rightly they must look up. Shakespeare, Spencer, and Milton, are unapproachable; but the present era is the most splendid in the history of our poetry-in England beginning with Cowper, in Scotland with Burns. Original and racy, each in his own land is yet unexcelled; immovably they both keep their places-their inheritance is sure. Changes wide and deep, for better and for worse, have been long going on in town and country. There is now among the people more education—more knowledge than at any former day. Their worldly condition is more prosperous, while there is still among them a deep religious spirit. By that spirit alone can they be secured in the good, and saved from the evil of knowledge; but the spirit of poetry is akin to that of religion, and the union of the two is in no human composition more powerful than in "the Cottar's Saturday Night." "Let who may have the making of the laws, give me the making of the ballads of a people," is a profound saying; and the truth it somewhat paradoxically expresses is in much as applicable to a cultivated and intellectual as to a rude and imaginative age. From our old traditional ballads we know what was dearest to the hearts and souls of the people. How much deeper must be the power over them of the poems and songs of such a man as Burns, of himself alone superior in genius to all those nameless minstrels, and of a nobler nature; and yet more endeared to them by pity for the sorrows that clouded the close of his life.

SPEECH AT THE BURNS FESTIVAL.

["The Burns Festival"-a meeting at which the people of Scotland of all ranks assembled in large numbers to do honour to the memory of their great national poet-was celebrated in the vicinity of Ayr on the 6th of August 1844. Not fewer than 80,000 persons were present on the occasion; and when they marched in procession with playing bands and streaming banners past the platform on which the Dii Majores of the jubilee were stationed, the spectacle was in the highest degree exhilarating. It was a demonstration worthy of the nation, and of the genius which the nation delighted to honour. In the afternoon about 2000 of the assembly dined together in an elegant pavilion extemporised for that purpose. The Earl of Eglinton was in the chair: Professor Wilson acted as croupier; and it was then that he delivered the following oration, in proposing as a toast "The Sons of Burns," who were present as guests at the entertainment.]

WERE this Festival but to commemorate the genius of Burns, and it were asked, what need now for such commemoration, since his fame is coextensive with the literature of the land, and enshrined in every household?—I might answer, that although admiration of the poet be wide as the world, yet we, his compatriots, to whom he is especially dear, rejoice to see the universal sentiment concentred in one great assemblage of his own people: that we meet in thousands and tens of thousands to honour him, who delights each single one of us at his own hearth. But this commemoration expresses, too, if not a profounder, a more tender sentiment; for it is to welcome his sons to the land he has illustrated, so that we may at once indulge our national pride in a great name, and gratify in filial hearts the most pious of affections. There was in former times a custom of crowning great poets. No such ovation honoured our bard, though he too tasted of human applause, felt its delights, and knew the trials that attend it. Which would Burns himself have preferred, a celebration like this in his lifetime, or fifty years after his death? I venture to say, he would have preferred the posthumous as the finer incense. The honour and its object are then seen in juster proportion; for death confers an elevation which the candid

soul of the poet would have considered, and such honour he would rather have reserved for his manes, than have encountered it with his living infirmities. And could he have foreseen the day, when they for whom at times he was sorely troubled, should, after many years of separation, return to the hut where himself was born, and near it, within the shadow of his monument, be welcomed for his sake by the lords and ladies of the land; and-dearer thought still to his manly breast-by the children and the children's children of people of his own degree, whose hearts he sought to thrill by his first voice of inspiration; surely had the Vision been sweeter to his soul than even that immortal one, in which the Genius of the Land bound the holly round his head, the lyric crown that it will wear for ever.

Of his three Sons sitting here, one only can remember their father's face-those large lustrous eyes of his, so full of many meanings as they darkened in thought, melted in melancholy, or kindled in mirth, but never turned on his children, or on their excellent mother, but with one of tender or intense affection. That son may even on this day have remembrance of his father's head, with its dark clusters not unmixed with grey, and those eyes closed, lying upon the bed of death. Nor, should it for a moment placidly appear, is such image unsuitable to this festival. For in bidding welcome to his sons to their father's land, I feel that, while you have conferred on me a high honour, you have likewise imposed on me a solemn duty; and, however inadequately I may discharge it, I trust that in nought shall I do any violence to the spirit either of humanity or of truth.

I shall speak reverently of Burns's character in hearing of his sons; but not even in their hearing must I forget what is due always to established judgment of the everlasting right. Like all other mortal beings, he had his faults-great even in the eyes of men-grievous in the eyes of Heaven. Never are they to be thought of without sorrow, were it but for the misery with which he himself repented them. But as there is a moral in every man's life, even in its outward condition imperfectly understood, how much more affecting when we read it in confessions wrung out by remorse from the greatly gifted, the gloriously endowed! But it is not his faults that are remembered here-assuredly not these we meet to honour.

To deny error to be error, or to extenuate its blame, that makes the outrage upon sacred truth; but to forget that it exists, or if not wholly so, to think of it along with that undercurrent of melancholy emotion at all times accompanying our meditations on the mixed characters of men-that is not only allowable, but it is ordered—it is a privilege dear to humanity --and well indeed might he tremble for himself who should in this be deaf to the voice of nature crying from the tomb.

And mark how graciously in this does time aid the inclinations of charity! Its shadows soften what they may not hide. In the distance, discordances that once jarred painfully on our ears are now undistinguishable-lost in the music sweet and solemn, that comes from afar with the sound of a great man's name. It is consolatory to see that the faults of them whom their people honour grow fainter and fainter in the national memory, while their virtues wax brighter and more bright; and if injustice have been done to them in life (and who now shall dare to deny that cruellest injustice was done to Burns?) each succeeding generation becomes more and more dutiful to the dead-desirous to repair the wrong by profounder homage. As it is by his virtues that man may best hope to live in the memory of man, is there not something unnatural, something monstrous, in seeking to eternise here below, that of which the proper doom is obscurity and oblivion? How beneficent thus becomes the power of example! The good that men do then indeed "lives after them"-all that was ethereal in their being alone survives-and thus ought our cherished memories of our best men-and Burns was among our best-to be invested with all consistent excellences; for far better may their virtues instruct us by the love which they inspire, than ever could their vices by aversion.

To dwell on the goodnesses of the great shows that we are at least lovers of virtue-that we may ourselves be aspiring to reach her serene abodes. But to dwell on their faults, and still more to ransack that we may record them, that is the low industry of envy, which, grown into a habit, becomes malice, at once hardening and embittering the heart. Such, beyond all doubt, in the case of our great poet, was the source of many "a malignant truth and lie," fondly penned, and carefully corrected for the press, by a class of calumniators that

may never be extinct; for, by very antipathy of nature, the mean hate the magnanimous, the grovelling them who soar. And thus, for many a year, we heard "souls ignoble born to be forgot" vehemently expostulating with some puny phantom of their own heated fancy, as if it were the majestic shade of Burns evoked from his Mausoleum for contumely and insult. Often, too, have we been told by persons somewhat presumptuously assuming the office of our instructors, to beware how we suffer our admiration of genius to seduce us from our reverence of virtue. Never cease to remember-has been still their cry-how far superior is moral to intellectual worth. Nay, they have told us that they are not akin in nature. But akin they are; and grief and pity 'tis that ever they should be disunited. But mark in what a hateful, because hypocritical spirit, such advices as these have not seldom been proffered, till salutary truths were perverted by misapplication into pernicious falsehoods. For these malignant counsellors sought not to elevate virtue, but to degrade genius; and never in any other instance have they stood forth more glaringly self-convicted of the most wretched ignorance of the nature both of the one and the other, than in their wilful blindness to so many of the noblest attributes of humanity in the character of Burns. Both gifts are alike from heaven, and both alike tend heavenward. Therefore we lament to see genius soiled by earthly stain; therefore we lament to see virtue, where no genius is, fall before the tempter. But we, in our own clear natural perceptions, refuse the counsels of those who with the very breath of their warning would blight the wreath bound round the heads of the Muses' sons by a people's gratitude-who, in affected zeal for religion and morality, have so deeply violated the spirit of both, by vile misrepresentations, gross exaggerations, and merciless denunciations of the frailties of our common nature in illustrious men—men who, in spite of their aberrations, more or less deplorable, from the right path, were not only in their prevailing moods devout worshippers of virtue, but in the main tenor of their lives exemplary to their brethren. And such a man was Burns. In boyhood-youth-manhood - where such peasant as he? And if in trouble and in trial, from which his country may well turn in self-reproach, he stood not always fast, yet shame and sin it were, and indelible infamy, were she