ebb in Dumfries-shire, that the flower of her beaux and belles, "in successive groups, drawn together for the festivities of the night," could find eyes for a disagree able object so many yards of causeway remote ? And if Burns observed that they gave him the cold shoulder-cut him across the street-on what recondite principle of conduct did he continue to walk there, in place of stalking off with a frown to his Howf? And is it high Galloway to propose to a friend to cross the street to do the civil "to successive groups of gentlemen and ladies, not one of whom had appeared willing to recognize him?" However it was gallant under such discouragement to patronize the gauger; and we trust that the "wicked wee bowl," while it detained from, and disinclined to, did not incapacitate for the Ball. But whence all those expressions so frequent in his correspondence, and not rare in his poetry, of self-reproach and rueful remorse? From a source that lay deeper than our eyes can reach. We know his worst sins, but cannot know his sorrows. The war between the spirit and the flesh often raged in his nature-as in that of the best of beings who are made—and no Christian, without humblest self-abasement, will ever read his Confessions. "Is there a whim-inspired fool, Owre fast for thought, owre hot for rule, And owre this grassy heap sing dool, "Is there a bard of rustic song, Who, noteless, steals the crowds among, That weekly this area throng, O, pass not by ! But with a frater-feeling strong, Here, heave a sigh. "Is there a man, whose judgment clear, Can others teach the course to steer, Yet runs himself life's mad career, Wild as the wave; A Bard's Epitaph! Such his character drawn by himself in deepest despondency-in distraction-in despair calmed while he was composing it by the tranquillizing power that ever accompanies the action of genius. And shall we judge him as severely as he judged himself, and think worse of him than of common men, because he has immortalized his frailties in his contrition? The sins of common men are not remembered in their epitaphs. Silence is a privilege of the grave few seek to disturb. If there must be no eulogium, our name and age suffice for that stone-and whatever may have been thought of us, there are some to drop a tear on our "forlorn hic jacet." Burns wrote those lines in the very prime of youthful manhood. You know what produced them—his miserable attachment to her who became his wife. He was then indeed most miserableafterwards most happy; he cared not then though he should die -all his other offences rose against him in that agony; and how humbly he speaks of his high endowments, under a sense of the sins by which they had been debased! He repented, and sinned again and again; for his repentance-though sincerewas not permanent; yet who shall say that it was not accepted at last? "Owre this grassy heap sing dool, and drap a tear," is an injunction that has been obeyed by many a pitying heart. Yet a little while, and his Jean buried him in such a grave. few years more, and a mausoleum was erected by the nation for A his honored dust. Now husband and wife lie side by side"in hopes of a joyful resurrection." Burns belonged to that order of prevailing poets, with whom "all thoughts, all passions, all delights possess not that entire satisfaction nature intends, till they effuse themselves abroad, for sake of the sympathy that binds them, even in uttermost solitude, to the brotherhood of man. No secrets have they that words can reveal. They desire that the whole race shall see their very souls-shall hear the very beatings of their hearts. Thus they hope to live for ever in kindred bosoms. They feel that a greater power is given them in their miseries--for what miseries has any man ever harbored in the recesses of his spirit, that he has not shared, and will share, with "numbers without number numberless" till the Judgment Day! Who reads unmoved such sentences as these? "The fates and characters of the rhyming tribe often employ my thoughts when I am disposed to be melancholy. There is not, among all the martyrologies that ever were penned, so woeful a narrative as the lives of the Poets. In the comparative view of wretches, the question is not what they are doomed to suffer, but how they are formed to bear!" Long before the light of heaven had ever been darkened or obscured in his conscience by evil. thoughts or evil deeds, when the bold bright boy, with his thick black clustering hair ennobling his ample forehead, was slaving for his parents' sakes-Robert used often to lie by Gilbert's side all night long without ever closing an eye in sleep; for that large heart of his, that loved all his eyes looked upon of nature's works living or dead, perfect as was its mechanism for the play of all lofty passions, would get suddenly disarranged, as if approached the very hour of death. Who will say that many more years were likely to have fallen to the lot of one so framed, had he all life long drunk, as in youth, but of the well-water-" laid down with the dove, and risen with the' lark!" If excesses in which there was vice and therefore blame, did injure his health, how far more those other excesses in which there was so much virtue, and on which there should be praise for ever! Over-anxious, over-working hours beneath the mid-day sun, and sometimes to save a scanty crop beneath the midnight moon, to which he looked up without knowing it with a poet's eyes, as he kept forking the sheaves on the high laden cart that "Hesperus, who led the starry host" beheld crashing into the barn-yard among shouts of "Harvest Home." It has been thought that there are not a few prominent points of character common to Burns and Byron; and though no formal comparison between them has been drawn that we know of, nor would it be worth while attempting it, as not much would come of it, we suspect, without violent stretching and bending of materials, and that free play of fancy which makes no bones of facts, still there is this resemblance, that they both give unreserved expositions of their most secret feelings, undeterred by any fear of offending others, or of bringing censure on themselves by such revelations of the inner man. Byron as a moral being was below Burns; and there is too often much affectation and insincerity in his Confessions. "Fare thee well, and if for ever, still for ever fare thee well," is not elegiac, but satirical; a complaint in which the bitterness is not of grief, but of gall; how unlike "The Lament on the unfortunate issue of a Friend's Amour" overflowing with the expression of every passion cognate with love's despair! Do not be startled by our asking you to think for a little while of Robert Burns along with-SAMUEL JOHNSON. Listen to him, and you hear as wise and good a man as earth ever saw for ever reproaching himself with his wickedness; "from almost the earliest time he could remember he had been forming schemes for a better life." Select from his notes, prayers, and diaries, and from the authentic records of his oral discourse, all acknowledgments of his evil thoughts, practices, and habits; all charges brought against him by conscience, of sins of omission and commission; all declarations, exclamations, and interjections of agonizing remorse and gloomy despair-from them write his character in his epitaph-and look there on the Christian Sage! God forbid! that saving truths should be so changed into destroying falsehoods. Slothful, selfish, sensual, envious, uncharitable, undutiful to his parents, thoughtless of Him who died to save sinners, and living without God in the world;-That is the wretched being named Samuel Johnson-in the eyes of his idolatrous countrymen only a little lower than the angels-in his own a worm! Slothful! yet how various his knowledge! acquired by fits and snatches-book in hand, and poring as if nearly sand-blind-yet with eyes in their own range of vision, keen as the lynx's or the eagle's-on pages no better than blanks to common minds, to his hieroglyphical of wisest secrets-or in long assiduity of continuous studies, of which a month to him availed more than to you or us a year-or all we have had of life. Selfish! with obscure people, about whom nobody cared, provided for out of his slender means within doors, paupers though they thought it not, and though meanly endowed by nature as by fortune, admitted into the friendship of a Sage simple as a child-out of doors, pensioners waiting for him at the corners of streets, of whom he knew little, but that they were hungry and wanted bread, and probably had been brought by sin to sorrow. Sensual! Because his big body, getting old, "needed repairs," and because though "Rasselas Prince of Abyssinia" had been written on an empty stomach, which happened when he was comparatively young and could not help it, now that he had reached his grand climacteric, he was determined to show not to the whole world, but to large parties, that all the fat of the earth was not meant for the mouths of blockheads. Envious of David Garrick? Poh! poh! Pshaw! pshaw! Uncharitable? We have disposed of that clause of the verse in our commentary on "selfish." Undutiful to his parents! He did all man could to support his mother; and having once disobliged his father by sulkily refusing to assist at his book-stall, half a century afterwards, more or less, when at the head of English literature, and the friend of Burke and Beauclerk, he stood bareheaded for an hour in the rain on the site of said book-stall, in the market-place of Litchfield, in penance for that great sin. As to the last two charges in the indictment—if he was not a Christian, who can hope for salvation in the Cross? If his life was that of an atheist, who of woman born ever walked with God? Yet it is true he was a great sinner. "If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us; but if we confess our sins, |