Meg's ale or porter, and eats her bread and cheese without incurring much blame from his biographer; but his companion prevails on him to taste "the widow's gill "-a thing this bold peasant seems never before to have heard of-and infatuated with the novel potion, Willie Garlace, after a few feeble struggles, in which he derives no support from his previous life of happiness, industry, sobriety, virtue, and religion, staggers to destruction. Jeanie, in despair, takes to drinking too; they are "rouped out;" she becomes a beggar, and he "a sodger." The verses run smoothly and rapidly, and there is both skill and power of narration, nor are touches of nature wanting, strokes of pathos that have drawn tears. But by what insidious witchcraft this frightful and fatal transformation was brought about, the uninspired story-teller gives no intimation-a few vulgar common-places constitute the whole of his philosophy-and he no more thinks of tracing the effects of whisky on the moral being the heart-of poor Willie Garlace, than he would have. thought of giving an account of the coats of his stomach, had he been poisoned to death by arsenic. "His hero" is not gradually changed into a beast, like the victims of Circe's enchantments; but rather resembles the Cyclops all at once maddened in his cave by the craft of Ulysses. This is an outrage against nature; not thus is the sting to be taken out of "Scotland's Scaith"-and a nation of drunkards to be changed into a nation of gentlemen. If no man be for a moment safe who "prees the widow's gill" the case is hopeless, and despair admits the inutility of Excise. In the "Waes o' War"-the Sequel of the story-Willie returns to Scotland with a pension and a wooden leg, and finds Jeanie with the children in a cottage given her by "the good Buccleugh." Both have become as sober as church-mice. The loss of a limb, and eight pounds a year for life, had effectually reformed the husband, a cottage and one pound a quarter the wife; and this was good Hector Macneil's idea of a Moral Poem! A poem that was not absolutely to stay the plague, but to fortify the constitution against it; "and if we may be allowed to draw favorable inferences from the sale of ten thousand copies in the short space of five months, why should we despair of success?"

It is not from such poetry that any healthful influence can be exhaled over the vitiated habits of a people;

"With other ministrations, thou, O Nature!

Healest thy wandering and distempered child;"

had Burns written a Tale to exemplify a Curse, Nature would have told him of them all; nor would he have been in aught unfitted by the experiences that prompted many a genial and festive strain, but, on the contrary, the better qualified to give in thoughts that breathe and words that burn," some solution of that appalling mystery, in which the souls of good men are often seen hurrying and hurried along paths they had long abhorred, and still abhor, as may be seen from their eyes, even when they are rejecting all offered means of salvation, human and divine, and have sold their bibles to buy death. Nor would Burns have adopted the vulgar libel on the British army, that it was a receptacle for drunken husbands who had deserted their wives and children. There have been many such recruits; but his martial, loyal, and patriotic spirit would ill have brooked the thought of such a disgrace to the service, in an ideal picture, which his genius was at liberty to color at its own will, and could have colored brightly according to truth. "One fine summer evening he was at the Inn at Brownhill with a couple of friends, when a poor way-worn soldier passed the window: of a sudden, it struck the poet to call him in, and get the story of his adven tures; after listening to which, he all at once fell into one of those fits of abstraction, not unusual with him," and perhaps, with the air of "The mill, mill O" in his heart, he composed "The Soldier's Return." It, too, speaks of the "waes of war; and that poor way-worn soldier, we can well believe, had given no very flattering account of himself or his life, either before or after he had mounted the cockade. Why had he left Scotland and Mill-mannoch on the sweet banks of the Coyle near Coylton Kirk? Burns cared not why; he loved his kind, and above all, his own people; and his imagination immediately pictured a blissful meeting of long-parted lovers.

"I left the lines and tented field,

Where lang I'd been a lodger,

My humble knapsack a' my wealth,
A poor but honest sodger.

"A right leal heart was in my breast,
A hand unstained wi' plunder,
And for fair Scotia hame again,

I cheery on did wander.

I thought upon the banks o' Coil,
I thought upon my Nancy,

I thought upon the witching smile,
That caught my youthful fancy.

"At length I reached the bonnie glen,
Where early life I sported;

I passed the mill, and trysting thorn,
Where Nancy oft I courted:

Wha spied I but my ain dear maid,
Down by my mother's dwelling!
And turned me round to hide the tear
That in my breast was swelling."

وو

The ballad is a very beautiful one, and throughout how true to nature! It is alive all over Scotland; that other is dead, or with suspended animation; not because "The Soldier's Return" is a happy, and "Will and Jean a miserable story; for the people's heart is prone to pity, though their eyes are not much given to tears. But the people were told that "Will and Jean" had been written for their sakes, by a wise man made melancholy by the sight of their condition. The upper ranks were sorrowful exceedingly for the lower-all weeping over their wine for them over their whisky, and would not be comforted! For Hector Macneil informs them that

"Maggie's club, wha could get nae light

On some things that should be clear,
Fand ere long the fau't, and ae night
Clubb'd and gat the Gazetteer."

The lower ranks read the Lamentation, for ever so many thousands were thrust into their hands; but though not insensible of their own infirmities, and willing to confess them, they rose up in indignation against a charge that swept their firesides of all that was most sacredly cherished there, asked who wrote

"The Cottar's Saturday Night?" and declared with one voice, and a loud one, that if they were to be bettered by poems, it should be by the poems of their own Robert Burns.

And here we are brought to speak of those Satirical compositions which made Burns famous within the bounds of more than one Presbytery, before the world had heard his name. In boyhood and early youth he showed no symptoms of humor—he was no droll--dull even-from constitutional headaches, and heartquakes, and mysteries not to be understood-no laughing face had he―the lovers of mirth saw none of its sparkles in his dark, melancholy looking eyes. In his autobiographical sketch he tells us of no funny or facetious "chap-books;" his earliest reading was of the "tender and the true," the serious or the sublime. But from the first he had been just as susceptible and as observant of the comic as of the tragic-nature had given him a genius as powerful over smiles as tears-but as the sacred source lies deepest, its first inspirations were drawn thence in abstraction and silence, and not till it felt some assurance of its diviner strength did it delight to disport itself among the ludicrous images that, in innumerable varieties of form and color-all representative of realities-may be seen, when we choose to look at them, mingling with the most solemn or pathetic shows that pass along in our dream of life. You remember his words, "Thus with me began Love and Poetry." True; they grew together; but for a long time they were almost silent-seldom broke out into song. His earliest love verses but poorly express his love-nature was then too strong within him for art which then was weak and young passion, then pure but all-engrossing, was filling his whole soul with poetry that ere long was to find a tongue that would charm the world.

It was in the Humorous, the Comic, the Satirical, that he first tried and proved his strength. Exulting to find that a rush of words was ready at his will-that no sooner flashed his fancies than on the instant they were embodied, he wanton'd and revelled among the subjects that had always seemed to him the most risible, whatever might be the kind of laughter, simple or compound-pure mirth, or a mixture of mirth and contempt, even of indignation and scorn-mirth still being the chief ingredient that

qualified the whole-and these, as you know, were all included within the "Sanctimonious," from which Burns believed the Sacred to be excluded; but there lay the danger, and there the blame if he transgressed the holy bounds.

His satires were unsparingly directed against certain ministers of the gospel, whose Calvinism he thought was not Christianity; whose characters were to him odious, their persons ridiculous, their manners in the pulpit irreverent, and out of it absurd; and having frequent opportunities of seeing and hearing them in all their glory, he made studies of them con amore on the spot, and at home from abundant materials with a master's hand elaborated finished pictures-for some of them are no less-which, when hung out for public inspection in market-places, brought the originals before crowds of gazers transported into applause. Was this wicked? Wicked we think too strong a word; but we cannot say that it was not reprehensible, for to all sweeping satire there must be some exception-and exaggeration cannot be truth. Burns by his irregularities had incurred ecclesiastical censure, and it has not unfairly been said that personal spite barbed the sting of his satire. Yet we fear such censure had been but too lightly regarded by him; and we are disposed to think that his ridicule, however blameable on other grounds, was free from malignity, and that his genius for the comic rioted in the pleasure of sympathy and the pride of power. To those who regard the persons he thus satirized as truly belonging to the old Covenanters, and Saints of a more ancient time, such satires must seem shameful and sinful; to us who regard "Rumble John" and his brethren in no such light, they appear venial offences, and not so horrible as Hudibrastic. A good many years after Burns's death, in our boyhood we sometimes saw and heard more than one of those worthies, and cannot think his descriptions greatly overcharged. We remember walking one dayunknown to us as a fast day—in the neighborhood of an ancient fortress, and hearing a noise to be likened to nothing imaginable on this earth but the bellowing of a buffalo fallen into a trap upon a tiger, which as we came within half a mile of the castle we discerned to be the voice of a pastor engaged in public prayer. His physiognomy was little less alarming than his voice, and his