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17 confer, when accompanied with such painful drawbacks; and affording a lesson of contentment to those who are denied, and may feel disposed to envy, such dangerous gifts. "The fate and characters of the rhyming tribe," thus writes the poet himself in 1793, "often employ my thoughts when I am disposed to be melancholy. There is not among all the martyrologies that ever were penned so rueful a narrative as the lives of the poets. In the comparrtive [sic] view of wretches, the criterion 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 delicate 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 fantastic nosegays, tracing the grasshopper to this haunt by his chirping song, watching 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 which shall eternally mislead him from the paths of lucre, and yet curse him with a keener relish than any man living for the pleasures that lucre 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 Burns has traced his own character far better than any one else has done it since.

The affairs of the farm did not long thrive, and, perceiving them going backwards, Burns resolved to enter upon the duties of the Excise. He was accordingly appointed to do duty in that capacity