THOMAS HOOD.

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Rabelais, and a poet with much of the sweetness and more than the pathos of Keats; these together would make up Thomas Hood. Worn out as a magazine writer, and as he said with a pathetic pun, the eating cares of a family, with the brain-work which hard writing, which alone produces easy reading, induces, this great author died, leaving no equal, but leaving a world only then ready to know and love him. He had often pleaded the cause of the poor, and in "Punch" he made a powerful appeal in behalf of poor needle-women, called "The Song of the Shirt." Dying full of Christian faith and hope, and comforted by love and deep humility, he desired to have engraved upon his tombstone, as an epitaph, this simple memorial of the one little act that had most graced his life—“ He sang the Song of the Shirt ;" and under this memorial the man who excited so much merriment in his lifetime, and who did so much good, the fellow of infinite goodness and infinite jest, this poor Yorick of our poets, lies.

JONQUERORS," says Thomas Carlyle, "are a class of men with whom, for the most part, the world can well dispense .. but a true poet, a man in whose heart resides some of the effluence of tone of the eternal melodies,' is the most precious gift that can be bestowed upon a nation." Such a gift was bestowed when Robert Burns was born, and happily upon a people who prized the precious gift at its true value. Demoralized by the exodus of some of their bravest and their best men, rendered poorer by the union with a richer country, Scotland might have fallen into the querulous temper and the periodical poverty of Ireland; but God sent the Scots a true singer, and he aroused them to a sense of their own dignity and worth. Afterwards came another man of genius; and he, too, exalted the nation; for what prophets were unto Israel, so the true poets are to modern nations; and it is not too much to say, that more than to any politician or inventor, more than to any abstruse

ROBERT BURNS.

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thinker or clever writer, Scotland owes her position in the world of Thought to Robert Burns, the ploughman, and to Walter Scott, the attorney. No duke ever welded a nation together as these men have done; no king ever led an army to battle, shoulder to shoulder, and in serried ranks, compact and firm, so well as the sweet native music breathed from these two men; and Scotland is proud of them, and answers for her sons like a rough but fond mother. It is the "land of

Burns," and the "land of Scott." The English and American tourists pass by the homes of the great, the abbeys of the religious, and the palaces of kings, but they bow with lowly reverence as they enter the cottage birthplace of Ayrshire Rabbie, and the magnificent home, reared with so much labour, of the Wizard of the North. An English writer who loves his country may well feel sad when he contemplates the difference between the respect and veneration shown to literature by the Scotch and by the English. It seems as if the very wealth of English genius made it despised by the vulgar rich and great; and while Shakespeare waits for his monument, and many living English authors for their recognition, a noble cenotaph rises for Sir Walter Scott, and seven memorials shine beneath the cold Caledonian skies for the Ayrshire bard, whose songs echo from every street and lane, and whose poems are with his countrymen "familiar in their mouths as

household words."

The story of Robert Burns's life is a sad one, and may quickly be dismissed. Great as was his genius, warm-hearted, lovable, noble, and excellent as he was acknowledged to be in many ways, he had no abiding prudence, and too little of that manly self-re

liance which is a crown of glory to a man; for all the "cants which are canted" in a world full of shows to the false, but of realities to the true, the greatest is that which looks down upon a man of genius, because of his "position." If he is a poet, what does it matter whether he is a wool-comber like Shakespeare, or a ploughman like Burns? Is the Koh-i-noor, that big piece of glittering carbon, less a diamond because it was set in black wax to show it off before it was placed in the Queen's crown? "Lowliness," says the manly Shakespeare, "is young Ambition's ladder." What we want to know of a genius is, not where he is, but what he is. Clothe the Apollo Belvidere in ragged fustian, it is still the Apollo. "The cottage hath a thatched roof; within the house is Jove." Here is a great, a consummate genius, born of a poor yeoman, imperfectly educated, but soon recognized, so early as in his twenty-third year; invited by the bucks and lords of Edinburgh to dine with them, and, as such people do invite men of genius, to amuse them; then receiving a small office, being made an exciseman, in fact, and doing his work fairly; and yet even so strong a man as Carlyle, with a host of smaller writers, pities him and weeps over him. "Tears lie in him, and consuming fire, as lightning lurks in the drops of the summer cloud," says Carlyle; but he adds, with " a soul like an Æolian harp, in whose strings the vulgar wind, as it passed through them, changed itself into 'articulate melody.' And this was he for whom the world found no fitter business than quarrelling with smugglers and vintners, computing excise dues upon tallow, and gauging ale-barrels. In such toils was that mighty spirit sorrowfully wasted; and a hundred

years may pass on before another such is given us to waste."

A hundred ay, five hundred. But why could not Burns, with that Heaven-gifted genius of his, write as well as a gauger or a ploughman, as if among the respectables, and covered with "braid claith ?" The truth is, this constant straining after position spoils a thousand poets, as Balaam's striving after money spoilt his prophesying. The poet dignifies the world: the world never did, never can, and never will dignify the poet.

A man's best things are nearest him,

Lie close about his feet;

It is the distant and the dim

That we are sick to meet.

So wrote a poet, infinitely smaller,-R. M. Milnes, now Lord Houghton; but if Burns had kept such a sentiment in heart, we should not have heard so much of the cowardly whining of biographers, that God Almighty, who gave him his imperial genius, did not also give him a coach and six, hosts of servants, troops of friends, and the frivolities of fashion, which would have rendered that genius nugatory. Clear and ringing out speaks Shelley of the discipline of lowliness and neglect:

it so.

Most wretched men

Are cradled into poetry by wrong:

They learn in suffering what they teach in song.

Burns's story, therefore, is sorrowful, because he made If any man could have stood upright on his own manliness, 'twas he. He had no right to be pressing in with the dissipated aristocracy of the Caledonian Hunt, nor to look at the unequal arrangements of

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