Page:Interesting history of Robert Burns (1).pdf/16

 to those who are denied, and may feel disposed to envy, suehsuch [sic] dangerous gifts. “The fate and charaeterscharacters [sic] of the rhyming tribe,” thus writes the poet himself in 1793, “often employ my thoughts when I am disposed to be melaneholymelancholy [sic]. There is not among all the martyrologies that ever were penned so rueful a narrative as the lives of the poets. In the eomparativecomparative [sic] view of wretches, the eriterioncriterion [sic] is not what they are doomed to suffer, but how they are formed to bear. Take a being of our kind, give him a stronger imagination and a more delieatedelicate [sic] sensibility, which between them will ever engender a more ungovernable set of passions than are the usual lot of man; implant in him an irresistible impulse to some idle vagary, such as arranging wild-flowers in fantastie nosegays, traeingtracing [sic] the grasshopper to his haunt by his ehirpingchirping [sic] song, watehingwatching [sic] the frisks of the little minnows in the sunny pool, or hunting after the intrigues of butterflies— in short, send him adrift after some pursuit whiehwhich [sic] shall eternally mislead him from the paths of lucre, and yet eursecurse [sic] him with a keener relish than any man living for the pleasures that luerelucre [sic] can purchase; lastly, fill up the measure of his woes by bestowing on him a spurning sense of his own dignity, and you have created a wight nearly as miserable as a poet.” In these short sentences