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BUR from which there was no after recovery. The melancholy of later times, and perhaps, moreover, the strong temptation to excitement, may have originated in the excessive labours of youth. The muscular fibre remained, but the nervous fibre was overstrung, and never afterwards acquired the faculty of repose. Few men could have entered on life under less favourable circumstances. On the one hand, he had the arctic regions of a frozen theology, with iceberg formalisms as the limiting boundaries of his desire. On the other, he had the torrid impulses of his own inspiration urging onward, to clothe the world of his thought with a thousand rays of gorgeous colouring. When lit by love, by genius, and by passion, the peasant poet rushed into a tumult of fitful, fiery existence, throwing around the coruscations of his meteoric nature—not living, but burning out a life, with flame and smoke swaying hither and thither till the fire burnt out, and the ashes of a noble nature alone remained marking the funeral place of grand endowments. The marvel is not that his course was in some sense irregular, but that he lived to accomplish, with untiring industry, his wondous treasure-store of song—that the warbling wood-note wild had not been quenched in the revelries that brought for a time forgetfulness of pain; and that, under the hostility of all surrounding influences, he could still pour forth such matchless gems of lyric beauty. Burns commenced his poetic career, as a matter of course, by a love song—Handsome Nell—"Oh! once I lo'ed a bonnie lass;" and plainly enough this doggerel was only the expression of his calf-love, when he thought he ought to be in love, but was not. In 1777 his father removed to the farm of Lochlea in the parish of Tarbolton, where William made a bad bargain, by taking 130 acres of bad land at twenty shillings an acre. From this place Robert went to Kirkoswald to school, and by his own account learned many more things than mensuration and surveying. "I made," he says in the fragment of his autobiography, "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 I 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." The peculiarity of Burns' zodiac seems to have been, that all its signs were signs of Virgo. He was always in love, or in something like it. His first articulate utterance in song was "writ with a plume from Cupid's wing;" his last, seven days before the final delirium, told the same tale—"No love but thine my heart shall know." Up to his twenty-third year Burns held on the same course. "Vive l'amour, et vive la bagatelle," were, he says, his principles of action, not knowing that he was making an utter mistranslation of his feelings. Nothing in his eyes was a bagatelle. He adds indeed, in sufficient contradiction—"My passions, when once lighted up, raged like so many devils, till they got vent in rhyme." He had the strong impulses of a man who had a future, but up to his twenty-third year he lived an irreproachable life of homely industry, as the eldest and most aiding son of a small farmer. Men of similar stamp, though not of similar genius, still grow in Ayrshire, their number rapidly diminishing before the march of the modern change of manners, and the exigencies of agricultural improvement. About this time he appears to have composed his first song of note, "My Nannie O!" "Behind yon hill where Stinchar flows," the name of the river being, with contemptible affectation, changed to Stinsiar. Even Burns was prevailed upon to substitute "Lugar." The vale of Stinchar is one of the most beautiful in Scotland, well worthy of an Ayrshire poet's celebration.

"My twenty-third year," says Burns, "was to me an important era. Partly through whim, and partly that I wished to set about doing something in life" (most probably with a view to marriage), "I joined a flax-dresser in the neighbouring town of Irvine. This was an unlucky affair. . . . As we were giving a welcome carousal to the new year, the shop took fire, and burned to ashes, and I was left, like a true poet, not worth a sixpence. I was obliged 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 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 pile, 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." At Irvine Burns learned something of a town life, and formed a friendship with a young fellow, "a very noble character," whose knowledge of the world was vastly superior to his own, and who was the only man he ever saw who was a greater fool than himself, where woman was the presiding star; "but he spoke of illicit love with the levity of a sailor, which hitherto I had regarded with horror. Here his friendship did me a mischief, and the consequence was that soon after I resumed the plough, and wrote "The Poet's Welcome."

Burns remained at Lochlea, in the performance of his ordinary farm work, until he was twenty-five years of age. He had there written "Poor Mailie," "John Barleycorn," "Mary Morrison," and some other pieces. At Lochlea his father died, on the 13th February, 1784, not without presentiments that the future course of Robert's life would be in the wandering byepaths from which, with puritan fortitude, he had so carefully preserved his own footsteps. The old man pointed out that there was one of his family for whom he feared. Robert turned to the window, and with a smothered sob and a scalding tear acknowledged that he knew the meaning of the reproof. He seems also to have made some serious resolutions of amendment, which he kept for a time. The old man was buried in Alloway kirk-yard, and on the headstone of his grave the poet son paid the following tribute to the puritan father:—

Whatever Robert may have been at Lochlea, it is tolerably certain that he had not learned to join extravagance to his other accomplishments. His brother Gilbert—a dogged, stolid sort of a character, stupidly wise—kept the family accounts, and knew the outgoings. Robert received as wages—not an unusual thing in Scottish farming families—the munificent sum of seven pounds sterling per annum; and this sum Worldly-Wiseman Gilbert assures us he did not exceed. He was frugal, temperate, and "everything that could be wished." In the spring of 1784, the family removed to the farm of Mossgiel, in the parish of Mauchline; the sons and daughters of William Burness having, by ranking as creditors for arrears of wages, saved from the clutches of Scotch law a small amount of stock to begin the new adventure. Here Robert commenced his intended reformation,—read farming books, calculated crops, attended markets, and believed that, "in spite of the world, the flesh, and the devil, he would be a wise man." But the first year, unfortunately, he bought bad seed, and the second he lost half his crops by a late harvest. The fates were adverse, or at least unpropitious, and he solaced himself with verse, producing a grand prayer, some psalms, "Green grow the rashes, O," and "A big-bellied bottle's the whole of my care"—a combination of theology, licentiousness, and drink, than which nothing can possibly be more expressive of the Scottish rural life of Burns' day. He suffered much from constitutional melancholy, and kept a barrel of water at his bedside, into which he plunged when attacked by fainting fits. He struggled on, however, attended a freemason lodge, and learnt that sort of sociality. He also made acquaintance with Jean Armour—

to whom, after the fashion of Scotland, he was in every sense of the word married, but who, at the instigation of her father, thought proper still to consider herself a single woman. The father—Armour, a stone mason—reckoned Burns too poor to marry his daughter, and, notwithstanding the accident of a prospective baby, calculated that she might still make a better match—a species of caution which approaches the horrible; but,