I drink it as the Fates ordain it.
Come, fill it, and have done with rhymes;
Fill up the lonely glass, and drain it
In memory of dear old times.
Welcome the wine, whate'er the seal is;
And sit you down and say your grace
With thankful heart, whate'er the meal is,
-Here comes the smoking Bouillabaisse!
WILLIAM M. THACKERAY.

had been ten years in print, and Gray's "Elegy" nine years. Dr. Johnson had lately published his Dictionary, and Edmund Burke his essay on the "Sublime and Beautiful." In the year 1759 Garrick was the first of actors, and Sir Joshua Reynolds of painters. Gibbon dated in this year the preface of his first work; Hume published the third and fourth volumes of his history of England; Robertson his history of Scotland, and Sterne came to London to find a publisher for "Tristram Shandy." Oliver Gold

TUE TO BURNS.

MR. CURTIS'S ADDRESS.

The year 1759 was a proud year for Great Britain. Two years before, amid universal disaster, Lord Chesterfield had exclaimed, "We are no longer a nation." But meanwhile Lord Chatham had restored to his country the scepter of the seas and covered her name with the glory of continuous victory. The year 1759 saw his greatest triumphs. It was the year of Minden, where the French Army was routed; of Quiberon, where the French fleet was destroyed; of the heights of Abraham, in Canada, where Wolfe died happy, and the dream of French supremacy upon the American continent vanished forever. The triumphant thunder of British guns was heard all around the world. Robert Clive was founding British dominion in India; Boscawen and his fellow-Admirals were sweeping France from the ocean; and in America Col. George Washington had planted the British flag on the field of Braddock's defeat. We are forced to ask every morning what victory there is," said Horace Walpole, "for fear of missing one."

But not only in politics and war was the genius of Great Britain illustrious. James Watt was testing the force of steam; Hargreaves was inventing the spinning-jenny, which ten years later Arkwright would complete, and Wedgwood was making household ware beautiful. Fielding's Tom Jones"

But

for the booksellers in his garret over Fleet Ditch; but four years later with Burke and Reynolds and Garrick and Johnson, he would found the most famous of literary clubs and sell the "Vicar of Wakefield" to save himself from jail. It was a year of events decisive of the course of history, and of men whose fame is an illustrious national possession. among those events none is more memorable than the birth of a son in the poorest of Scotch homes; and of all that renowned and resplendent throng of statesmen, soldiers, and seamen; of philosophers, poets, and inventors, whose fame filled the world with acclamation, not one is more gratefully and fondly remembered than the Ayrshire ploughman, Robert Burns.

This great assembly is in large part composed of his countrymen. You, fellow-citizens, were mostly born in Scotland. There is no more beautiful country, and as you stand here, memory and imagination recall your native land. Misty coasts and farstretching splendors of summer sea; solemn mountains and wind-swept moors; singing streams and rocky glens and water falls; lovely vales of Ayr and Yarrow, of Teviot, and the Tweed; crumbling ruins of ancient days, abbey and castle and tower; legends of romance gilding burn and brae with "the light that never was on sea or land; " every hill with its heroic tradition, every stream with its story, every valley with its song; land of the harebell and the mountain daisy, land of the laverock and the curlew, land of braw youths and sonsie lasses, of a deep, strong, melancholy manhood, of a deep, true, tender womanhood-this is your Scotland, this is your native land. And how could you so truly transport it to the home of your adoption, how interpret it to us beyond the sea, so fully and so fitly, as by this memorial of the poet whose song is Scotland? No wonder that you proudly bring his statue and place it here under the American sun, in the chief American city, side by side with that of the other great Scotchman, whose genius and fame, like the air and the sun

shine, no local boundary can confine. In this Walhalla of our various nationality it will be long before two fellow-countrymen are commemorated whose genius is at once so characteristically national and so broadly universal, who speak so truly for their own countrymen and for all mankind as Walter Scott and Robert Burns.

This season of the reddening leaf, of sunny stillness and of roaring storm, especially befits this commemoration, because it was at this season that the poet was peculiarly inspired, and because the wild and tender, the wayward and golden-hearted Autumn is the best symbol of his genius. The sculptor has imagined him in some hour of pensive and ennobling meditation, when his soul, amid the hush of evening, in the falling year, was exalted to an ecstasy of passionate yearning and regret; and here, rapt in silence, just as the heavenly melody is murmuring from his lips, here he sits and will sit forever. It was in October that Highland Mary died. It was in October that the hymn to Mary in Heaven was written. It was in October, ever afterward, that Burns was lost in melancholy musing as the anniversary of her death drew near. Yet within a few days, while his soul might seem to have been still lifted in that sorrowful prayer, he wrote the most rollicking, resistless, and immortal of drinking songs:

"O Willie brew'd a peck o'maut,
And Rob and Allan cam to pree,
Three blither hearts that lee lang night
Ye wadna find in Christendie."

his birth's invidious bar." He was born poor, he lived poor, he died poor, and he always felt his poverty to be a curse. He was fully conscious of himself and of his intellectual superiority. He disdained and resented the condescension of the great, and he defiantly asserted his independence. I do not say that he might not or ought not to have lived tranquilly and happily as a poor man. Perhaps, as Carlyle suggests, he should have divided his hours between poetry and virtuous industry. We only know that he did not. Like an untamable eagle he dashed against the bars he could not break, and his life was a restless, stormy alternation of low and lofty moods, of pure and exalted feeling, of mad revel and impotent regret: His pious mother croned over his cradle snatches of old ballads and legends of which her mind was full. His father, silent, austere, inflexibly honest, taught him to read good books, books whose presence in his poor cottage helps to explain the sturdy mental vigor of the Scotch peasantry. But the ballads charmed the boy. He could not turn a tune, but driving the cart or ploughing or digging in the field, he was still saying the verses over and over, his heart answering, like a shell the sea, until, when he was fifteen, he composed a song himself upon a lassie who drew his eye and heart; and so, as he says, love and poetry began with him together.

For ten years his life was a tale of fermenting youth: toiling and moiling, turning this way and that, to surveying and flax dressing, in the vain hope of finding a fairer chance; a lover of all the girls and the mas

"He raised a mortal to the skies, She drew an angel down."

This was Burns. This was the blended poet and man. What sweetness and grace! What soft, pathetic, penetrating melody, as if all the sadness of shaggy Scotland had found a voice! What whispering witchery of love! What boisterous, jovial humor, excessive, daring, unbridled!-satire of the kirk, so scorching and scornful that John Knox might have burst indignant from his grave, and shuddering ghosts of Covenanters have filled the mountain with a melancholy wail. A genius so masterful, a charm so universal, that it drew farmers from the fields when his coming was known, and men from their tavern beds at midnight to listen delighted until dawn.

It cannot be said of Burns that he "burst

long day of peat-cutting with the rattling fire of wit that his comrades never forgot; writing love-songs, and fascinated by the wild smuggler boys of Kirkoswald; led by them into bitter shame and self-reproach, but turning with all the truculence of heady youth upon his moral censors and taunting them with immortal ridicule. At twenty-five, when his father was already laid in Alloway kirkyard, the seed of old national legend which his mother had dropped into his cradle began to shoot into patriotic feeling and verse, and Burns became conscious of distinct poetic ambition. For two years he followed the plow and wrote some of his noblest poems. But the farm which he tilled with his brother was unproductive, and at the very time that his genius was most affluent his conduct was most wayward. Distracted by poetry and poverty and passion, and brought to public shame, he determined to leave the country, and in 1786, when he was twenty-seven years old, Burns published his poems by

all his stock and crops and tools, withdrew to Dumfries. It was the last change of his life, and melancholy were the days that followed, but radiant with the keen flashes and tender gleams of the highest poetic genius of the time. Writing exquisite songs, often lost in the unworthiest companionship, consumed with self-reproach, but regular in his official duties; teaching his boy to love the great English poets, from Shakespeare to Gray, seeking pleasure at any cost, conscious of a pity and a censure at which he could not wonder, but conscious also of the inexpressible tragedy which pity and censure could not know nor comprehend, and through evil report and good report the same commanding and noble nature that we know, Burns in these last dark days of Dumfries is like a stately ship in a tempest with all her canvass spread, with far-flying streamers and glancing lights and music penetrating the storm, drifting helpless on the cruel rocks of a lee shore. One summer evening toward the end, as a young man rode into Dumfries to attend a ball, he saw Burns loitering along on one side of the street, while the other was thronged with gay gentlemen and ladies, not one of whom cared to greet the poet. The young man instantly dismounted, and, joining Burns, asked him to cross the street. "Nay, nay, my young friend, that's all over now;" and then in a low, soft, mournful voice Burns repeated the old ballad:

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

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

Oh were we young as we ance hae been,
We suld hae been galloping down on yon green,
And linking it owre the lillie-white lea,
And werena my heart light it wad dee."

is no great poet who is less of a mere name and abstraction. His grasp is so human that the heart insists upon knowing the story of his life, and ponders it with endless sympathy and wonder. It is not necessary to excuse or conceal. The key of Burns's life is the struggle of a shrinking will tossed between great extremes, between poetic genius and sensibility, intellectual force, tenderness, conscience, and generous sympathies on one side and tremendous passions upon the other. We cannot, indeed, know the power of the temptation. We cannot pretend to determine the limits of responsibility for infirmity of will. We only know that however supreme and resistless the genius of a man may be it does not absolve him from the moral obliga tion that binds us all. It would not have comforted Jeanie Deans as she held the sorrowing Effie to her heart to know that the fause lover" who "staw" her rose was named Shakespeare or Burns. Nor is there any baser prostitution than that which would grace self-indulgence with an immortal name. If a boy is a dunce at school it is a foolish parent who consoles himself with remember ing that Walter Scott was a dull school-boy. It was not Scott's dullness that made him the magician. It is not the reveling at Poosie Nansie's and the Globe Tavern, and the reckless life at Mauchline and Mossgiel that endeared Robert Burns to mankind. Just there is the mournful tragedy of his story. Just there lies its pathetic appeal. The young man who would gild his dissipation with the celestial glamour of Burns's name snatches the glory of a star to light him to destruction. But it is no less true, and in the deepest and fullest meaning of his own words,

44

"What's done we partly may compute But know not what's resisted."

The personal feeling of Longfellow's poem is that which Burns always inspires. There

But we unveil to-day and set here for perpetual contemplation, not the monument of the citizen at whom respectable Dumfries looked askance, but the statue of a great poet. Once more we recognize that no gift