The rough burr-thistle, spreading wide I turned the weedin'-heuk aside, An' spared the symbol dear." Burn's first notoriety-his first becoming known, as he said, as a maker of rhymes-came in a way scarcely to have been expected, and less congenial with the spirit of true poetry than the simple effusions of his better feelings. The Church of Scotland was divided into two ecclesiastical parties, who were waging against each other a warfare of words the bitterness of which spread from the manse to the cottage; and, as Burns said, polemical divinity was putting the country half mad. In the midst of a general strife he was not one likely to remain unconcerned. How far he felt a real interest in the discussions of "Auld Light" and "New Light" it would be hard to say; but, be that as it may, it was a chance for him to feed his hungering after a name. He began his impetuous alliance in some of his free-spoken and irreverent productions, which were welcomed, as he described it, with a roar of applause. This was a welcome given—such was the heat of ecclesiastical factions-not only by laity, but by clergy, on the side the poet espoused. These audacious pieces wrought this effect to be noticed in tracing the progress of Burn's genius :-that they developed, and doubtless at the time increased, the nerve and force of his imaginative powers. The influence on the moral side of his genius was much more questionable. The excesses which Burns witnessed among men active in the national church of Scotland exaggerated his hatred of hypocrisy, and, at the same time, a recklessness of public opinion, a palliation of his own misdoings in the belief that the propriety was an assumed and superficial thing, as in the address to the "Unco Guid," or rigidly righteous: "O ye wha are sae guid yoursel, Sae pious and sae holy, Ye've nought to do but mark and tell Or in that better-known stanza, "Oh wad some power the giftie gie us It wad frae monie a blunder free us And foolish notion: What airs in dress an' gait wad lea'e us And e'en devotion!" Burns had an ambition to distinguish himself by his conversational powers,-oratory to groups of villagers: this made him a ready disputant in the polemics of the church. That soon passed; but he found another kind of intercourse, unhappily, a live-long intercourse, with boon companions, a freer field for his native wit. "The star that rules my luckless lot Has fated me the russet coat And damned my fortune to the groat, But, in requit, Has blessed me wi' a random shot O' country wit!" Occasional intervals of absence from the homestead had early made Burns a looker-on in scenes of freer living than was known in the domains of peasant-life. The fondness for revelry had not yet begun to work its mischief upon him; and, while free from the sting of selfreproach and the misery of a dangerous indulgence, he was able to rouse the feeling of nationality on the subject of Scotch drink, and to give a poetic dignity to distilled liquors. The spirit of Pindar's first Olympic ode-the praise of water and the panegyric on the Sicilian ring— breathes in Burns's stanzas, giving as they do a dignity, a sublimity to strong drink, by a grand effort of imagination in associating it with the dying Highland soldier: "Bring a Scotsman frae his hill, Clap in his cheek a highland gill, He has nae thought but how to kill "Nae cauld, faint-hearted doubtings tease him. And, when he fa's, His latest draught o' breathing lea'es him "Sages their solemn e'en may steek, An' physically causes seek, In clime and season. But tell me Whisky's name in Greek, I'll tell the reason." It seems to have been reserved for Burns, in one of the genial moods of the better part of his life, to give a picture, at once humorous and elevated, of tipsy ness: "The clachan yill had made me canty, I was na fou, but just had plenty; I stachered whyles, but yet took tent aye An' hillocks, stanes, and bushes kenned aye "The rising moon began to glower But whether she had three or four, The most propitious era of the poet's life was that portion of it spent at the Mossgeil Farm. The cottage, with its few acres, had been taken by the two brothers, with the dutiful and affectionate purpose of providing a shelter for their parents and the determination of earning their subsistence by manly labour. It was there made manifest that Scotland was in possession of a great national poet. The early inspirations of the Scottish Muse had been given to the indwellers of a palace,-the ancient King James Stuart; and, after poetry had declined with the decline of the national spirit, in consequence of the union of the two kingdoms of England and Scotland, after the lapse of centuries it was reanimated in the humble clay cottage of Mossgeil Farm. The poet's life was the outdoor-life of a labourer in the fields; he was in perpetual and quickly-sensitive communion with nature; and here especially was gained the glory of the peasantpoet of Scotland. The poetry of Burns was as indige nous as the thistle; it was a pure native growth, as different as possible from the trim, unnatural exotics which had been cultivated with hothouse temperature and method. The freshness of old Chaucer's genius seemed to be breathing again upon British poetry. The longlost honours given by the chief of the early poets to the lowliest flower of the field, as I noticed in a former lecture, was now restored, when Burns suddenly checked his plough at the sight of the mountain-daisy looking up to him from the mid-furrows. It was a moment of genuine poetic inspiration; for, while actually holding the plough, his imagination fashioned itself into musical words: "Wee, modest, crimson-tippéd flower, To spare thee now is past my power, "Alas! it's no' thy neebor sweet, When upward-springing, blithe, to greet "Cauld blew the bitter-biting North Upon thy early, humble birth; Scarce reared above the parent-carth |