life was his going to Irvine at all. The ill associations that he met there then, impressed themselves indelibly on his sensitive young mind. He got a bias there to that broad and flowery path which has no hedge or boundary, and he wandered on, the self-led child of nature, gathering at times the choicest flowers that the wild woods yield, at times the noxious weeds, that should have been passed by.

No poet was ever more a man, no man was ever more human, than was Burns. He was like a thermometer to humanity, depressed by a frown, raised by a smile. That is a true theory, established by the investigations of the new ethical societies, and known to-day as the Polarity of Character." This theory of the Polarity of Character shows, from innumerable examples, that man is, as it were, a two-fold being, half earthly, half divine, never wholly good nor wholly bad; and all of us can find this theory verified in our own hearts and motives and internal conflicts; it shows that for every good point or excellence or virtue in every individual there is a negative counterpart, a corresponding weak point, or defect, or vice or a strong tendency thereto. For every mountain there is a corresponding valley; for every wave a corresponding trough or hollow; for every positive pole a corresponding negative pole.

Hence the explanation of so many of the world's great emancipators and philanthropists, working and dreaming for the alleviation of mankind, but leaving their own wives and children all the time in indigence and misery; hence the explanation of philosophers and poets, writing and singing of liberty, equality, fraternity, but being themselves all the time the slaves of petty personal indulgences and unbrotherly bickerings; hence the explanation of the fact that no man has yet been found irredeemably bad, and a living saint has not yet been entered in the calendar-the calendar saints have usually required two or three centuries to hang out, and bleach, and dry! Hence the old country proverb, known well enough to Burns-"A shoemaker's wife and a smith's mare are mostly ill-shod." Some philosopher, indeed, has said that the scales of fortune always swing even: take as much as you will out of one scale, good or bad,

It

the balance is not long disturbed, for you will be served an equal amount out of the other scale, bad or good. All this is but another form of the great law of compensation that reigns in all human things. It is the old story and the old proverb-" No rose without its thorns." Now, in the truly human soul of Burns these two opposing poles were exceedingly developed. If, in his impulses of human earthly passion, he forgot at times to follow piously in prudent reason's rule, at other times he forgot again that he was bounded in by human flesh and blood, and his soul could soar as on an angel's wings to flash new truths on life and thrill the hearts of men. is admitted now, once for all, and for ever—and is not that enough?—that Burns often fell and failed, and sinned and erred. But not for that has his name become immortal among men. Not because Paul stoned Stephen and persecuted the Church has he become the greatest of all the Apostles; no, but in spite of that! Men have looked about in literature, sacred and profane, for a parallel to Burns, and one and all have turned instinctively to the doings and the writings of the Shepherd King of Israel, David, whose slips and failings showed his human side, but whose lyric utterances and aspirations have become the joy of the whole earth, and proved the Divinity within him—“A man after God's own heart."

In his 24th year Robert and his brother, Gilbert Burns, took a farm of 118 acres at Mossgiel, and here he tried to be a steady farmer; but four years of bad crops and bad seasons proved his prospects vain. His hopes as a farmer were blighted, but his genius as a poet was now disclosed. Around Mossgiel his little poems were quoted and applauded by his friends, and he showed a power of sarcasm which caused his enemies to tremble. It was at this time that he was censured by the Church for some irregularities of conduct, and obliged to undergo a public penance. In his mortification he attacked the Church and the minister in stinging satire. The Church of Scotland was just then divided into two parties: the "Auld Lights," or Conservatives of the old school, who prosecuted Burns; and the "New Lights," or Progressives, who applauded Burns's satires on their spiritual opponents.

A noted elder in the Auld Light party was one Willie Fisher, who had also brought before the Church Courts an attorney named Hamilton, a friend of Burns, because the said Hamilton had taken a walk on the Sabbath Day, and made his servant fetch in some cabbage from the garden! But this same prosecuting elder, this "holy Willie Fisher," was himself all the time one of the most immoral, sanctimonious, hypocritical, and tippling pretenders, and (to clinch all these adjectives) he at last actually died drunk in a ditch. Burns saw through such men as Fisher, although he did occupy a chief seat in the synagogue, and shot on him a dart of fire in a mock-heroic poem, called "Holy Willie's Prayer," that set the world a-laughing at him-and it has been laughing at him ever since.

Other poems of this period and this sort were "The Ordination" and "The Holy Fair." These pieces were thought by some to be little short of blasphemous. I know we are treading here on delicate and sacred ground. There were things sacred then, there are things sacred now, there will always be things rightly considered sacred; but sacred things, religious things, when once twisted into a rut or groove, are the hardest of all things on earth to get out and straighten. Religious forms are the most conservative. Nothing short of a violent shake up and re-formation, that may drench the world again in blood perhaps for centuries, can move them. Humanly speaking, the easiest and most harmless way to do it, if it can be done, is in the manner of that motto from Horace, fixed above the curtain of the best theatre in the world, the Theâtre Français in Paris, Castigat moves ridendo--" Purify morals by ridicule." But it isn't necessary to go to Horace for a motto; Burns has it himself. One day at church he noticed that the young lady in the pew before him had neglected to dust her bonnet, and the dust, or something else on the bonnet, began to creep and crawl, and Burns went home and wrote his little poem on "The Louse." (He was a poet of minature and small life.) And in this poem on "The Louse " he has the famous lines:

Ah, wad some Power the giftie gie us,

To see oursels as others see us!
It wad frae mony a blunder free us
And foolish notion.

He

And thus,

And this is just what Burns did for his Church. let them see themselves as others saw them. without wishing in any way to be a professional reformer, he was the means of putting in the thin end of the wedge to cut off the excrescences growing on his Church, and thus he helped to make it what it is to-day all around the world.

If Burns now seemed following the loose or liberal opinions of his old chums at Irvine, shooting his satiric darts at privileged hypocrisy, there was in his heart, now and always, the truest reverence for what was good and pure. He hated sham and semblance, but he loved mankind; he loved his country with a true patriot's devotion; indeed, his chiefest fault was that he loved not always wisely, but too well. And a new aspect of the poet's genius is revealed right here in the quick transition by which he can turn from themes of scathing scarcasm, like "Holy Willie's Prayer," to themes of humblest piety, like "The Cotter's Saturday Night," written at the same time. Indeed, no poet, including Shakspere, has ever had greater power of quick transition and terse condensation than had Burns. From grave to gay, from comedy to tragedy, from rationalism to orthodoxy, from the most Doric Scotch to the most classic English, is with him but à single line. And in this classic English poem of "The Cotter's Saturday Night," whose scenes the painter has delighted to portray on canvas, and which has elevated to the dignity of kings and palaces the humblest of Scotia's dwellers in their straw-roofed sheds, Burns has shown, thus early in his literary career, how without education and without experience, and purely by the inspiration that was in him, how he could rise like the lark of his native mountains, almost at once, to the summit of his art; he has raised in this poem a national memorial to Scotland more enduring than brass, and which nothing can now destroy or replace. In the forefront of the picture you can see the image of his own godly father and his own early Christian training. When the children had come home on the Saturday night from working for the neighbouring farmers, and had read "verse about " in the big Bible-

Then, kneeling down to heaven's eternal King,
The saint, the father and the husband prays.
Hope springs exulting on triumphant wing,
That thus they all shall meet in future days,
There ever bask in uncreated rays,

No more to sigh, or shed the bitter tear,
Together hymning their Creator's praise,
In such society, yet still more dear,

While circling Time moves round in an eternal sphere.

Then homeward all take off their sev'ral ways,
The youngling cottagers retire to rest,
The parent-pair their secret homage pay,
And proffer up to heaven the warm request,
That He who stills the raven's clam'rous nest,
And decks the lily fair in flow'ry pride,
Would, in the way His wisdom sees the best,
For them and for their little ones provide,

But chiefly in their hearts with grace divine preside.

From scenes like these old Scotia's grandeur springs,
That makes her loved at home, revered abroad;
Princes and lords are but the breath of kings,
An honest man's the noblest work of God.

It was also at this period, when ploughing at Mossgiel, that he wrote many of his little lyric gems in the Doric Scottish dialect-especially those to "The Mouse," "The Mountain Daisy," and "The Deil."

These poems are so felicitous and choice in words, so artistic and expressive, so natural, and so full of sympathy and tenderness, as to surpass all praise. Indeed, in all his poems Burns sees clear through his subject like an "X ray;" glasses himself in it as the eye does its object, till it becomes the very light that is in him; and then, with his inspiration of utterance, born of glowing sympathy and insight, he speaks out through it his own very heart. His love and sympathy for every living thing is so free and generous that all men now naturally love him with an increasing fondness. Burns saw down the chain of all created life-down almost to its nether link; and long ere Darwin's day he could be the first of Darwinists; and like Goethe, who could hail the linnet as his "feathered brother in the bush," so Burns hailed the mouse as his "poor earth-born companion and fellow-mortal;" and he has drawn a parallel between its schemes, and his, and all men's, that will never be forgotten, for it is true at all times of us all and of all our schemes and plans.