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wounds to which indolent sensibility is exposed, and under the gloomy apprehensions respecting futurity to which it is so often a prey, how strong is the temptation to have recourse to an antidote by which the pain of these wounds is suspended, by which the heart is exhilarated, ideas of hope and of happiness are excited in the mind, and the forms of external nature clothed with new beauty!

Elysium opens round,

A pleasing phrenzy buoys the lightened soul,
And sanguine hopes dispel your fleeting care;
And what was difficult, and what was dire,
Yields to your prowess and superior stars :
The happiest you of all that e'er were mad,
Or are, or shall be, could this folly last.
But soon your heaven is gone; a heavier gloom
Shuts o'er your head-

* * *

Morning

The praises of wine form many of the most beautiful lyrics of the poets of Greece and Rome, and of modern Europe. Whether opium, which produces visions still more ecstatic, has been the theme of the eastern poets I do not know. Wine is taken in small where for a time, it pro

doses at a time, in company, motes harmony and social affection. Opium is swallowed by the Asiatics in full doses at once, and the inebriate retires to the solitary indulgence of his delirious imaginations. Hence the wine-drinker appears in a superior light to the imbiber of opium, a diftinction which he owes more to the form than to the quality of his liquor.

Morning comes; your cares return

With tenfold rage. An anxious stomach well
May be endured; so may the throbbing head:
But such a dim delirium, such a dream
Involves you; such a dastardly despair
Unmans your soul, as madd'ning Pentheus felt,
When, baited round Citharon's cruel sides,
He saw two suns and double Thebes ascend.
Armstrong's Art of Preserving Health, l. iv. b. 163.

Such are the pleasures and the pains of intoxication as they occur in the temperament of sensibility, described by a genuine poet, with a degree of truth and energy, which nothing but experience could have dictated. There are indeed some individuals of this temperament on whom wine produces no cheering influence. On some, even in very moderate quantities, its effects are painfully irritating; in large doses, it excites dark and melancholy ideas; and in doses still larger, the fierceness of insanity itself. Such men are happily exempted from a temptation, to which experience teaches us the finest dispositions often yield, and the influence of which, when strengthened by habit, it is a humiliating truth, that the most powerful minds have not been able to resist.

It is the more necessary for men of genius to

be

be on their guard against the habitual use of wine, because it is apt to steal on them insensibly; and because the temptation to excess usually presents itself to them in their social hours, when they are alive only to warm and generous emotions, and when prudence and moderation are often contemned as selfishness and timidity.

It is the more necessary for them to guard against excess in the use of wine, because on them, its effects, are, physically and morally, in an especial manner injurious. In proportion to its stimulating influence on the system (on which the pleasurable sensations depend) is the debility that ensues; a debility that destroys digestion, and terminates in habitual fever, dropsy, jaundice, paralysis, or insanity. As the strength of the body decays, the volition fails; in proportion as the sensations are soothed and gratified, the sensibility increases; and morbid sensibility is the parent of indolence, because, while it impairs the regulating power of the mind, it exaggerates all the obstacles to exertion. Activity, perseverance, and self-command, become more and more difficult, and the great purposes of utility, patriotism, or of honourable ambition, which had occupied the imagination, die away in fruitless resolutions, or in feeble efforts.

Το

To apply these observations to the subject of our memoirs would be an useless as well as a painful task. It is indeed a duty we owe to the living, not to allow our admiration of great genius, or even our pity for its unhappy destiny, to conceal or disguise its errors. But there are sen

timents of respect, and even of tenderness, with which this duty should be performed; there is an awful sanctity which invests the mansions of the dead; and let those who moralize over the graves of their contemporaries, reflect with humility on their own errors, nor forget how soon they may themselves require the candour and the sympathy they are called upon to bestow.

Soon after the death of Burns, the following article appeared in the Dumfries Journal, from which it was copied into the Edinburgh newspapers, and into various other periodical publications. It is from the elegant pen of a lady already alluded to in the course of these memoirs,* whose exertions for the family of our bard, in the circles

of

* See p. 223.

of literature and fashion in which she moves, have done her so much honour.

"It is not probable that the late mournful event, which is likely to be felt severely in the literary world, as well as in the circle of private friendship which surrounded our admired poet, should be unattended with the usual profusion of posthumous anecdotes, memoirs, &c. that commonly spring up at the death of every rare and celebrated personage. I shall not attempt to enlist with the numerous corps of biographers, who, it is probable, may, without possessing his genius, arrogate to themselves the privilege of criticising the character or writings of Mr. Burns. "The inspiring mantle" thrown over him by that tutelary muse who first found him, like the prophet Elisha," at his plough,"* has been the portion of few, may be the portion of fewer still; and if it is true that men of genius have a claim in their literary capacities to the legal right of the British

citizen

*The poetic genius of my country found me as the prophetic bard Elijah did Elisha-at the plough; and threw her inspiring mantle over me. She bade me sing the loves, the joys, the rural scenes and rural pleasures of my native soil, in my native tongue,' &c.

&c.

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Burns's Prefatory Address to the Noblemen and

Gentlemen of the Caledonian Hunt.

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