We have seen, that up to early manhood his life was virtuous, and therefore must have been happy-that by magnanimously enduring a hard lot, he made it veritably a light one—and that though subject "to a constitutional melancholy or hypochondriasm that made him fly to solitude," he enjoyed the society of his own humble sphere with proportionate enthusiasm, and even then derived deep delight from his genius. That genius quickly waxed strong, and very suddenly he was in full power as a poet. No sooner was passion indulged than it prevailed-and he who had so often felt during his abstinent sore-toiled youth that "a blink of rest's a sweet enjoyment," had now often to rue the self-brought trouble that banishes rest even from the bed of labor, whose sleep would otherwise be without a dream. "I have for some time been pining under secret wretchedness, from causes which you pretty well know-the pang of disappointment, the sting of pride, with some wandering stabs of remorse, which never fail to settle on my vitals like vultures, when attention is not called away by the calls of society, or the vagaries of the Muse." These agonies had a well-known particular cause, but his errors were frequent and to his own eyes flagrant—yet he was no irreligious person-and exclaimed-"Oh! thou great, unknown Power! thou Almighty God! who hast lighted up reason in my breast, and blessed me with immortality! I have frequently wandered from that order and regularity necessary for the perfection of thy works, yet thou hast never left me nor forsaken me." What signified it to him that he was then very poor ? The worst evils of poverty are moral evils, and them he then knew not; nay, in that school he was trained to many virtues, which might not have been so conspicuous even in his noble nature, but for that severest nurture. Shall we ask, what signified it to him that he was very poor to the last? Alas! it signified much; for when a poor man becomes a husband and a father, a new heart is created within him, and he often finds himself trembling in fits of unendurable, because unavailing fears. Of such anxieties Burns suffered much; yet better men than Burns-better because sober and more religious-have suffered far more; nor in their humility and resignation did they say even unto themselves "that God had given their share."

His worst sufferings had their source in a region impenetrable to the visitations of mere worldly calamities; and might have been even more direful, had his life basked in the beams of fortune, in place of being chilled in its shade. "My mind my kingdom is "few men have had better title to make that boast than Burns; but sometimes raged there plus quam civilia bella— and on the rebellious passions, no longer subjects, at times it seemed as if he cared not to impose peace.

Why, then, such clamor about his condition-such outcry about his circumstances-such horror of his Excisemanship? Why should Scotland, on whose "brow shame is ashamed to sit," hang down her head when bethinking her of how she treated him? Hers the glory of having produced him; where lies the blame of his penury, his soul's trouble, his living body's emaciation, its untimely death?

" and

His country cried, "All hail, mine own inspired Bard! his heart was in heaven. But heaven on earth is a mid-region not unvisited by storms. Divine indeed must be the descending light, but the ascending gloom may be dismal; in imagination's airy realms the Poet cannot forget he is a Man-his passions pursue him thither—and "that mystical roof fretted with golden fire, why it appears no other thing to them than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors." The primeval curse is felt through all the regions of being; and he who in the desire of fame having merged all other desires, finds himself on a sudden in its blaze, is disappointed of his spirit's corresponding transport, without which it is but a glare; and remembering the sweet calm of his obscurity, when it was enlivened not disturbed by soaring aspirations, would fain fly back to its secluded shades and be again his own lowly natural self in the privacy of his own humble birth-place. Something of this kind happened to Burns. He was soon sick of the dust and din that attended him on his illumined path; and felt that he had been happier at Mossgiel than he ever was in the Metropolis-when but to relieve his heart of its pathos, he sung in the solitary field to the mountain daisy, than when to win applause, on the crowded street he chanted in ambitious strains

"Edina! Scotia's darling seat!

All hail thy palaces and towers,
Where once beneath a monarch's feet
Sat legislation's sov'reign powers!
From marking wildly-scatter'd flow'rs,
As on the banks of Ayr I stray'd,
And singing, lone, the lingering hours,

I shelter in thy honor'd shade."

He returned to his natural condition, when he settled at Ellisland. Nor can we see what some have seen, any strong desire in him after preferment to a higher sphere. Such thoughts sometimes must have entered his mind, but they found no permanent dwelling there; and he fell back, not only without pain, but with more than pleasure, on all the remembrances of his humble life. He resolved to pursue it in the same scenes, and the same occupations, and to continue to be what he had always been a Farmer.

And why should the Caledonian Hunt have wished to divert or prevent him? Why should Scotland? What patronage, pray tell us, ought the Million and Two Thirds to have bestowed on their poet? With five hundred pounds in the pockets of his buckskin breeches, perhaps he was about as rich as yourself —and then he had a mine—which we hope you have too—in his brain. Something no doubt might have been done for him, and if you insist that something should, we are not in the humor of argumentation, and shall merely observe that the opportunities to serve him were somewhat narrowed by the want of special preparation for any profession; but supposing that nobody thought of promoting him, it was simply because everybody was thinking of getting promoted himself; and though selfishness is very odious, not more so surely in Scotsmen than in other people, except indeed that more is expected from them on account of their superior intelligence and virtue.

Burns's great calling here below was to illustrate the peasant life of Scotland. Ages may pass without another arising fit for that task; meanwhile the whole pageant of Scottish life has passed away without a record. Let him remain, therefore, in the place which best fits him for the task, though it may not be

the best for his personal comfort. If an individual can serve his country at the expense of his comfort, he must, and others should not hinder him; if self-sacrifice is required of him, they must not be blamed for permitting it. Burns followed his calling to the last, with more lets and hindrances than the friends of humanity could have wished; but with a power that might have been weakened by his removal from what he loved and gloried in-by the disruption of his heart from its habits, and the breaking up of that custom which with many men becomes second nature, but which with him was corroboration and sanctification of the first, both being but one agency-its products how beautiful! Like the flower and fruit of a tree that grows well only in its own soil, and by its own river.

But a Gauger! What do we say to that? Was it not most unworthy? We ask, unworthy what? You answer, his genius. But who expects the employments by which men live to be entirely worthy of their genius-congenial with their dispositions-suited to the structure of their souls? It sometimes happens, but far oftener not-rarely in the case of poets, and most rarely of all in the case of such a poet as Burns. It is a law of nature that the things of the world come by honest industry, and that genius is its own reward, in the pleasure of its exertions and its applause. But who made Burns a gauger? Himself. It was his own choice. "I have been feeling all the various rotations and movements within respecting the excise," he writes to Aiken soon after the Kilmarnock edition. "There are many things plead strongly against it," he adds, but these were all connected with his unfortunate private affairs; to the calling itself he had no repugnance; what he most feared was "the uncertainty of getting soon into business." To Graham of Fintry he writes, a year after the Edinburgh edition, "Ye know, I dare say, of an application I lately made to your Board to be admitted an officer of excise. I have, according to form, been examined by a supervisor, and to-day I gave in two certificates, with a request for an order for instructions. In this affair, if I succeed, I am afraid I shall but too much need a patronizing friend. Propriety of conduct as a man, and fidelity and attention as an officer, I dare engage for; but with anything

like business, except manual labor, I am totally unacquainted. ** I know, Sir, that to need your goodness is to have a claim on it; may I therefore beg your patronage to forward me in this affair, till I be appointed to a division, where, by the help of rigid economy, I will try to support that independence so dear to my soul, but which has been too often distant from my situation.' To Miss Chalmers he writes, "You will condemn me for the next step I have taken. I have entered into the excise. I have chosen this, my dear friend, after mature deliberation. The question is not at what door of fortune's palace we shall enter in, but what door does she open for us? I got this without any hanging on, or mortifying solicitation: it is immediate support, and though poor in comparison of the last eighteen months of my existence, it is plenty in comparison of all my preceding life; besides, the Commissioners are some of them my acquaintance, and all of them my firm friends." To Dr. Moore he writes, "There is still one thing would make me quite easy. I have an excise officer's commission, and I live in the midst of a country division. If I were very sanguine, I might hope that some of my great patrons might procure me a treasury warrant for supervisor, surveyor-general, &c." It is needless to multiply quotations to the same effect. Burns with his usual good sense took into account, in his own estimate of such a calling, not his genius, which had really nothing to do with it, but all his early circumstances, and his present prospects; nor does it seem at any time to have been a source of much discomfort to himself; on the contrary, he looks forward to an increase of its emoluments with hope and satisfaction. We are not now speaking of the disappointment of his hopes of rising in the profession, but of the profession itself: "A supervisor's income varies," he says, in a letter to Heron of that ilk, "from about a hundred and twenty to two hundred a year; but the business is an incessant drudgery, and would be nearly a complete bar to every species of literary pursuit. The moment I am appointed supervisor, I may be nominated on the collector's list; and this is always a business purely of political patronage. A collectorship varies much, from better than two hundred a year to near a thousand. They also come forward by precedency on the list;