last, that on the 4th of July he was removed to a little sea-bathing hamlet on the Solway, at a distance of about ten miles from Dumfries, called Brow, in Annandale. While sojourning there, he was visited by his quondam friend, Mrs. Maria Riddel, of Woodley Park, with whom he had quarrelled, but had recently again become reconciled. Upon her first beholding him there, she saw death already stamped upon his features. His greeting to her had a profound significance as to what were his own presentiments. "Well, madam, " said he, "have you any commands for the other world?" Already laid upon the shelf and incapacitated from work, he was pursued to his seaside retreat by the cruelest solicitude. He dreaded the dwindling of his already insufficient salary. With five children clustered at home about his modest hearth, he feared that his wages as an invalided Exciseman, now shrunk to £50, would be still further reduced to a paltry stipend of £35. On the 7th of July he wrote in an agony about this to Alexander Cunningham, speaking of having been reduced to nearly the last stage through the tortures of an excruciating rheumatism. Five days later he wrote to his once considerate old friend, Mrs. Dunlop, gently reproaching her for her long silence and apparent forgetfulness. Referring to her once frequent correspondence, "With what pleasure," he exclaimed, “did I use to break the seal! The remembrance yet adds one pulse more to my poor palpitating heart." Upon the same day, the 12th of July, he penned two other letters, among the most afflicting and affecting communications he ever produced. A haberdasher of Dumfries, suing him for £10, had employed a law agent to recover from Burns the cost of his uniform as a Volunteer! Tormented with anxiety, and terror-stricken, in his morbid state of mind, lest the ruin impending over his wife and children might be perfected by his being thrown into prison, he—who had sung of "the glorious privilege of being independent "-wrote to his cousin and to the publisher of his songs in an agony, entreating them at once to send him a few pounds sterling. After recounting to the former the circumstances which had driven him to this application, he went on"Will you be so good as to accommodate me, and that by return of post, with ten pounds? Oh, James! did you know the pride of my heart, you would feel doubly for me! Alas! I am not used to beg. The worst of it is, my health was coming about finely. You know, and my physician assured me, that melancholy and low spirits are half my disease-guess, then, my horror since this business began. If I had it settled, I would be, I think, quite well, in a manner. How shall I use the language to you?—oh, do not disappoint me! but strong necessity's curst command. Forgive me for once more mentioning by return of post-save me from the horrors of a jail. I do not know what I have written. The subject is so horrible I dare not look over it again. Farewell." To George Thomson-from whom he would never receive one sixpence payment for all the treasures of song he had long been pouring lavishly into his collection, any more than he would accept anything in the way of remuneration from Johnson for the yet larger number of lyrics contributed to his Scots Musical Museum-he wrote by the same post words of almost shamefaced supplication : "After all my boasted independence, curst necessity compels me to implore you for five pounds. A cruel scoundrel 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 in 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. I do not ask all this gratuitously; for, upon returning health, I hereby promise and engage to furnish you with five pounds' worth of the neatest song-genius you have seen. I tried my hand on Rothemurchie this morning. The measure is so difficult, that it is impossible to infuse much genius into the lines; they are on the other side. Forgive, forgive me!" Both these painful letters, it is a sorry comfort to know, were answered upon the instant, each answer containing the required enclosure. On Thursday, the 14th, he wrote to his bonnie Jean, from Brow, "My dearest love, I will see you on Sunday." Returning home to Dumfries on that Sunday, the 17th, we find him writing, on its morrow, to his father-in-law, "Do, for Heaven's sake, send Mrs. Armour here immediately. My wife is hourly expecting. Good God! what a situation. I think and feel that my strength is so gone that the disorder will prove fatal to me "-as in truth it did three days afterwards. On Wednesday the 20th, in a momentary wandering of his mind, he called out his brother's name sharply, in a strong and resonant voice, "Gilbert! Gilbert!" On the day of his dissolution, Thursday, the 21st of July, Burns, having by that time become delirious, and evidently sinking, his children were hurriedly summoned around his death-bed, to obtain one last glimpse in life of their Poet-father. According to his eldest son's account, the very last utterance that started from his tongue was an exclamatory allusion to "That damned rascal, Matthew Penn !"-this being the name of the collector or legal agent who had embittered the Poet's dying moments by threatening him with incarceration. Thus with an execration upon his lips, directed against the latest embodiment of all the sordid and carking cares which had pursued his footsteps relentlessly throughout life, the most tenderly musical spirit of his generation passed away in a jangle of discord. Adapting to him, as he lay there in death, however, one of the loveliest thoughts or phrases ever articulated by the Poet-Laureate, it may be said of him quite truly, that in the very act of heaving his last sigh all his baser self slipped from him like a robe, leaving him only to the recollection of the world under his noblest aspect as a Man and as a Poet. Upon the evening of Sunday, the 24th of July, his remains were conveyed from his humble dwelling to the Town Hall of Dumfries, whence, on the following day, Monday, the 25th, they were borne in procession, with military honours, the band of the Volunteers pouring forth, with drum and bugle, the sublimely affecting strain of the “Dead March in Saul" as they advanced to St. Michael's Churchyard. There, in the north-east corner of the cemetery, they were solemnly interred, in compliance with his own proud injunction-"When I am laid in my grave I wish to be stretched at my full length, that I may occupy every inch of ground that I have a right to!" Upon the very day of his funeral a posthumous child was born to him, another son, whose infant remains, nearly three years later on, were laid beside his own, in a tomb already become illustrious. Nearly twenty years after the Poet's death the site of his grave was changed to the south-east of that same burial-ground, over it being then (in 1815) raised in his honour a noble Doric mausoleum. There, with the dust beside him of the child he had never seen, and with another son, laid to rest there, who had died in 1803, at the age of fourteen, and with their mother, his bonnie Jean, who survived him as many years as he himself had lived, being laid there also, in her green old age, in the April of 1834, Robert Burns has, for considerably more than half a century, had homage paid to his memory by thousands upon thousands, who have flocked thither from the ends of the earth in pilgrimage. "The man of independent mind,” he himself sang in perhaps his finest, certainly his most characteristic, song, "is King o' men for a' that." As Lord Lytton once said, in reference to his great contemporary, Charles Dickens (who was seated upon his right hand at the moment the words were uttered), "Happy is the man who makes clear his title-deeds to the royalty of genius while he yet lives to enjoy the gratitude and reverence of those whom he has subjected to his sway." With Burns it was otherwise. His royalty as a man of incomparable genius was only fully recognized after his departure. His tomb became his throne, and the pilgrims who have ever since been approaching it—those and his countless other readers-are his courtiers. His place as a poet, according to the dictum of Lord Byron-surely a competent witness to the truth in such a matter is in the very first rank of his art. But, as Carlyle has written of him, "It is not chiefly as a poet but as a man that he interests and affects us-tears lying in him and consuming fire, as lightning lurks in the summer cloud." "King o' men for a' that " in his own loftiest sense though he be, no man was, nevertheless, truer to his order than the great National Poet of Scotland. Hence, indeed, Professor Wilson has so exquisitely said of Burns, in his splendid tribute to his genius and character, "The poor man, as he speaks of Burns, always holds up his head, and regards you with an elated look!" Incidental flaws and stains there are, no doubt, upon some of those songs and poems of his, of which, upon the very threshold of the century (on the 6th of July, 1800), Francis Jeffrey wrote that they were, to his mind, enchantingly beautiful, and that they affected him more than any other species of poetry whatsoever. But, as the great and good Sir Walter Scott has written upon this very matter, “If, from veneration to the names of Swift and Dryden, we tolerate the grossness of the one and the indelicacy of the other, the respect due to that of Burns may surely claim indulgence for a few light touches of broad humour." These are, in effect, but the infinitesimal maculæ upon the sunlike disc of his genius. Regarding that genius in its integrity, they are practically indistinguishable, and are, in fact, only to be recognized (as the solar spots through a smoked glass), when viewed by the blinking gaze of a purblind cynicism. Burns, no doubt, had his foot, if you will, upon the dust, upon the very dung of the farmyard, but his brow was among the stars. Insomuch that, as a song-writer, he at least might have applied to himself the proud boast of Horace si me lyricis vatibus inseris, Sublimi feriam sidera vertice. [This, the earliest poem of Burns extant, was written at Mount Oliphant, in 1776, when he was seventeen. It is spoken of by himself as the earliest of his printed pieces, and, judging from an entry in his Common Place Book, was the expression of his peculiar preference for that season by which at all times, but more especially in moments of despondency, he was the most exalted and enraptured. The first line of the second stanza he borrowed from Edward Young, of the "Night Thoughts."] THE wintry west extends his blast, And hail and rain does blaw; Or, the stormy north sends driving forth The blinding sleet and snaw: While, tumbling brown, the burn comes down, And roars frae bank to brae; And bird and beast in covert rest, And pass the heartless day. "The sweeping blast, the sky o'ercast," The joyless winter day, Let others fear, to me more dear Than all the pride of May: The tempest's howl, it soothes my soul, My griefs it seems to join ; The leafless trees my fancy please, Their fate resembles mine! Thou Power Supreme, whose mighty scheme These woes of mine fulfil, Because they are Thy Will! This one request of mine!) Since to enjoy Thou dost deny, Assist me to resign! Still my heart melts at human wretched- incident is commemorative of the all but strangu ness; lation of a favourite ewe, which was only released from the tether-line, when apparently at her last And with sincere, though unavailing gasp, by her owner, whose attention had been Even you, ye helpless crew, I pity you; Ye, whom the seeming good think sin to pity; Ye poor, despised, abandoned vagabonds, Whom vice, as usual, has turned o'er to ruin. opportunely called to the accident by certain There, groaning, dying, she did lie, Wi' glowrin' een, an' lifted han's, Oh, but for kind, though ill-requited But, waes my heart! he could na mend it ! friends, I had been driven forth like you, forlorn, The most detested, worthless wretch among you! "O thou, whase lamentable face O injured God! Thy goodness has An' bear them to my master dear. endowed me With talents passing most of my com- "Tell him, if e'er again he keep peers, Which I in just proportion have abused, more. As muckle gear as buy a sheep, |