The honest man, though very poor You see a fellow called a Lord, A prince can make a belted knight, But an honest man is above his might, For all that and all that, Their dignities and all that. The pith of sense and pride of worth Are higher ranks than all that! Then let us pray that come it may, That sense and worth o'er all the earth May bear the palm and all that, For all that and all that; It's coming yet for all that, That man to man the world o'er Shall brothers be for all that! CLOSING AND CRUEL YEARS. POETRY. Fate and necessity pushed Burns into the humiliating business of a whiskey inspector and gauger, hunting up distilleries and ale houses, for fifty miles through and around Dumfries. It was the worst business that a poet could be engaged in, for temptation to drink beset him in every mountain path, road, street and tavern; and he had not the strength of character to abstain from the allurements of the wine-cup:— His soul was clean, but his body bent To the tempter's siren song, And ever and ever was too weak There was a constant war between the spiritual and physical characteristics of Burns, which made him one of the most inconsistent men, leaving even his dearest friend in a vale of uncertainty. His independent and generous nature led him into all kinds of human society, and while he thought himself cunning and wise, he was easily fooled and bamboozled by sharpers. Several months before the death of Burns, when badly afflicted with rheumatism, remorse and poverty, the poor fellow uttered to a fine lady this last apology for his drunken conduct at her social board: "I dare say this is the first epistle you ever received from this nether world! I write you from the regions of Hell, amid the horrors of the damned. The time and manner of my leaving your earth, I do not exactly know, as I took my departure in the heat of a fever of intoxication, contracted at your hospitable mansion, but on my arrival here, I was fairly tried and sentenced to endure the purgatorial tortures of this infernal confine for the space of ninety-nine years, eleven months and twentynine days, all on account of the impropriety of my conduct yester night under your roof! Here I am, laid on a bed of pitiless furze, with my aching head reclined on a pillow of ever-piercing thorn, while an infernal tormenter, wrinkled and old and cruel; his name, I think, is Recollection, with a whip of scorpions, forbids me peace, or rest to approach me, and keeps anguish eternally awake! Still, madam, if I could in any measure be reinstated in the good opinion of the fair circle, whom my conduct last night so much injured, I think it would be an alleviation to my torments. For this reason, I trouble you with this letter. To the men of the company I make no apology. Your husband, who insisted on my drinking more than I chose, has no right to blame me, and the other gentlemen were partakers of my guilt. But to you, madam, I have much to apologize. Your good opinion I valued as one of the greatest acquisitions I had made on earth, and I was truly a beast to forfeit it. To all the ladies present, my humble contrition for my conduct and my petition for their gracious pardon. O, all ye powers of decency and decorum, whisper to them, that my errors, though great, were involuntary-that an intoxicated man is the vilest of beasts! Regret! Remorse! Shame! ye three hell hounds that ever dog my steps and bay at my heels, spare me, spare me! And yet, with all this repentance, this rural, wandering adopted child of the Muses, never had the will power to fling away the intoxicating bowl of Bacchus, and trample on the social vipers that stung his beautiful and lofty nature into the perdition of intemperance!" The patriotism of Burns was the most prominent point in his impulsive character, and no Scotchman ever lived who did so much for the glory of his native land as the ploughman bard. The last ten years of his life, when not pushed on his farm by poverty, or forced to work as a gauger, for a dollar a day, was spent in collecting, composing, amending or extracting folk-lore, songs of Caledonia, to be published in the Musical Museum of James Johnson, or the Scotch Melodies of George Thompson. He took this searching and patriotic work on himself as a labor of love; and when Thompson sent him some money for some of his best songs, he spurned the pay, and threatened to quit the work if the compiler of the Scotch Melodies should ever again dare to offer him any recompense for his labor! And at this very time he had a wife and three children, puttering along in partial poverty. Such consistency and inconsistency, in thought, word and deed, has seldom been found in other poets, although the whole tribe are erratic, ecstatic, lunatic and impracticable! The light from the fires of the French Revolution in 1792 and 1793 flashed across the British Channel and illumed not only the liberty-loving people of London, but enthrilled the peasantry of Scotland and Ireland with renewed hopes that the destruction of the Bastile in Paris, and the headchopping of criminal lords, dukes and monarchs, would extirpate from the records of the world these bloody leeches and tigers of ancestral tyranny! In thinking of this and the loss of the liberty of Scotland, in a stormy highland ramble, Burns impulsively composed this great war song, or the imagined address of Robert Bruce to his troops at the battle of — BANNOCKBURN. Scots, who have with Wallace bled, Or to glorious victory! Now is the day and now is the hour; See approach proud Edward's power- Who will be a traitor knave? Who so base as be a slave? Traitor! coward! turn and flee! Who for Scotland's king and law By oppressions, woes and pains! But they shall be-shall be free! Lay the proud usurper low! Forward! let us do or die! The Marseilles Hymn and Star Spangled Banner have no loftier lines or appeal to patriotism more than the whirlwind glory of that Scotch War Song! In the poetry and prose letters of Burns a vein of personal biography may be traced by the keen reader, and while his mind held the aspiring hope of the optimist, his physical and financial fear put him in the ranks of the pessimist. He seemed to cherish a soul grievance against puritanical religion and wealthy aristocracy that ground the rustic poor under the heel of oppression. Had Burns endeavored to court the rich and powerful, by incidental flattery, when he was first entertained in Edinburgh, after the Kilmarnock edition of his poems, he might |