lects his spades, his mattocks, and his hoes:" many of us, who have work to do and do it not, may envy his contentment, and the religion that gladdens his release-" hoping the MORN in ease and rest to spend," only to such as he, in truth, a Sabbath. "Remember that thou keep holy the Sabbath day. Six days shalt thou labor and do all that thou hast to do. But the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God. In it thou shalt do no manner of work!" O! that man should ever find it in his heart to see in that law a stern obligation-not a merciful boon and a blessed privilege!

In those times family worship in such dwellings, all over Scotland, was not confined to one week-day. It is to be believed that William Burnes might have been heard by his son Robert duly every night saying, "Let us worship God." "There was something peculiarly venerable in the phrase" every time he heard it; but on "Saturday night" family worship was surrounded, in its solemnity, with a gathering of whatever is most cheerful and unalloyed in the lot of labor; and the poet's genius in a happy hour hearing those words in his heart, collected many nights into one, and made the whole observance, as it were, a religious establishment, it is to be hoped, for ever.

"The fifth and sixth stanzas, and the eighteenth," says Gilbert, "thrilled with peculiar ecstasy through my soul;" and well they might; for, in homeliest words, they tell at once of home's familiar doings and of the highest thoughts that can ascend in supplication to the throne of God. What is the eighteenth stanza, and why did it too "thrill with peculiar ecstasy my soul?" You may be sure that whatever thrilled Gilbert's soul will thrill yours if it be in holy keeping; for he was a good man, and walked all his days fearing God.

"Then homeward all take off their sev'ral way;

The youngling cottagers retire to rest;

The parent-pair their secret homage pay,
And proffer up to Heaven the warm request
That He who stills the raven's clam'rous nest,
And decks the lily fair in flow'ry pride,
Would, in the way his wisdom sees the best,
For them and for their little ones provide :

But chiefly, in their hearts with grace divine preside."

Think again of the first stanza of all—for you have forgotten it -of the toil-worn Cottar collecting his spades, his mattocks, and his hoes, and weary o'er the moor bending his course homewards. In spite of his hope of the morn, you could hardly help looking on him then as if he were disconsolate-now you are prepared to believe, with the poet, that such brethren are among the best of their country's sons, that

"From scenes like these old Scotia's grandeur springs,
That makes her lov'd at home, rever'd abroad;"

and you desire to join in the Invocation that bursts from his pious and patriotic heart:

"O Scotia! my dear, my native soil!

For whom my warmest wish to Heaven is sent!

Long may thy hardy sons of rustic toil,

Be bless'd with health, and peace, and sweet content!
And O! may Heaven their simple lives prevent

From luxury's contagion, weak and vile!
Then, howe'er crowns and coronets be rent,

A virtuous populace may rise the while,

And stand a wall of fire around their much lov'd Isle.

"O Thou! who pour'd the patriotic tide

That stream'd through Wallace's undaunted heart;
Who dared to nobly stem tyrannic pride,
Or nobly die, the second glorious part,
(The patriot's God, peculiarly thou art,

His friend, inspirer, guardian, and reward!)

O never, never, Scotia's realm desert:

But still the patriot, and the patriot bard,
In bright succession raise, her ornament and guard !"

The expression

We said there are few more perfect poems. is hardly a correct one; but in two of the stanzas there are lines which we never read without wishing them away, and there is one stanza we could sometimes almost wish away altogether; the sentiment, though beautifully worded, being somewhat harsh, and such as must be felt to be unjust by many devout and pious people:

"They chant their artless notes in simple guise;
They tune their hearts, by far the noblest aim:
Perhaps Dundee's wild warbling measures rise,
Or plaintive Martyrs, worthy of the name;
Or noble Elgin beats the heaven-ward flame,
The sweetest far of Scotia's holy lays:
Compared with these Italian trills are tame;
The tickl'd ears no heart-felt raptures raise;
Noe unison hae they with our Creator's praise."

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 truth be said of the hymns of that most musical of all people, and superstitious 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 colors and most portentous forms.

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

"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, incens'd, 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."

"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 incens'd, 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 Mayday 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,
An' ploughmen gather wi' their graith,
O rare! to see thee fizz an' freath

I' th' luggit caup!

Then Burnewin comes on like death

At every chaup.

"Nae mercy, then, for airn or steel;
The brawnie, bainie, ploughman cheel,
Brings hand owrehip, wi' sturdy wheel,
The strong forehammer,
Till block an' studdie ring an' reel
Wi' dinsome clamor."

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