Page:Life of Robert Burns.pdf/9

 9 landlord. Burns sided with his patron, and was no doubt a powerful anxiliary. As to these pieces various opinions have been 'held-some heaping upon Burns the charges of blasphemy, irreligion, &c. while others have praised him for so meri- torious a task as the exposure and denunciation of what they are pleased to call "hypocrisy and fana- ticism. To the present generation it is not easy to convey, an adequate notion of the height to which parties ran, in the West Country at this period, nor of the acrimony that was ingrafted on the polemical controversies then raging. These considerations should go far in the eyes of even the most austere to exculpate Burns from the charges alluded to, and incline then rather to impute to the fiery vehemence of his temperament those sallies which overleap the bounds of de- curum-for that Burns. in spite of the levity of certain passages to be found in his works, was embued, and deeply embued, with the solemn and contemplative thoughts which belong to religious feeling, and in the longrun generally issue in strict religions principle, cannot fairly be denied. But no one had, on the other hand, a keener percep- tion of the ludicrous, and such peculiarities in his opponents as offered a tempting mark for the shafts of the satirist were sure to be taken advan- tage of; at all events, the humour of these pieces is confessedly unrivalled. Halloween, a descrip- tive poem, perhaps more exquisitely wrought than the Holy Fair, and containing nothing that could offend the feelings of any body, was produced about the same period. After residing some time at Mossgiel, he seems to have perceived that the farm would at best furnish no more than the bare means of subsist-