accidents that have mixed with it; and yet how strange a tone do they not too frequently succeed in imparting to the worship! There was much of apology at the Burns' festival for the errors of the poet; and it said at least something for the morals of the time, whatever it might for the taste of the speakers, that such should have been the case. In a remoter and more darkened age of the world, like those ages in which hero-worship rose into religion, the errors would have been remembered, but the apology would have been wanting. Burns would have been deified into an Apollo, and his lovepassages with the nymphs Daphne, Levcothoe, and Coronis, and his drinking bouts with Admetus and Hyacinthus, would have been registered simply as incidents in his history,—incidents which in the course of time would have come to serve as precedents for his worshippers. We are afraid that, maugre regret and apology, there is too much of this as it is. His hapless errors, so fatal to himself, have been too often surveyed through the dazzling halo of his celebrity. The felt influence of his greatness has extended to his faults, as if they were part and parcel of that greatness. The atmosphere of the sun conceals the sun's spots from the unassisted eye of the observer; but the atmosphere of glory that surrounds the memory of Burns has not had a similar effect. To many at least it has the effect of making his blemishes appear less as original flaws than as a species of beauty-spots, of a fashion to be imitated. How can we marvel that the old worshippers of the offspring of Saturn or of Latona should have imitated their gods in their crimes, if in these our days of light, with the model of a perfect religion before our eyes, hero-worship should be found to exert, as of old, a demoralizing tendency! But it would not be easy to say where more emphatic or most honest warning could be found on this head than in the writings of Burns himself. We stake his own deeply-mournful prediction of the fate which he

saw awaiting him, against all ever advanced on the opposite

side:

"The poor inhabitant below

Was quick to learn, and wise to know,
And keenly felt the social glow,

And safter flame;

But thoughtless follies laid him low,

And stained his name."

Of

Despite the authority of high names, we are no admirers of hero-worship. We are not insensible to what we may term the natural claims of Burns on the admiration of his country, both as a writer and as a character of great bulk and power. It would be hypocrisy in us to say that we were. Were his writings to be annihilated to-morrow, we could restore from memory some of the best of them entire, and not a few of the more striking passages in many of the others. Nor are we unimpressed by the massiveness of his character as a man. We bear about with us an adequate idea of it, as developed. in that deeply-mournful tragedy, his life. But we would not choose to go and worship at his festival. There was a hollowness about the ceremony, independently of the falseness of the principles on which its ritual was framed. the thousands who attended, how many, does the reader think, would have sympathized, had they seen the light some fifty years earlier, with the man Robert Burns? How many of them grappled in idea at his festival with other than a mere phantom of the imagination,—a large but intangible shade, obscure and indefinable as that conjured up by the uninformed Londoner of Cromwell or of Johnson? Rather more than fifty years ago, the sinking sun shone brightly, one fine afternoon, on the stately tenements of Dumfries, and threw its slant rule of light athwart the principal street of the town. The shadows of the houses on the western side were stretched half-way across the pavement; while on the side opposite, the red beam seemed as if sleeping on jutting irregular fronts

and tall gables. There was a world of well-dressed company that evening in Dumfries; for the aristocracy of the adjacent country for twenty miles round had poured in to attend a county ball, and were fluttering in groupes along the sunny side of the street, gay as butterflies. On the other side, in the shade, a solitary individual paced slowly along the pavement. Of the hundreds who fluttered past, no one took notice of him ; no one seemed to recognise him. He was known to them all as the exciseman and poet, Robert Burns; but he had offended the stately Toryism of the district by the freedom of his political creed; and so, tainted by the plague of Liberalism, he lay under strict quarantine. He was

shunned and neglected; for it was with the man Burns that these his contemporaries had to deal. Let the reader contrast with this truly melancholy scene, the scene of his festival a fortnight since. Here are the speeches of the Earl of Eglinton and of Sir John M'Neill, and here the toast of the Lord Justice-General. Let us just imagine these gentlemen, with all their high aristocratic notions about them, carried back half a century into the past, and dropped down, on the sad evening to which we refer, in the main street of Dumfries. Which side, does the reader think, would they have chosen to walk upon? Would they have addressed the one solitary individual in the shade, or not rather joined themselves to the gay groupes in the sunshine who neglected and contemned him? They find it an easy matter to deal with the phantom idea of Burns now: how would they have dealt with the man then? How are they dealing with his poorer relatives; or how with men of kindred genius, their contemporaries? Alas! a moment's glance at such matters is sufficient to show how very unreal a thing a commemorative feast may be. Reality, even in idea, becomes a sort of Ithuriel spear to test it by. The Burns' festival was but an idle show, at which players enacted their parts.

There is another score on which we dislike hero-worship. We deem it a sad misapplication of an inherent disposition of the mind, imparted for the most solemnly important of purposes. "Man worships man," says Cowper. The tendency, either directly or in its effects, we find indicated in almost every page of the history of the species. We see it in every succeeding period, from its times of full development, when the men-gods of the Greek were worshipped by sacrifice and oblation, down to the times of the Shakspeare jubilee at Stratford on-Avon, or the times of the Burns' festival at Ayr. But the sentiment, thus active in expatiating in false direction, has a true direction in which to expatiate, and a worthy object on which to fix. As if to dash the dull and frigid dreams of the Socinian, the instinct of man-worship may find a true man worthy the adoration of all, and who reigns over the nations as their God and King. Every other species of man-worship is a robbery of Him. It is a worship that belongs of right to the man Christ Jesus alone,-the "God whose throne is for ever and ever," and whom "all the angels of God worship."-August 24, 1844.

ESSAYS, POLITICAL AND SOCIAL.

OUR WORKING CLASSES.

NEVER in the history of the world have so many efforts been made to improve the condition of the working classes as at the present time. The legislator, the philanthropist, the city missionary, the theorist, who would do his best to uproot the very foundations of our social system, and the man of practice, who would spare no exertion to ameliorate its actual condition, have been at work, each in his several direction, honestly, earnestly, and unremittingly toiling to a single purpose, the elevation of our working people. We have passed laws; we have devised model dwellings; we have sent pious men to hunt out ignorance and vice; we have schemed out theories that would mow down the institutions of ages; we have speculated in the direction of secular socialism and in the direction of Christian socialism; we have tried co-operative societies, building societies, and model lodgings; we have written, lectured, and taught; we have appointed commissions, printed acres of reports; pried into every hole and corner of society (except the convents); we have exported hundreds of thousands of what we termed, only a year or two