dissipated and reckless. Some of his biographers have gone further, and attributed his early death to the same cause; but what says Burns's superior in the Dumfries excise district, Mr. Findlater? In a letter on the subject that gentleman says:-"I may venture to assert that when Burns was accused of a leaning to democracy, and an inquiry into his conduct took place, he was subjected in consequence thereof to no more than perhaps a verbal or private caution to be more circumspect in future. Neither do I believe his promotion was thereby affected, as has been stated. That, had he lived, would, I have every reason to think, have gone on in the usual routine. His good and steady friend, Mr. Graham, would have attended to this. What cause, therefore, was there for depression of spirits on this account? or how should he have been hurried thereby to a premature grave? I never saw his spirit fail till he was borne down by the pressure of disease and bodily weakness; and even then it would occasionally revive, and, like an expiring lamp, emit bright flashes to the last."

Burns was the laureate of the company, "and in that capacity," says Lockhart, “did more good service to the government of the country, at a crisis of the darkest alarm and danger, than perhaps any one person of his rank and station, with the exception of Dibdin, had the power or the inclination to render."

His "Poor and Honest Soger," says Allan Cunningham, "laid hold at once on the public feeling; and it was everywhere sung with an enthusiasm which only began to abate when Campbell's 'Exile of Erin' and 'Wounded Hussar,' were published. Dumfries, which sent so many of her sons to the wars, rung with it from port to port; and the poet, wherever he went, heard it echoing from house and hall. I wish this exquisite and useful song, with Scots wha hae wi' Wallace bled,' the 'Song of Death,' and 'Does Haughty Gaul Invasion Threat?'-all lyrics which enforce a love of country, and a martial enthusiasm into men's breasts-had obtained some reward for the poet. His perishable conversation was remembered by the rich to his prejudice: his imperishable lyrics were rewarded only by the admiration and tears of his fellow peasants."

In the spring of 1793 Burns addressed the following letter "To the Hon. the Provost, Bailies, and Town Council of Dumfries."

"Gentlemen,―The literary taste and liberal spirit of your good town has so ably filled the various departments of your schools, as to make it a very great object for a parent to have his children educated in them. Still to me, a stranger, to give my young ones that education I wish, at the High School, fees which a stranger pays will bear hard upon me. Some years ago your good town did me the honour of making me an honorary burgess. Will you allow me to request that this mark of distinction may extend so far as to put me on the footing of a real freeman of the town in the schools? If you are so very kind as to grant my request, it will certainly be a constant incentive to me to strain every nerve where I can officially serve; and will, if possible, increase that grateful respect with which ! have the honour to be, gentlemen, &c.,-ROBERT BURNS"

Besides, Burns, the very year before he died, actually officiated as a supervisor; and there is every reason to conclude that he would soon have been permanently promoted to that rank had not death intervened. Whilst we think that the charge against the excise board, of neglecting or ill-using Burns, is undeserved, we are decidedly of opinion that the treatment he received from the superiors of the board and the government of the day was infamous. It was a disgrace to them, and must ever be a source of the deepest regret to all admirers of the poet, that they allowed a few random sparks of disaffection to rise up between them and the lustre of his genius; and that, too, when it was pervaded and intensified by the purest patriotism. When the war between Britain and France broke out, in 1793, Burns joined a volunteer company that was formed in Dumfries; and, according to the testimony of his The request was at once complied with, to the commanding officer, Colonel de Peyster, he great gratification of the poet, who was devotedly faithfully discharged his soldierly duties, and attached to his children, and desirous above was the pride of the corps, whom he made all things to give them a liberal education immortal by his verse, especially by the vigor-"In the bosom of his family," says Mr. Gray, ous address beginning

"Does haughty Gaul invasion threat?
Then let the loons beware, sir;
There's wooden walls upon our seas,
And volunteers on shore, sir.
The Nith shall run to Corsincon,
And Criffel sink in Solway,

Ere we permit a foreign foe

On British ground to rally !”

one of the teachers in the Academy, "he spent many a delightful hour in directing the studies of his eldest son, a boy of uncommon talents. I have frequently found him explaining to this youth, then not more than nine years of age, the English poets from Shakspeare to Gray, or storing his mind with examples of heroic virtue, as they live in the pages of our most celebrated English historians. I would

ask any person of common candour if employ- | time, states that though malicious stories were ments like these are consistent with habitual circulated freely against him, his early friends drunkenness." gave them no credit, and clung to him through good and bad report. "To the last day of his life," he says, "his judgment, his memory, his imagination, were fresh and vigorous as when he composed the "Cottar's Saturday Night." The truth is, that Burns was seldom intoxicated. The drunkard soon becomes besotted, and is shunned even by the convivial. Had he been so, he would not long have continued the idol of every party." We have the testimony of the poet's widow that her husband "never drank by himself at home," and that he still continued to attend church-two facts which, apart from other more decided evidence, tell against the stigma that he had become recklessly dissipated in his latest years.

But though not systematically intemperate, his habits were too lax and irregular for the community in which he lived, convivial though it was; and many who disliked him on other grounds magnified his excesses, and made these a pretext for "sending him to Coventry." On one well-known occasion our errant poet received the cut direct from some of the patrician citizens. During an autumnal evening in 1794, High Street was gay with fashionable | groups of ladies and gentlemen, all passing down to a county ball in the Assembly Rooms. One man, well fitted to be the cynosure of the party, passed up on the shady side of the thoroughfare, and soon found himself to be doubly in the shade. It was Burns. Nearly all knew him, but none seemed willing to recognize him; till Mr. David M'Culloch of Ardwell, noticing the circumstance, dismounted from the horse on which he rode, politely accosted the poet, and proposed that he should cross the street. "Nay, nay, my young friend," said the bard pathetically; "that's all over now!" and after a slight pause he quoted two verses of Lady Grizel Bailie's touching ballad:

"His bonnet stood aince fu' fair on his brow,

His auld ane looked better than mony ane's new;
But now he lets't wear ony way it will hing,
And casts himsel' dowie upon the corn-bing.

"O! were we young, as we aince has been,
We sud hae been galloping doun on yon green;
And linking it over the lily-white lea;
And werena my heart light I would dee."

This incident has been adduced as a proof that Burns at this period (admittedly the darkest in his career) had become an object of "universal rejection." Never was there a greater mistake; and it would be even wrong to suppose that the dejection that he felt, and expressed in Lady Grizel's verse, was more than momentary, or otherwise than semi-dramatic. One who is overcome by real heart distress does not seek to give it vent by measured poetical quotations. Half an hour after the rencontre, Burns and Mr. M'Culloch had some cheerful chit-chat over a glass of punch in the bard's

's own house, the latter having thoroughly recovered his spirits; and so charming was his discourse, and so sweetly did Bonnie Jean sing some of his recent effusions, that the Laird of Ardwell left the couple with reluctance to join his fashionable friends in Irish Street.

Mr. Gray, referring to the poet about this

Burns' circumstances whilst in Dumfries were humble, but not poverty-stricken. His official income was £50, extra allowances usually bringing it up to £70; and his share in fines averaged an additional £10. "Add to all this," says Chambers, "the solid perquisites which he derived from seizures of contraband spirits, tea, and other articles, which it was then the custom to divide among the officers, and we shall see that Burns could scarcely be considered as enjoying less than £90 a year."

If the poet would have accepted money payment for the glorious coinage of his fancy, he might easily have doubled this income or more; but, with a magnanimity which, however mistaken, illustrates the unselfishness of his nature, he steadily refused all offers of pecuniary reward for his lyrical productions. Of George Thomson's Musical Miscellany, Burns was the chief minstrel, but he scorned to barter his melodious contributions for worldly gear, even when "one pound one he sairly wanted.' Thomson having ventured to send some cash to the bard on one occasion, drew down upon himself this rebuke, dated July, 1793:—“I assure you, my dear sir, that you truly hurt me with your pecuniary parcel. It degrades me in my own eyes. However, to return it would savour of affectation; but as to any more traffic of that debtor and creditor kind, I swear by that HONOUR which crowns the upright statue of ROBERT BURNS'S INTEGRITY, on the least motion of it, I will indignantly spurn the bypast transactions, and from that moment commence entire stranger to you."

According to the testimony of the bard's eldest son, given to Mr. Chambers, and amply corroborated by others, the house in Mill Street was of a good order, such as was occupied at that time by the better class of burgesses; and

Thursday morning, he that I left in the cof-, sical rather than a mental malady.

ferer's chamber brought me word that the queen was dead."

A Latin letter written the day after her death to Edmund Lambert, whether by one of her physicians or not is uncertain, gives an account of her sickness in no respect contradictory to Robert Carey's, which may be thus rendered:

"It was after labouring for nearly three weeks under a morbid melancholy, which brought on stupor not unmixed with some indications of a disordered fancy, that the queen expired. During all this time she could neither by reasoning, entreaties, or artifices be brought to make trial of any medical aid; and with difficulty was persuaded to receive sufficient nourishment to sustain nature; taking also very little sleep; and that not in bed, but on cushions, where she would sit whole days motionless and sleepless; retaining however the vigour of her intellect to her last breath, though deprived for three days before her death of the power of speech."

Another contemporary writes to his friend thus: . . . "No doubt you shall hear her majesty's sickness and manner of her death diversely reported; for even here the Papists do tell strange stories, as utterly void of truth as of all civil honesty or humanity. . . Here was some whispering that her brain was somewhat distempered, but there was no such matter; only she held an obstinate silence for the most part; and, because she had a persuasion that if she once lay down she should never rise, could not be got to bed in a whole week, till three days before her death. . . . She made no will, neither gave anything away; so that they which come after shall find a well-furnished jewel-house and a rich wardrobe of more than two thousand gowns, with all things else answerable."

That a profound melancholy was either the cause, or at least a leading symptom, of the, last illness of the queen, so many concurring testimonies render indisputable; but the ori gin of this affection has been variously explained. Some, as we have seen, ascribed it to her chagrin on being in a manner compelled to grant the pardon of Tyrone;-a cause disproportioned apparently to the effect. Others have imagined it to arise from grief and indignation at the neglect which she began to experience from the venal throng of courtiers, who were hastening to pay timely homage to her successor. By others, again, her dejection has been regarded as nothing more than a natural concomitant of bodily decay; a phy

But the prevalent opinion, even at the time, appears to have been, that the grief, or compunction, for the death of Essex, with which she had long maintained a secret struggle, broke forth in the end superior to control; and rapidly completed the overthrow of powers which the advances of old age and accumulation of cares and anxieties had already undermined. "Our queen," writes an English correspondent to a Scotch nobleman in the service of James, "is troubled with a rheum in her arm, which vexeth her very much, besides the grief she hath conceived for my Lord of Essex's death. She sleepeth not so much by day as she used, neither taketh she rest by night. Her delight is to sit in the dark, and sometimes, with shedding tears, to bewail Essex."

A remarkable anecdote, first published in Osborn's Traditional Memoirs of Queen Elizabeth, and confirmed by M. Maurier's Memoirs -where it is given on the authority of Sir Dud| ley Carleton, the English ambassador in Holland, who related it to Prince Maurice-offers the solution of these doubts. According to this story, the Countess of Nottingham, who was a relation, but no friend, of the Earl of Essex, being on her death-bed, entreated to see the queen; declaring that she had something to confess to her before she could die in peace. On her majesty's arrival, the countess produced a ring, which she said the Earl of Essex had sent to her after his condemnation, with an earnest request that she would deliver it to the queen, as the token by which he implored her mercy; but that in obedience to her busband, to whom she had communicated the circumstance, she had hitherto withheld it; for which she entreated the queen's forgiveness. On sight of the ring, Elizabeth instantly recognized it as one which she had herself presented to her unhappy favourite on his departure for Cadiz, with the tender promise, that of whatsoever crimes his enemies might have accused him, or whatsoever offences he might actually have committed against her, on his returning to her that pledge she would either pardon him, or admit him at least to justify himself in her presence. Transported at once with grief and rage, on learning the barbarous treachery of which the earl had been the victim and herself the dupe, the queen shook the dying countess in her bed: and-vehemently exclaiming, that God might forgive her, but she never could-flung out of the chamber.

Returning to her palace, she surrendered herself without resistance to the despair which