We do not find fault with Burns for having written these lines for association of feeling with feeling, by contrast, is perhaps most of all powerful in music. Believing that there was no devotional spirit in Italian music, it was natural for him to denounce its employment in religious services; but we all know that it cannot without most ignorant violation of the truth be said of the hymns of that most musical of all people, and super stitious as they may be, among the most devout, that

"Nae unison hae they with our Creator's praise."

Our objection to some lines in another stanza is more serious, for it applies not to a feeling but a judgment. That there is more virtue in a cottage than in a palace we are not disposed to deny at any time, least of all when reading "The Cottar's Saturday Night;" and we entirely go along with Burns when he says,

"And certes, in fair virtue's heavenly road,

The cottage leaves the palace far behind;"

but there, we think, he ought to have stopped, or illustrated the truth in a milder manner than

"What is a lordling's pomp ?-a cumbrous load,
Disguising oft the wretch of human kind,

Studied in arts of hell, in wickedness refined."

Our moral nature revolts with a sense of injustice from the comparison of the wickedness of one class with the goodness of another; and the effect is the very opposite of that intended, the rising up of a miserable conviction that for a while had been laid asleep, that vice and crime are not excluded from cots, but often, alas! are found there in their darkest colours and most portentous forms.

The whole stanza we had in our mind as somehow or other not entirely delightful, is

66

Compared with this, how poor Religion's pride,

In all the pomp of method, and of art,

When men display to congregations wide,
Devotion's every grace except the heart.
The Pow'r incensed, the pageant will desert,
The pompous strain, the sacerdotal stole ;
But haply, in some cottage far apart,

May hear, well pleased, the language of the soul;
And in his book of life the inmates poor enrol."

VOL. VII.

C

"Let us join in the worship of God" is a strong desire of nature, and a commanded duty; and thus are brought together, for praise and prayer, "congregations wide," in all populous places of every Christian land. Superstition is sustained by the same sympathy as religion-enlightenment of reason being essential to faith. There sit, every Sabbath, hundreds of hypocrites, thousands of the sincere, tens of thousands of the indifferent-how many of the devout or how few who shall say that understands the meaning of devotion? If all be false and hollow, a mere semblance only, then indeed

"The Pow'r, incensed, the pageant will desert,

The pompous strain, the sacerdotal stole ;"

but if, even in the midst of "religion's pride," there be humble and contrite hearts-if a place be found for the poor in spirit even "in gay religions full of pomp and gold"-a Christian poet ought to guard his heart against scorn of the ritual of any form of Christian worship. Be it performed in Cathedral, Kirk, or Cottage-God regards it only when performed in spirit and in truth.

Remember all this poetry, and a hundred almost as fine things besides, was composed within little more than two years, by a man all the while working for wages-seven pounds from May-day to May-day; and that he never idled at his work, but mowed and ploughed as if working by the piece, and could afford therefore, God bless his heart, to stay the share for a minute, but too late for the "wee, sleekit, cowrin, timorous beastie's" nest. Folks have said he was a bad farmer, and neglected Mossgiel, an idler in the land.

"How various his employments whom the world

Calls idle!"

Absent in the body, we doubt not, he frequently was from his fields; oftenest in the evenings and at night. Was he in Nance Tinnock's? She knew him by name and head-mark, for once seen he was not to be forgotten; but she complained that he had never drunk three half-mutchkins in her house, whatever he might say in his lying poems. In Poussie Nannie's-mother of Racer Jess ?-He was there once; and out of the scum and refuse of the outcasts of the lowest grade of possible being, he constructed a Beggar's Opera, in which the singers and dancers, drabs and drunkards all, belong still

to humanity; and though huddling together in the filth of the flesh, must not be classed, in their enjoyments, with the beasts that perish. In the Smiddy? Ay, you might have found him there, at times when he had no horse to be shoed, no coulter to be sharpened.

"When Vulcan gies his bellows breath,
And ploughmen gather wi' their graith,
O rare to see thee fizz and freath
I' the luggit caup!

Then Burnewin comes on like death
At every chaup.

Nae mercy, then, for airn or steel;
The brawnie, bainie, ploughman chiel',
Brings hard owrehip, wi' sturdy wheel,
The strong forehammer,

Till block and studdie ring and reel

Wi' dinsome clamour."

On frozen Muir-loch? Among the curlers "at their roaring play"-roaring is the right word—but 'tis not the bonspiel only that roars, it is the ice, and echo tells it is from her crags that submit not to the snow. There king of his rink was Rabbie Burns to be found; and at night in the Hostelry, in the reek of beef and greens and "Scotch drink," Apollo in the shape of a ploughman at the head of the fir-table that dances with all its glasses to the horny fists clenching with cordial thumpers the sallies of wit and humour volleying from his lips and eyes, unreproved by the hale old minister who is happy to meet his parishioners out of the pulpit, and by his presence keeps the poet within bounds, if not of absolute decorum, of that decency becoming men in their most jovial mirth, and not to be violated without reproach by genius in its most wanton mood dallying even with forbidden things. Or at a Rockin? An evening meeting as you know, "one of the objects of which," so says the glossary, "is spinning with the rock or distaff;" but which has many other objects, as the dullest may conjecture, when lads and lasses have come flocking from "behind the hills where Stinchar flows, 'mang muirs and mosses mony o'," to one solitary homestead made roomy enough for them all; and if now and then felt to be too close and crowded for the elderly people and the old, not

unprovided with secret spots near at hand in the broom and the brackens, where the sleeping lintwhites sit undisturbed by lovers' whispers, and lovers may look, if they choose it, unashamed to the stars.

And what was he going to do with all this poetry-poetry accumulating fast as his hand, released at night from other implements, could put it on paper in bold round upright characters, that tell of fingers more familiar with the plough than the pen? He himself sometimes must have wondered to find every receptacle in the spence crammed with manuscripts, to say nothing of the many others floating about all over the country, and setting the smiddies in a roar, and not a few, of which nothing was said, folded in the breast-kerchiefs of maidens, put therein by his own hand on the lea-rig, beneath the milk-white thorn. What brought him out into the face of day as a Poet?

Of all the women Burns ever loved, Mary Campbell not excepted, the dearest to him by far, from first to last, was Jean Armour. During composition her image rises up from his heart before his eyes the instant he touches on any thought or feeling with which she could be in any way connected; and sometimes his allusions to her might even seem out of place, did they not please us, by letting us know that he could not altogether forget her, whatever the subject his muse had chosen. Others may have inspired more poetical strains, but there is an earnestness in his fervours, at her name, that brings her breathing in warm flesh and blood to his breast. Highland Mary he would have made his wife, and perhaps broken her heart. He loved her living, as a creature in a dream, dead as a spirit in heaven. But Jean Armour possessed his heart in the stormiest season of his passions, and she possessed it in the lull that preceded their dissolution. She was well worthy of his affection, on account of her excellent qualities; and though never beautiful, had many personal attractions. But Burns felt himself bound to her by that inscrutable mystery in the soul of every man, by which one other being, and one only, is believed, and truly, to be essential to his happiness here,-without whom, life is not life. Her strict and stern father, enraged out of all religion both natural and revealed, with his daughter for having sinned with a man of sin, tore from her hands her

marriage lines as she besought forgiveness on her knees, and, without pity for the life stirring within her, terrified her into the surrender and renunciation of the title of wife, branding her thereby with an abhorred name. A father's power is sometimes very terrible, and it was so here; for she submitted, with less outward show of agony than can be well understood, and Burns almost became a madman. His worldly circumstances were wholly desperate, for bad seasons had stricken dead the cold soil of Mossgiel; but he was willing to work for his wife in ditches, or to support her for a while at home, by his wages as a negro-driver in the West Indies.

A more unintelligible passage than this never occurred in the life of any other man, certainly never a more trying one; and Burns must at this time have been tormented by as many violent passions, in instant succession or altogether, as the human heart could hold. In verse he had for years given vent to all his moods; and his brother tells us that the LAMENT was composed "after the first distraction of his feelings had a little subsided." Had he lost her by death he would have been dumb, but his grief was not mortal, and it grew eloquent, when relieved and sustained from prostration by other passions that lift up the head, if it be only to let it sink down again, rage, pride, indignation, jealousy, and scorn. "Never man loved, or rather adored woman, more than I did her; and to confess a truth between you and me, I do still love her to distraction after all. My poor dear unfortunate Jean! It is not the losing her that makes me so unhappy; but for her sake I feel most severely; I grieve she is in the road to, I fear, eternal ruin. May Almighty God forgive her ingratitude and perjury to me, as I from my very soul forgive her; and may his grace be with her, and bless her in all her future life! I can have no nearer idea of the place of eternal punishment than what I have felt in my own breast on her account. I have tried often to forget her; I have run into all kinds of dissipation and riot, mason-meetings, drinking matches, and other mischiefs, to drive her out of my head, but all in vain. And now for the grand cure; the ship is on her way home that is to take me out to Jamaica; and then farewell, dear old Scotland and farewell, dear ungrateful Jean! for never, never will I see you more." In the LAMENT, there are the same passions, but genius has ennobled them by the tenderness and