more consequence in life. His love, therefore, rarely settled on persons of this description. When he selected any one out of the sovereignty of his good pleasure to whom he should pay his particular attention, she was instantly invested with a sufficient stock of charms, out of the plentiful stores of his own imagination; and there was often a great dissimilitude between his fair captivator, as she appeared to others, and as she seemed when invested with the attributes he gave her. One generally reigned paramount in his affections; but as Yorick's affections flowed out toward Madame de L at the remise door, while the eternal vows of Eliza were upon him, so Robert was frequently encountering other attractions, which formed so many under-plots in the drama of his love."

Thus occupied with labour, love, and dancing, the youth "without an aim" found leisure occasionally to clothe the sufficiently various moods of his mind in rhymes. It was as early as seventeen, (he tells us),* that he wrote some stanzas which begin beautifully :

"I dream'd I lay where flowers were springing
Gaily in the sunny beam;
Listening to the wild birds singing,

By a fallen crystal stream.

Straight the sky grew black and daring,

Thro' the woods the whirlwinds rave,

Trees with aged arms were warring,
O'er the swelling drumlie wave.

Such was life's deceitful morning," &c.

On comparing these verses with those on "Handsome Nell," the advance achieved by the young bard in the course of two short years, must be regarded with admiration; nor should a minor circumstance be entirely overlooked, that in the piece which we have just been quoting, there occurs but one Scotch word. It was about this time, also, that he wrote a ballad of much less ambitious vein, which, years after, he says, he used to con over with delight, because of the faithfulness with which it recalled to him the circumstances and feelings of his opening manhood.

"My father was a farmer upon the Carrick Border,
And carefully he brought me up in decency and order.
And bade me act a manly part, tho' I had ne'er a farthing;

For without an honest manly heart, no man was worth regarding.

Then out into the world my course I did determine

Tho' to be rich was not my wish, yet to be great was charming ;
My talents they were not the worst, nor yet my education;
Resolved was I at least to try to mend my situation.

No help, nor hope, nor view had I, nor person to befriend me;
So I must toil, and sweat, and broil, and labour to sustain me.
To plough and sow, to reap and mow, my father bred me early;
For one, he said, to labour bred, was a match for fortune fairly.

Thus all obscure, unknown and poor, thro' life I'm doomed to wander ;
Till down my weary bones 1 lay, in everlasting slumber.

No view, nor care, but shun whate'er might breed me pain or sorrow;
I live to-day, as well's I may, regardless of to-morrow," &c.

These are the only two of his very early productions in which we have nothing expressly about love. The rest were composed to celebrate the charms of those rural beauties who followed each other in the dominion of

• Reliques, p. 242.

his fancy-or shared the capricious throne between them; and we may easily believe, that one who possessed, with his other qualifications, such powers of flattering, feared competitors as little in the diversions of his evenings as in the toils of his day.

The rural lover, in those districts, pursues his tender vocation in a style, the especial fascination of which town-bred swains may find it somewhat difficult to comprehend. After the labours of the day are over, nay, very often after he is supposed by the inmates of his own fireside to be in his bed, the happy youth thinks little of walking many long Scotch miles to the residence of his mistress, who, upon the signal of a tap at her window, comes forth to spend a soft hour or two beneath the harvest moon, or, if the weather be severe, (a circumstance which never prevents the journey from being accomplished), amidst the sheaves of her father's barn. This " chappin' out," as they call it, is a custom of which parents commonly wink at, if they do not openly approve, the observance; and the consequences are far, very far, more frequently quite harmless, than persons not familiar with the peculiar manners and feelings of our peasantry may find it easy to believe. Excursions of this class form the theme of almost all the songs which Burns is known to have produced about this period, and such of these juvenile performances as have been preserved, are, without exception, beautiful. They show how powerfully his boyish fancy had been affected by the old rural minstrelsy of his own country, and how easily his native taste caught the secret of its charm. The truth and simplicity of nature breathe in every line--the images are always just, often originally happy-and the growing refinement of his ear and judgment, may be traced in the terser language and more mellow flow of each successive ballad.

The best of the songs written at this time is that beginning,

"It was upon a Lammas night,

When corn rigs are bonnie,

Beneath the moon's unclouded light,

I held awa to Annie.

The time flew by wi' tentless heed,
Till, 'tween the late and early,
Wi' sma' persuasion she agreed
To see me thro' the barley."

"A circumstance," says

We may let the poet carry on his own story. he," which made some alteration on my mind and manners, was, that I spent my nineteenth summer on a smuggling coast, a good distance from home, at a noted school (Kirkoswald's) to learn mensuration, surveying, dialling, &c., in which I made a good progress. But I made a greater progress in the knowledge of mankind. The contraband trade was at that time very successful, 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, though 1 learnt to fill my glass, and to mix without fear in a drunken squabble, yet I went on with a high hand with my geometry, till the sun entered Virgo, a month which is always a carnival in my bosom, when a charming filette, who lived next door to the school, overset my trigonometry, and set me off at a tangent from the sphere of my studies. I, however, struggled on with my sines and co-sines for a few days more; but stepping into the gar den one charming noon to take the sun's altitude, there I met my angel, love: ·

"Proserpine, gathering flowers, Herself a fairer flower."

"It was in vain to think of doing any more good at school. The remain ing week I staid, I did nothing but craze the faculties of my soul about her, or steal out to meet her; and the two last nights of my stay in the country, had sleep been a mortal sin, the image of this modest and innocent girl had kept me guiltless. I returned home very considerably improved. My reading was enlarged with the very important addition of Thomson's and Shenstone's Works; I had seen human nature in a new phasis; and I engaged several of my school-fellows to keep up a literary correspondence with me. This improved me in composition. I had met with a collection of letters by the wits of Queen Anne's reign, and I pored over them most devoutly; I kept copies of any of my own letters that pleased me; and a comparison between them and the composition of most of my correspondents flattered my vanity. I carried this whim so far, that though I had not three farthings worth of business in the world, yet almost every post brought me as many letters as if I had been a broad plodding son of daybook and ledger. My life flowed on much in the same course till my twenty-third year. Vive l'amour, et vive la bagatelle, were my sole principles of action. The addition of two more authors to my library gave me great pleasure; Sterne and Mackenzie-Tristram Shandy and The Man of Feeling-were my bosom favourites. Poesy was still a darling walk for my mind; but it was only indulged in according to the humour of the hour. I had usually half a dozen or more pieces on hand; I took up one or other, as it suited the momentary tone of the mind, and dismissed the work as it bordered on fatigue. My passions, once lighted up, raged like so many devils, till they found vent in rhyme; and then the conning over my verses, like a spell, soothed all into quiet."

Of the rhymes of those days, few, when he wrote his letter to Moore, had appeared in print. Winter, a dirge, an admirably versified piece, is of their number; The Death of Poor Mailie, Mailie's Elegy, and John Barleycorn ; and one charming song, inspired by the Nymph of Kirkoswald's, whose attractions put an end to his trigonometry.

John Barleycorn is a clever old ballad, very cleverly new-modelled and extended; but the Death and Elegy of Poor Mailie deserve more attention. The expiring animal's admonitions touching the education of the "poor toop lamb, her son and heir," and the "yowie, silly thing," her daughter, are from the same peculiar vein of sly homely wit, embedded upon fancy, which he afterwards dug with a bolder hand in the Twa Dogs, and perhaps to its utmost depth, in his Death and Doctor Hornbook. It need scarcely be added, that Poor Mailie was a real personage, though she did not actually die until some time after her last words were written. She had been purchased by Burns in a frolic, and became exceedingly attached to his person

"Thro' all the town she trotted by him ;
A lang half-mile she could descry him;
Wi' kindly bleat, when she did spy him,
She ran wi' speed:

A friend mair faithfu' ne'er came nigh him,
Than Mailie dead."

These little pieces are in a much broader dialect than any of their predecessors. His merriment and satire were, from the beginning, Scotch. Notwithstanding the luxurious tone of some of Burns's pieces produced in those times, we are assured by himself (and his brother unhesitatingly confirms the statement) that no positive vice mingled in any of his loves, until after he had reached his twenty-third year. He has already told us, that his short residence " away from home" at Kirkoswald's, where he mixed in the society of seafaring men and smugglers, produced an unfavourable alteration on some of his habits; but in 1781-2 he spent six months at Irvine; and it is from this period that his brother dates a serious change. "As his numerous connexions," says Gilbert, "were governed by the strictest rules of virtue and modesty, (from which he never deviated till his twenty-third year), he became anxious to be in a situation to marry. This was not likely to be the case while he remained a farmer, as the stocking of a farm required a sum of money he saw no probability of being master of for a great while. He and I had for several years taken land of our father, for the purpose of raising flax on our own account; and in the course of selling it, Robert began to think of turning flax-dresser, both as being suitable to his grand view of settling in life, and as subservient to the flax-raising." Burns, accordingly, went to a half-brother of his mother's, by name Peacock, a flax-dresser in Irvine, with the view of learning this new trade, and for some time he applied himself diligently; but misfortune after misfortune attended him. The shop accidentally caught fire during the carousal of a new-year's-day's morning, and Robert "was left, like a true poet, not worth a sixpence."-" I was obliged," says he, "to give up this scheme; the clouds of misfortune were gathering thick round my father's head; and what was worst of all, he was visibly far gone in a consumption; and, to crown my distresses, a belle fille whom I adored, and who had pledged her soul to meet me in the field of matrimony, jilted me, with peculiar circumstances of mortification. The finishing evil that brought up the rear of this infernal file, was, my constitutional melancholy being increased to such a degree, that for three months I was in a state of mind scarcely to be envied by the hopeless wretches who have got their mittimus-Depart from me, ye cursed." The following letter, addressed by Burns to his father, three days before the unfortunate fire took place, will show abundantly that the gloom of his spirits had little need of that aggravation. When we consider by whom, to whom, and under what circumstances, it was written, the letter is every way a remarkable one :—

"HONOURED SIR,

"I HAVE purposely delayed writing, in the hope that I should have the pleasure of seeing you on New-year's day; but work comes so hard upon us, that I do not choose to be absent on that account, as well as for some other little reasons, which I shall tell you at meeting. My health is nearly the same as when you were here, only my sleep is a little sounder; and, on the whole, I am rather better than otherwise, though I mend by very slow degrees. The weakness of my nerves has so debilitated my

mind, that I dare neither review past wants, nor look forward into futurity; for the least anxiety or perturbation in my breast produces most unhappy effects on my whole frame. Sometimes, indeed, when for an hour or two my spirits are alightened, I glimmer a little into futurity; but my principal, and indeed my only pleasurable employment, is looking backwards and forwards in a moral and religious way. I am quite transported at the thought, that ere long, perhaps very soon, I shall bid an eternal adieu to all the pains and uneasiness, and disquietudes of this weary life; for I assure you I am heartily tired of it; and, if I do not very much deceive myself, I could contentedly and gladly resign it.

The soul, uneasy, and confined at home,
Rests and expatiates in a life to come.'

"It is for this reason I am more pleased with the 15th, 16th, and 17th verses of the 7th chapter of Revelations, than with any ten times as many verses in the whole Bible, and would not exchange the noble enthusiasm 1 with which they inspire me for all that this world has to offer. As for this world, I despair of ever making a figure in it. I am not formed for the bustle of the busy, nor the flutter of the gay. I shall never again be capable of entering into such scenes. Indeed, I am altogether unconcerned at the thoughts of this life. I foresee that poverty and obscurity probably await me, and I am in some measure prepared, and daily preparing, to meet them. I have but just time and paper to return you my grateful thanks fo the lessons of virtue and piety you have given me, which were too much. neglected at the time of giving them, but which I hope have been remembered ere it is yet too late. Present my dutiful respects to my mother, and my compliments to Mr. and Mrs. Muir; and, with wishing you a merry New-year's-day, I shall conclude.

"I am, honoured Sir, your dutiful son,

"ROBERT BURNS."

"P. S.-My meal is nearly out; but I am going to borrow, till I get more."

The verses of Scripture here alluded to, are as follows:

"15. Therefore are they before the throne of God, and serve him day and night in his temple; and he that sitteth on the throne shall dwell among them.

"16. They shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more; neither shall the sun light on them, nor any heat.

17. For the Lamb that is in the midst of the throne shall feed them, and shall lead them unto living fountains of waters; and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes."

"This letter," says Dr. Currie, "written several years before the publıcation of his Poems, when his name was as obscure as his condition waз humble, displays the philosophic melancholy which so generally forms the poetical temperament, and that buoyant and ambitious spirit which indicates a mind conscious of its strength. At Irvine, Burns at this time possessed a single room for his lodgings, rented, perhaps, at the rate of a shilling a-week. He passed his days in constant labour as a flax-dresser, and his food consisted chiefly of oat-meal, sent to him from his father's family. The store of this humble, though wholesome nutriment, it appears, was nearly exhausted, and he was about to borrow till he should obtain a supply. Yet even in this situation, his active imagination had formed to itself pictures of eminence and distinction. His despair of making a figure in