new "Chambers" has rightly restated the relation between Burns and his patrons thus:

The period was, however, the evening of the first heydey of Edinburgh letters. A few years before, Burns would perhaps have found an even warmer welcome and a more just appreciation; he would certainly have met at least one man intelle. tually his peer in the Select Society and the Poker Club. But David Hume had. in 1786, been dead half a score of years; Lord Kames was gone, and the majority of their more or less brilliant contemporaries were long past their prime. Adam Smith was too ill to see Burns. William Robertson had only seven years to live; Tytler and Lord Hailes even less. It was, in short, the interregnum between Hume and Scott. Burns himself was the man of the age. It strikes us of this day as almost ludicrous that he should have been patronized by men of the undoubted though second-rate capacity of Dugald Stewart, Hugh Blair, and Henry Mackenzie.

Again, summing up the testimony as to Burns's conduct in Edinburgh, Mr. Wallace says:

He saw from the first that his reputation, so far as society in Edinburgh was concerned, must be evanescent, and he acted accordingly. His second Common place Book proves that he measured him self deliberately against the men he met. He perceived his own superiority to them in natural force; he did not repine at their better fortune. It is morally certain that had Burns visited Edinburgh in the days of the literary supremacy of Scott and Jeffrey, a vigorous and successful effort would have been made to secure for him a position which would have permitted free exercise of his extraordinary faculty. . . . Burns, however, asked nothing from his Edinburgh friends; when they helped him to a farm and a position in the Excise, believing, as they apparently did, that they were thereby gratifying his own wishes he made no complaint, but cheerfully prepared himself for the necessarily uncongenial career which alone appeared open to him.

Burns was but twenty-seven years of age when he came to Edinburgh from Ayr shire. Of few men of warm temperament and exceptionally endowed by nature with those strong passions which the sources at once of selfishness and unself

are

ishness, can it be said with truth that "the battle between the flesh and the spirit" which ends in the ruin or the consolidation of character had been fought out so early in life. His sociable temperament, his eager willingness to observe all sorts and conditions of men, inevitably led him into "scenes of life," the survey of which meant the enlargement of experi ence, but not-at least immediately-tha enrichment of motive. But it is as certain that he never lost command of himself. amidst the Crochallan festivities, as that he acquitted himself with modesty and manliness at the tables of professors and senators of the College of Justice.

Mr. Wallace's revision of the Edinburgh episode is thorough and broad. He has pursued every incident of itthe Clarinda liaison, the Masonic bardship, the tours, the flirtations, the relations with Creech, etc.-with the pertinacity of a sleuthhound. It is impossible to go into details here, but students of Burns will be grateful for many misconceptions removed, many mysteries as to dates cleared up, and generally for the numerous vivid touches he has introduced into Chambers's generally accurate picture of the poet as he lived and moved at this period.

Equally valuable is the reconstruction of the Ellisland epoch. There is no stick or stone left of the house that Burns built on the farm which he described as "the very riddlings of creation." As the Rev. Richard Simpson, minister of Dunscore, who is the authority on the history and topography of the district, testifies, those who protest against the rebuilding of the present farmhouse as desecration of the rooftree of Burns, are more than eighty years too late, and even the famous window with its inscription is of more than doubtful authenticity. Mr. Wallace presents us with a picturesque description of Ellisland, and-what is of even greater interest-he brings the tenant of 1788-1791 into at least geographical touch with others whose memories are rooted in Dunscore. Thus:

Its glens are steeped in the story of the War of Independence of Wallace, of Bruce, and of Bruce's friend and "mak siccar" lieutenant, Kilpatrick, to whose

family Ellisland once belonged. The hillsides of Dunscore recall the more recent memories of the Covenanters. The tower of Lag, the prototype of Redgauntlet Castle, and the home of Sir Robert Grierson, "the persecutor," whose name was more feared and hated in Galloway than that of John Graham himself, still stands in one of the glens. . . . Travelling up the valley, we come to Thornhill, with Tynron Doon, recalling the memories of the Ettrick Shepherd, Drumlanrig Castle, ete. The extreme eastern point of Dunscore parish is Ellisland; the extreme western point in Craigenputtock, looking out on the moors of Galloway, where Carlyle wrote "Sartor Resartus" and his essay on Burns. It was on the slopes of Craigenputtock Hill that Carlyle, conversing with Emerson, put the Iliad of "this mysterious mankind" into a nutshell"Christ died on the tree; that built Dunscore kirk yonder; that brought you and me together. existence."

Time has only a relative

of

On this epoch of the poet's existence, as on all the others, a vast amount editorial labor has been spent. On point of research, pure and simple, there is nothing more valuable in any of the four portly volumes than the results displayed of a fresh investigation into Burns's connection with the "London newsmen." Peter Stuart, the pioneer of Metropolitan journalism, tried to secure the poet as a paid contributor to his newly-established Star in 1788. Burns refused enrolment, but sent contributions, including the ode on Mrs. Oswald, the "Ode to the Departed Regency-Bill," and probably also the (prose) "Address of the Scottish distillers to the Right Honble. William Pitt." He called the Star "a blasphemous party newspaper." He helped to justify the description by a satire he sent to it on the "solemn farce of pageant mummery," the public thanksgiving for the recovery of the king. This production, unearthed now from the files of the Star, is dated, Kilmarnock, April 30th, and takes the form of a psalm, said to have been composed for and sung on the occasion.

Burns's note to Stuart, of April, 1789; "Your polite exculpation of me in your paper was enough," has not hitherto

It referred to an been understood. episode in his connection with the Star, which is expiscated in the new "Chambers" for the first time. In March, 1789, Stuart, in the pleasant polemical manner of the day, struck a blow at that eminent Pittite, the Duchess of Gordon, by publishing a set of coarsish verses about her, which, “a correspondent asfrom the pen of sured him," were Burns, describing her Grace's performance at an Edinburgh ball. Burns hastened to repudiate the whole thing. The Gazetteer had copied from the Star a still more disrespectful stanza to the duchess. Burns denied the authorship, with heat, in both journals, and it was doubtless for the "exculpation" from "The two most damning crimes of which, as a man and as a poet, I could have been guilty-ingratitude and stupidity," that he thanked Stuart in April. Henley and Henderson in "The Centenary Burns," having evidently not pursued their researches far enough, accept the duchess pasquinade as genuine, although internal evidence is convincing against its authenticity. The most interesting discovery, however, which Mr. Wallace chronicles in connection with the affair is this note, which the editor of the Gazetteer appends to Burns's letter:

Mr. Burns will do right in directing his petulance to the proper delinquent, the printer of the Star, from which paper the stanza was literally copied into the Gazetteer. We can assure him, however, for his comfort, that the Duchess of Gordon acquits him both of the ingratitude and the dulness. She has, with much difficulty, discovered that the jeu d'esprit was written by the Right Honorable the Treasurer of the Navy, on her Grace's dancing at a ball given by the Earl of Findlater; this has been found out by the industry and penetration of Lord Fife. The lines are certainly not so dull as Mr. Burns insinuates, and we fear he is jealons of the poetical talents of his rival, Mr. Dundas.

Burns, as everybody knows, hated the Dundases because Robert, the solicitorgeneral, slighted his poem on the death of the lord president. We have not here absolute proof that the skit on the gay

that he wrote in their manner, on subjects similar to theirs, but not that he looked at the world as any one of them did. In short, while emphasizing the debt Burns owed to his "forebears," they also unwillingly emphasize the gulf that separates him from the best as well as the last of them-which gulf is made not only by genius (for Dunbar had genius too), but by modernity.

No poet, not even Shakespeare, has been so minutely, lovingly studied as Burns. No editor has ever approached the text in so truly critical a spirit or treated it in so scholarly and classical a fashion as Messrs. Henley and Henderson. It is impossible to convey in a brief notice an adequate impression either of the bulk or of the quality of their work. Take for example their treatment of "The Kirk's Alarm." Their note embraces a summary of the M'Gill persecution, which is a model of conciseness and completeness, and an account of the production of the poem, to which they contribute a quotation from the unpublished Dunlop manuscripts at Lochryan: "I have just sketched the following ballad, and as usual send the first rough draft to you." Their "study of the origin" is as follows: "This copy (Mrs. Dunlop's) was originally entitled "The Kirk's Lament," a ballad: Tune, “Push about the Brisk Bowl;" but in the manuscript Lament is deleted for Alarm. Probably, therefore, the idea of the burlesque was suggested by a certain broadside, "The Church of Scotland's Lamentation concerning the setting up of Plays and Comedies, March, 1715," the work of an anonymous writer, of which there is a copy in the Roxburghe Collection." Then they describe the various manuscripts and versions, cluding the broadside published in 1789 with the title "The Ayrshire Garland," an excellent new song: tune, "The Vicar and Moses," of which Mr. Craibe Angus is the proud possessor of the only copy known to exist. Burns's tunes do not, it seems, fit the verses. The stave of "The Kirk's Alarm" was used in Pitcairne's "Roundell on Sir Robert Sibbald," 1686, and by Congreve, and

in

was popular in England throughout the eighteenth century. But "as a matter of fact "The Kirk's Alarm" was modelled directly on a political squib which appeared in the Glasgow Mercury, December 23-30, 1788, and was current at least six months before Burns wrote his first draft.” This is admirable work. It is the kind of critical editing that the student has long desired, and it is free from all suspicion of a straining of the facts to suit the editors' theory. But too high praise cannot be accorded to Messrs. Henley and Henderson's studies of origins throughout. Thus the six-line stave in rime couée, built on two rhymes, of the "Address to the Deil," is traced from the work of the first-known troubabour, William IX., Count of Poitiers and Duke of Guienne (1071-1127), through Hilary, a Paris monk of the twelfth century, through an anonymous English love-song of the thirteenth century, through the "York Plays" and the "Towneley Mysteries" of the fifteenth century, down to its first use by a Scotsman, Sir David Lyndesay. So by Fergusson's time it hau "become the common inheritance of all such Scotsmen as could rhyme." Again, the metrical structure of "The Holy Fair" is traced back to the thirteenth century romance of "Sir Tristrem," and "docked of the bob-wheel, that never-failing device of the medieval craftsman, the "Sir Tristrem" stave is identical with one which, imitated from a monkish-Latin original, was popular all through the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and long afterwards." Burns himself avowedly derived the metre of the "Epistle to Davie" from Montgomerie. Messrs. Henley and Henderson ascribe to Montgomerie, with the utmost probability, the invention of this peculiar quatorzain; they trace its history to Ramsay's revival of it in "The Vision," and elsewhere, and claim it as exclusively Scottish, both in derivation and in use. In like manner they trace back "The Death and Dying Words of Poor Mailie" to Hamilton of Gilbertfield's (1665 ?— 1757) "Last Dying Words of Bonny Heck."

To revert to the famous theory, what do Messrs. Henley and Henderson make of "Tam o' Shanter" and "The Jolly Beggars?" Do these works of genius help to prove or disprove that Burns was the last expression of the old Scots world and the outcome of an environment plus Scots forebears, rather than a pioneer in poetry, a prophet with a distinct point of view from his predecessors? Well, the "Centenary" edition does not attempt to derive "Tam o' Shanter" at all. Of "The Jolly Beggars" it says frankly: "The Burns of this 'puissant and splendid production,' as Matthew Arnold calls it—this irresistible presentation of humanity caught in the act, and summarized forever in the terms of art-comes into line with divers poets of repute, from our own Dekker and John Fletcher to the singer of les Gueux (1813) and "Le Vieux Vagabond" (1830), and approves himself their master in the matter of such qualities as humor, vision, lyrical potency, descriptive style, and the faculty of swift, dramatic presentation, to a purpose that may not be gainsaid." Does not that give away the whole case? The poet of "The Jolly Beggars" was neither the satirist and singer of a parish, nor the product of a local or traditionary environment, ever so many forebears aiding. He imitated, copied, and stole much; that is proved to the hilt, and never more conclusively or completely than here. But when an attempt is made to place him in the hierarchy of literature, his imitative work must be assigned its proper, recognized value, and that which he invented (in the widest sense of the term, including form and point of view) must be taken as the decisive evidence of distinction. But the note on "The Jolly Beggars" is in itself a monument of knowledge of the literature of mendicancy and knavery, and will be precious to all time.

It is in the third volume, recently published, that Messrs. Henley and Henderson are most successful, as they were bound to be, in proving Burns to be the last expression of the old Scots world, although their theory unquestionably

leads them to exaggerate a little his debt to his "nameless forebears," and to minimize, by ever so little, the broad distinction between him and the writers of the songs which he "passed through the mint of his mind." It is not easy to see how they can prove-and they do not attempt it-that the masterqualities of "fresh and taking simplicity, of vigor and directness, and happy and humorous ease," came to Burns from his nameless forebears, along with "much of the thought, the romance, and the sentiment, for which we read and love him.” But theory apart, students are deeply indebted for the study in the origins of Burns's songs which is here presented to them. The editors have utilized a vast mass of material which previous editors have but skimmed-broadsides, chap-books, rare song-books, the great collections of David Herd, including the British Museum manuscripts, even "The Merry Muses," an invaluable guide, rightly used. The Lochryan manuscripts, embracing unpublished letters of Burns to Mrs. Dunlop, have furnished them with a number of interesting facts, such as the poet's explicit statement that "Sweet Afton" was written for Johnson's Musical Museum as a "compliment" to the "small river Afton that flows into the Nith, near New Cumnock, which has some charming wild romantic scenery on its banks." Their treatment of Burns's inheritance from the clandestine literature of Scotland, and of England too, is excellent. The poet's relations with Johnson and Thomson are carefully and accurately set forth, and sufficient proof is furnished from his correspondence in the Hastie manuscripts, and from certain manuscript material in the possession of Mr. George Gray, Rutherglen, that he was virtually editor of the Museum from 1787 till his health began to fail. The Thomson songs are justly placed on a lower level than those which he passed through the mint to Johnson, though one may fairly demur to the sweeping criticism that "they are often vapid in sentiment and artificial in effect."

A good example of the editing of a