld ane look'd better than mony ane's new;
But now he lets't wear ony way it will hing,
And casts himsell dowie upon the corn-bing.

O were we young, as we ance hae been,

We sud hae been gallopping down on yon green,
And linking it ower the lily-white lea!

And werena my heart light I wad die."

It was little in Burns's character to let his feelings on certain subjects escape in this fashion. He, immediately after reciting these verses, assumed the sprightliness of his most pleasing manner; and taking his young friend home with him, entertained him very agreeably till the hour of the ball arrived.'

But we must hasten to the closing scene of the poet's life. He had been for some months confined by sickness, towards the close of the year 1795. In the month of January following, he imprudently exposed himself, and brought on a relapse, under the effects of which his constitution rapidly sunk. Sea-bathing for a while recruited him, and his friends began to flatter themselves with hopes of his recovery; but the hand of death was upon him; he was brought back to his own house under an accession of fever, and expired in three days thereafter, on the 21st of July, 1796.

The character of Burns, moral and literary, as a man and as a poet, has received very ample discussion and illustration, in the pages of Currie, Walker, Lockhart, Cunningham, and Hogg, who have all successively essayed the office of Burns's biographer, and that with great though of course unequal merit and success. We are inclined to think, however, with Mr Carlyle, that the real problem of Burns's biography, has not been adequately solved by any of these writers; that their biographies are deficient in a philosophical induction, from their own facts and documents, towards the true character of the man and bard. Mr Carlyle, as he was the first to point out the omission and defect, so he has also done the most to supply and rectify it, in that profound and highly original article of criticism, to which we have made such repeated reference in the course of our own brief notice. It is, indeed, to be regretted, that with such profound talents for the true exposition and analysis of character, he should choose to clothe his thoughts in so fuliginous a diction as that which pervades the article in question, though not quite to the same amount as in some of his other contributions to periodical criticism; nevertheless we refer our readers to the entire article, in full confidence that it will nobly repay an attentive perusal. With one further extract from it, we must conclude the present notice. "All that remains of Burns, the writings he has left, seem to us, as we hinted above, no more than a poor mutilated fraction of what was in him; brief, broken glimpses of a genius that could never show itself complete; that wanted all things for completeness: culture, leisure, true effort, nay, even length of life. His poems are, with scarcely any exception, mere occasional effusions, poured forth with little premeditation, expressing, by such means as offered, the passion, opinion, or humour of the hour. Never in one instance was it permitted him to grapple with any subject with the full collection of his strength, to fuse and mould it in the concentrated fire of his genius.