the amount was sufficient to incur punishment by imprisonment, and as prisons then were fouler and in most respects more grievous than now, Burns, in his weak state, was frightened into frenzy. It was then that he wrote the heart-rending letter to James Burness, his lawyer cousin at Montrose, asking ten pounds by return of post.

"O James, did you know the pride of my heart, you would feel doubly for me. Alas! I am not used to beg. Forgive me for once more mentioning by return of post. Save me from the horrors of a jail.”

And this to another friend :

"After all my boasted independence, curst necessity compels me to implore you for five pounds. A cruel wretch of a haberdasher, to whom I owe an account, taking it into his head that I am dying, has commenced a process, and will infallibly put me into jail. Do, for God's sake, send me that sum, and that by return of post. Forgive me this earnestness, but the horrors of a jail have made me half distracted."

Both loans duly arrived, but by that time the borrower had no need of them. Burns's last word was a delirious curse on

the offending Penn and Williamson. So said his eldest son, but his mother afterwards contradicted him. It is fair to infer that a boy of ten, with his hearing and intelligence made abnormally acute by the circumstances of the great hour, is in this matter more reliable than poor Jean, who was at the moment about to be confined, and was doubtless almost overwhelmed by her sorrows.

The final legal business was the appointment of Mrs. Burns as "executrix dative qua relict to the umquhile Robert Burns." The two remittances just referred to appeared in the inventory which Mrs. Burns made up of her husband's estate and the Commissary at Dumfries issued Confirmation to her on 6th October, 1796.

Burns held advanced views with regard to breaches of the criminal code. Some of these may be gathered from such extracts as the following:

"I'll no say, men are villains a',

The real, harden'd wicked,

Wha hae nae check but human law,

Are to a few restricted.

But-och mankind are unco weak,

An' little to be trusted:

If self the wavering balance shake,
It's rarely right adjusted."

And again :

many

"I have often observed in the course of my experience that every man, even the worst, has something good about him, though very often nothing else than a happy temperament of constitution inclining him to this or that virtue. For this reason, no man can say in what degree any other person, besides himself, can be with strict justice called wicked. Let any of the strictest character for regularity of conduct among us examine, impartially, how vices he has never been guilty of, not from any care or vigilance, but for want of opportunity, and how many of the weaknesses of mankind he has escaped, because he was out of the line of such temptation. I say, any man who can thus think will scan the failings, nay, the faults and crimes, of mankind round him with a brother's eye. I have often courted the acquaintance of that part of mankind, commonly known by the ordinary phrase of blackguards, sometimes further than was consistent with the safety of my character. Those who, by thoughtless prodigality or headstrong passions, have been driven to ruin, though disgraced by follies, I have yet found among them, in not a few instances, some of the noblest virtues, magnanimity, generosity, disinterested friendship, and even modesty."

And yet again

"The man of unfortunate disposition, and neglected education is condemned as a fool for his dissipation, despised and shunned as a needy wretch, when his follies, as usual, bring him to want; and when his unprincipled necessities drive him to dishonest practices, he is abhorred as a miscreant, and perishes by the justice of his country. But far otherwise is the lot of the man of family and fortune. His early follies and extravagance are spirit and fire, his consequent wants are the embarrassments of an honest fellow; and when, to remedy the matter, he has gained a legal commission to plunder distant provinces, or massacre peaceful nations, he returns, perhaps, laden with the spoils of rapine and murder, lives wicked and respected, and dies a scoundrel and a lord."

were severe.

Crime was as plentifnl in Burns's time as the punishments In the last years of his life, owing to the distress caused by the war, the condition of the country was specially grave. We are reminded frequently in the poems that thieves and other petty offenders were hanged, and that banishment, transportation, ducking, and public whipping were all "legal horrors."

Though it appears certain that Burns never was in prison, he was several times in danger of confinement. In early life the chances are that he joined in smuggling operations at Kirkoswald.

"The contraband trade was at that time very successful," he writes, "and it sometimes happened to me to fall in with those who carried

it on.

Scenes of swaggering riot and roaring dissipation were till this time new to me, but I was no enemy to social life. Here, I learned to fill my glass and to mix without fear in a drunken squabble."

Later, as a vigilant exciseman, Burns played a courageous part on the Solway in suppressing the followers of this once flourishing illegality. In February, 1792, he took part in the seizure of a smuggling brig and ran serious risks. The property was sold by auction, Burns buying four cannonades, which he sent to the French Convention. They were, however, detained at Dover.

Burns's relations to the law in his Excise appointment are interesting. Findlater avers that the poet performed his duties successfully, acting with leniency to poor people who were occasionally tempted to break the law. The Poet was fined at Carlisle, it is said, for allowing his horse to trespass on forbidden ground. The serious allegations made towards the close of his life of disaffection to the Government might have had more serious results than the threatened loss of his Excise appointment, had not Graham of Fintry and other influential friends intervened. Burns had undoubtedly said sharp things of people in high places and that was a dangerous thing to do long after his time. According to Lockhart, there was a "good deal of stately Toryism in Dumfries," and Burns's free utterances in jovial hours marked him out as one of the most formidable of the suspected apostles of sedition. That unlucky gift of cannonades and the writing of such lines as :

The injured Stewart line is gone,

A race outlandish fills their throne,

were not likely to improve his position among the violent partisans of the Government. Yet when Britain was threatened by a French invasion, Burns enrolled himself among the Volunteers of Dumfries, and even the extremest Tory could find little to blame in the stirring "Does haughty Gaul invasion threat?" He once came near to fighting a duel :—

“I was, I know, drunk last night, but I am sober this morning. From the expressions Capt. made use of to me, had I had nobody's welfare to care for but my own, we should certainly have come, according to the manners of the world, to the necessity of murdering one another about the business. The words were such as generally, I believe, end in a brace of pistols, but I am still pleased to think that I did not ruin the peace and welfare of a wife and family in a drunken squabble."

Of many expressions concerning the "horrors of the jail" two more may suffice :

Oh ye, who sunk on beds of down,

Feel not a want but what yourselves create,
Think, for a moment, on his wretched fate,
Whom friends and fortune quite disown;
Think on the dungeon's grim confine,
Where guilt and poor misfortune pine.

Another less decorous serio-comic poem has this:—
"From those drear solitudes and frowsy cells,
Where infamy with sad repentance dwells,
Where turnkeys make the jealous mortal fast,
And deal from iron hands the spare repast,
Where tiny thieves, not destined yet to swing,
Beat hemp for others, riper for the string;

From these dim scenes my wretched lines I date."

The foregoing is necessarily a brief résumé of what appears to really concern the matter. If it should be found interesting, the subject may be amplified on a future occasion.

J. JEFFREY HUNTER.

AUTHENTIC PORTRAIT OF JEAN ARMOUR.

WE

E are indebted to Mr. MACFADZEAN, Supervisor, Inland Revenue Office, Ayr, for this reproduction of a Portrait of "Bonnie Jean," by James Gilfillan, the artist. Early in his career (circa 1821) he was commissioned to make a copy of the Nasmyth "Burns" for the Dumfries Burns Club, and at the same time to paint from life, as a companion picture, a likeness of the Poet's widow. The Club still exhibits

the former each 25th of January, but the latter has mysteriously disappeared. The artist left Glasgow for New Zealand in 1850 and died there. He took with him a study in crayon for the above portrait of Bonnie Jean (24 in. by 18 in.), and this has recently been sent home by his daughter to her cousin, Miss Maxwell, Bankhouse, Maxwelltown, by whose permission it has been reproduced here.