Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 2.djvu/162

456 different fits of intemperance, he suffered still the keenest anguish of remorse, and horribly afflictive foresight. His Jane still behaved with a degree of maternal and conjugal tenderness and prudence, which made him feel more bitterly the evil of his misconduct, although they could not reclaim him. At last, crippled, emaciated, having the very power of animation wasted by disease, quite broken-hearted by the sense of his errors, and of the hopeless miseries in which he saw himself and his family depressed, with his soul still tremblingly alive to the sense of shame, and to the love of virtue; even to the last feebleness, and amid the last .agonies of expiring life, yielding readily to any temptation that offered the semblance of intemperate enjoyment ; he died at Dumfries, on the 21st of July, 1796, while he was yet three or four years under the age of forty.

After his death, it quickly appeared that his failings had not effaced from the minds of his more respectable acquaintance, either the regard which had once been won by his social qualities, or the reverence due to his intellectual talents, The circumstances of want in which he left his family, were noticed by the gentlemen of Dumfries, with earnest commiseration. His funeral was celebrated, by the care of his friends, with a decent solemnity, and with a numerous attendance of mourners, sufficiently honourable to his memory. Several copies of verses, having, if no other merit, at least that of a good subject, were inserted in different newspapers, upon the occasion of his death. A contribution, by subscription, was proposed, for the purpose of raising a small fund for the decent support of his widow, and the education of his infant children. This subscription was very warmly promoted, and not without considerable success, by John Syme Esq. of Dumfries, by Alexander Cunningham, Esq. W.S. Edinburgh; and by Dr James Currie, and Mr Roscoe, of Liverpool. Mr Stephen Kemble, manager of the Theatre Royal, Edinburgh, with ready liberality, gave a benefit night for this generous purpose.

I shall conclude this paper with a short estimate of what appears to me to have been Burns's real merits, as a poet and as a man: the most remarkable quality he displayed, both in his writings and his conversation, was, certainly, an enlarged, vigorous, keenly discerning, conscious comprehension of mind. Whatever be the subject of his verse, he still seems to grasp it with giant force; to wield and turn it with easy dexterity; to view it on all sides, with an eye which no turn of outline and no hue of colouring can elude; to mark all its relations to the group of surrounding objects, and then to select what he chooses to represent to our imagination, with a skilful and happy propriety, which shows him to have been, at the same time, master of all the rest. It will not be very easy for any other mind, however richly stored with various knowledge; for any other imagination, however elastic and inventive, to find any new and suitable topic that has been omitted by Burns, in celebrating the sub-