CHAPTER IIITHE SERIES OF SATIRES

'The westlin wind blaws loud an' shill;The night's baith mirk and rainy, O:But I'll get my plaid, an' out I'll steal,An' owre the hills to Nannie, O.'

According to Gilbert, the poet himself was constantly the victim of some fair enslaver, although, being jealousof those richer than himself, he was not aspiring in his loves. But while there was hardly a comely maiden in Tarbolton to whom he did not address a song, we are not to imagine that he was frittering his heart away amongst them all. A poet may sing lyrics of love to many while his heart is true to one. The one at this time to Robert Burns was Ellison Begbie, to whom some of his songs are addressed—notablyMary Morrison, one of the purest and most beautiful love lyrics ever poet penned. Nothing is more striking than the immense distance between this composition and any he had previously written. In this song he for the first time stepped to the front rank as a song-writer, and gave proof to himself, if to nobody else at the time, of the genius that was in him. A few letters to Ellison Begbie are also preserved, pure and honourable in sentiment, but somewhat artificial and formal in expression. It was because of his love for her, and his desire to be settled in life, that he took to the unfortunate flax-dressing business in Irvine. That is something of an unlovely and mysterious episode in Burns's life. Suffice it to say in his own words: 'This turned out a sadly unlucky affair. My partner was a scoundrel of the first water, and, to finish the whole business, while we were giving a welcome carousal to the New Year, our shop, by the drunken carelessness of my partner's wife, took fire and burned to ashes, and I was left, like a true poet, not worth a sixpence.'

His stay at Irvine was neither pleasant for him at the time nor happy in its results. He met there 'acquaintances of a freer manner of thinking and living than he had been used to'; and it needs something more than the family misfortunes and the deathbed of his father toaccount for that terrible fit of hypochondria when he returned to Lochlea. 'For three months I was in a diseased state of body and mind, scarcely to be envied by the hopeless wretches who have just got their sentence,Depart from me, ye cursed.'

Up to this time, the twenty-fifth year of his age, Burns had not written much. BesidesMary Morrisonmight be mentionedThe Death and Dying Words of Poor Mailie, and another bewitching song,The Rigs o' Barley, which is surely an expression of the innocent abandon, the delicious rapture of pure and trustful love. But what he had written was work of promise, while at least one or two of his songs had the artistic finish as well as the spontaneity of genuine poetry. In all that he had done, 'puerile and silly,' to quote his own criticism ofHandsome Nell, or at times halting and crude, there was the ring of sincerity. He was not merely an echo, as too many polished poetasters in their first attempts have been. Such jinglers are usually as happy in their juvenile effusions as in their later efforts. But Burns from the first tried to express what was in him, what he himself felt, and in so far had set his feet on the road to perfection. Being natural, he was bound to improve by practice, and if there was genius in him to become in time a great poet. That he was already conscious of his powers we know, and the longing for fame, 'that last infirmity of noble mind,' was strong in him and continually growing stronger.

'Then out into the world my course I did determine,Though to be rich was not my wish, yet to be great was charming;My talents they were not the worst, nor yet my education;Resolved was I at least to try to mend my situation.'

Before this he had thought of more ambitious things than songs, and had sketched the outlines of a tragedy; but it was only after meeting with Fergusson'sScotch Poemsthat he 'struck his wildly resounding lyre with rustic vigour.' In his commonplace book, begun in 1783, we have ever-recurring hints of his devoting himself to poetry. 'For my own part I never had the least thought or inclination of turning poet till I got once heartily in love, and then Rhyme and Song were in a measure the spontaneous language of my heart.'

The story of Wallace from the poem by Blind Harry had years before fired his imagination, and his heart had glowed with a wish to make a song on that hero in some measure equal to his merits.

'E'en then, a wish, I mind its power—A wish that to my latest hourShall strongly heave my breast—That I, for poor auld Scotland's sake,Some usefu' plan or beuk could make,Or sing a sang at least.'

This was written afterwards, but it is retrospective of the years of his dawning ambition.

For a time, however, all dreams of greatness are to be set aside as vain. The family had again fallen on evil days, and when the father died, his all went 'among the hell-hounds that grovel in the kennel of justice.' This was no time for poetry, and Robert was too much of a man to think merely of his own aims and ambitions in such a crisis. It was only by ranking as creditors to their father's estate for arrears of wages that the children of William Burness made a shift to scrape together a little money, with which Robert and Gilbert were able tostock the neighbouring farm of Mossgiel. Thither the family removed in March 1784; and it is on this farm that the life of the poet becomes most deeply interesting. The remains of the father were buried in Alloway Kirkyard; and on a small tombstone over the grave the poet bears record to the blameless life of the loving husband, the tender father, and the friend of man. He had lived long enough to hear some of his son's poems, and to express admiration for their beauty; but he had also noted the passionate nature of his first-born. There was one of his family, he said on his deathbed, for whose future he feared; and Robert knew who that one was. He turned to the window, the tears streaming down his cheeks.

Mossgiel, to which the brothers now removed, taking with them their widowed mother, was a farm of about one hundred and eighteen acres of cold clayey soil, close to the village of Mauchline. The farm-house, having been originally the country house of their landlord, Mr. Gavin Hamilton, was more commodious and comfortable than the home they had left. Here the brothers settled down, determined to do all in their power to succeed. They made a fresh start in life, and if hard work and rigid economy could have compelled success, they might now have looked to the future with an assurance of comparative prosperity. Mr. Gavin Hamilton was a kind and generous landlord, and the rent was only £90 a year; considerably lower than they had paid at Lochlea.

But misfortune seemed to pursue this family, and ruin to wait on their every undertaking. Burns says: 'I entered on this farm with a full resolution, "Come, goto, I will be wise." I read farming books; I calculated crops; I attended markets; and, in short, in spite of the devil, the world, and the flesh, I should have been a wise man; but the first year, from unfortunately buying in bad seed; the second from a late harvest, we lost half of both our crops. This overset all my wisdom, and I returned like the dog to his vomit, and the sow that was washed to her wallowing in the mire.'

That this resolution was not just taken in a repentant mood merely to be forgotten again in a month's time, Gilbert bears convincing testimony. 'My brother's allowance and mine was £7 per annum each, and during the whole time this family concern lasted, which was four years, as well as during the preceding period at Lochlea, his expenses never in any one year exceeded his slender income. His temperance and frugality were everything that could be wished.'

Honest, however, as Burns's resolution was, it was not to be expected that he would—or, indeed, could—give up the practice of poetry, or cease to indulge in dreams of after-greatness. Poetry, as he has already told us, had become the spontaneous expression of his heart. It was his natural speech. His thoughts appeared almost to demand poetry as their proper vehicle of expression, and rhythmed into verse as inevitably as in chemistry certain solutions solidify in crystals. Besides this, Burns was conscious of his abilities. He had measured himself with his fellows, and knew his superiority. More than likely he had been measuring himself with the writers he had studied, and found himself not inferior. The great misfortune of his life, as he confessed himself, was never to havean aim. He had felt early some stirrings of ambition, but they were like gropings of Homer's Cyclops round the walls of his cave. Now, however, we have come to a period of his life when he certainly did have an aim, but necessity compelled him to renounce it as soon as it was recognised. It was not a question of ploughing or poetry. There was no alternative. However insidiously inclination might whisper of poetry, duty's voice called him to the fields, and that voice he determined to obey. Reading farming books and calculating crops is not a likely road to perfection in poetry. Yet, in spite of all noble resolution, the voice of Poesy was sweet, and he could not shut his ears to it. He might sing a song to himself, even though it were but to cheer him after the labours of the day, and he sang of love in 'the genuine language of his heart.'

'There's nought but care on every hand,In every hour that passes, O:What signifies the life o' man,An' 'twere na for the lasses, O?'

For song must come in spite of him. The caged lark sings, though its field be but a withered sod, and the sky above it a square foot of green baize. Nor was his commonplace book neglected; and in August we come upon an entry which shows that poetical aspirations were again possessing him; this time not to be cast forth, either at the timorous voice of Prudence or the importunate bidding of Poverty. Burns has calmly and critically taken stock—so to speak—of his literary aptitudes and abilities, and recognised his fitness for a place in the ranks of Scotland's poets. 'However I am pleased with the works of our Scotch poets, particularly the excellent Ramsay, and the still more excellentFergusson, yet I am hurt to see other places of Scotland, their towns, rivers, woods, haughs, etc., immortalised in such celebrated performances, whilst my dear native country, the ancient Bailieries of Carrick, Kyle, and Cunningham, famous both in ancient and modern times for a gallant and warlike race of inhabitants; a country where civil and particularly religious liberty have ever found their first support and their last asylum, a country the birthplace of many famous philosophers, soldiers, and statesmen, and the scene of many important events in Scottish history, particularly a great many of the actions of the glorious Wallace, the saviour of his country; yet we have never had one Scottish poet of any eminence to make the fertile banks of Irvine, the romantic woodlands and sequestered scenes of Aire, and the heathy mountainous source and winding sweep of Doon, emulate Tay, Forth, Ettrick, Tweed, etc. This is a complaint I would gladly remedy; but, alas! I am far unequal to the task, both in native genius and education. Obscure I am, and obscure I must be, though no young poet nor young soldier's heart ever beat more fondly for fame than mine.' The same thoughts and aspirations are echoed later in hisEpistle to William Simpson—

'Ramsay and famous FergussonGied Forth and Tay a lift aboon;Yarrow and Tweed, to mony a tune,Owre Scotland rings,While Irwin, Lugar, Ayr, and Doon,Naebody sings.. . . . . .We'll gar our streams and burnies shineUp wi' the best!'

'Ramsay and famous FergussonGied Forth and Tay a lift aboon;Yarrow and Tweed, to mony a tune,Owre Scotland rings,While Irwin, Lugar, Ayr, and Doon,Naebody sings.

. . . . . .

We'll gar our streams and burnies shineUp wi' the best!'

The dread of obscurity spoken of here was almost a weakness with Burns. We hear it like an ever-recurring wail in his poems and letters. In the very next entry in his commonplace book, after praising the old bards, and drawing a parallel between their sources of inspiration and his own, he shudders to think that his fate may be such as theirs. 'Oh mortifying to a bard's vanity, their very names are buried in the wreck of things that were!'

Close on the heels of these entries came troubles on the head of the luckless poet, troubles more serious than bad seed and late harvests. During the summer of 1784, we know that he was in bad health, and again subject to melancholy. His verses at this time are of a religious cast, serious and sombre, the confession of fault, and the cry of repentance.

'Thou know'st that Thou hast formèd meWith passions wild and strong;And listening to their witching voiceHas often led me wrong.'

Perhaps this is only the prelude to his verses to Rankine, written towards the close of the year, and his poem,A Poet's Welcome. They must at least be all read together, if we are to have any clear conception of the nature of Burns. It is not enough to select hisEpistle to Rankine, and speak of its unbecoming levity. This was the time when Burns was first subjected to ecclesiastical discipline; and some of his biographers have tried to trace the origin of that wonderful series of satires, written shortly afterwards, to the vengeful feelings engendered in the poet by this degradation. But Burns's attack on the effete and corrupt ceremonials of the Church was not a burst of personal rancour and bitterness.The attack came of something far deeper and nobler, and was bound to be delivered sooner or later. His own personal experience, and the experience of his worthy landlord, Gavin Hamilton, may have given the occasion, but the cause of the attack was in the Church itself, and in Burns's inborn loathing of humbug, hypocrisy, and cant.

Well was it the satires were written by so powerful a satirist, that the Church purged itself of the evil thing and cleansed its ways. This, however, is an episode of such importance in the life of Burns, and in the religious history of Scotland, as to require to be taken up carefully and considered by itself.

Before we can clearly see and understand Burns's attitude to the Church, we must have studied the nature of the man himself, and we must know something also of his religious training. It will not be enough to select his series of satires, and, from a study of them alone, try to make out the character of the man. His previous life must be known; the natural bent of his mind apprehended, and once that is grasped, these satires will appeal to the heart and understanding of the reader with a sense of naturalness and expectedness. They are as inevitable as his love lyrics, and are read with the conviction that his merciless exposure of profanity masquerading in the habiliments of religion, was part of the life-work and mission of this great poet. He had been born, it is recognised, not only to sing the loves and joys and sorrows of his fellow men and women, but to purge their lives of grossness, and their religion of the filth of hypocrisy and cant. Let it be admitted, that he himself went 'a kennin wrang.' What argument is there? We do not deny the divine mission of Samson because of Delilah. Surely that giant's life was a wasted one, yet in his very death he was true to his mission, and fulfilled the purpose of his birth. In other lands and inother times the satirist is recognised and his work appraised; the abuses he scourged, the pretensions he ridiculed, are seen in all their hideousness; but when a great satirist arises amongst ourselves to probe the ulcers of pharisaism, he is banned as a profaner of holy things, touching with impious hands the ark of the covenant. Why should thecloth—as it is so ingenuously called—be touched with delicate hands, unless it be that it is shoddy? Yet the man who would stand well in the eyes of society must not whisper a word against pharisaism; for the Pharisee is a highly respectable person, and observes the proprieties; he typifies the conventional righteousness and religion of his time.

Let us have done with all this timidity and coward tenderness. If the Church is filthy, it must be cleansed; if there be money-changers within its gates, let them be driven out with a whip of small cords. This awe of thecloth, not yet stamped out in Scotland, is but the remains of a pagan superstition, and has nothing to do with the manliness and courage of true religion. But prophets have no honour in their own country, rarely in their own time; they have ever been persecuted, and it is the Church's martyrs that have handed down through the ages the light of the world.

The profanities and religious blasphemies Burns attacked were evils insidious and poisonous, eating to the very heart of the religious life of the country, and they required a desperate remedy. Let us be thankful that the remedy was applied in time; and, looking to the righteousness he wrought, let us bless the name of Burns.

Burns's father, stern and severe moralist as he was,was not a strict Calvinist. Anyone who takes the trouble to read 'The Manual of Religious Belief in a Dialogue between Father and Son, compiled by William Burness, Farmer, Mount Oliphant, and transcribed with Grammatical Corrections by John Murdoch, Teacher,' will see that the man was of too loving and kindly a nature to be strictly orthodox. What was rigid and unlovely to him in the Calvinism of the Scottish Church of that day has been here softened down into something not very far from Arminianism. He had had a hard experience in the world himself, and that may have drawn him nearer to his suffering fellow-men and into closer communion with his God. He had learned that religion is a thing of the spirit, and not a matter of creeds and catechisms. Of Robert Burns's own religion it would be impertinent to inquire too curiously. The religion of a man is not to be paraded before the public like the manifesto of a party politician. After all, is there a single man who can sincerely, without equivocation or mental reservation, label himself Calvinist, Arminian, Socinian, or Pelagian? If there be, his mind must be a marvel of mathematical nicety and nothing more. All that we need know of Burns is that he was naturally and sincerely religious; that he worshipped an all-loving Father, and believed in an ever-present God; that his charity was boundless; that he loved what was good and true, and hated with an indignant hatred whatever was loathsome and false. He loved greatly his fellow-creatures, man and beast and flower; he could even find something to pity in the fate of the devil himself. That he was not orthodox, in the narrow interpretation of orthodoxy in hisday, we are well enough aware, else had he not been the poet we love and cherish.

In his early days at Mount Oliphant there is a hint of these later satires. 'Polemical divinity about this time was,' he says, 'putting the country half-mad, and I, ambitious of shining on Sundays, between sermons, in conversation parties, at funerals, etc., in a few years more, used to puzzle Calvinism with so much heat and indiscretion that I raised a hue and cry of heresy against me, which has not ceased to this hour.' And heresy is a terrible cry to raise against a man in Scotland. In those days it was Anathema-maranatha; even now it is still the war-slogan of the Assemblies.

The polemical divinity which he refers to as putting the country half-mad was the wordy war that was being carried on at that time between the Auld Lights and the New Lights. These New Lights, as they were called, were but a birth of the social and religious upheaval that was going on in Scotland and elsewhere. The spirit of revolution was abroad; in France it became acutely political; in Scotland there was a desire for greater religious freedom. The Church, as reformed by Knox, was requiring to be re-reformed. The yoke of papacy had been lifted certainly, but the yoke of pseudo-Protestantism which had taken its place was quite as heavy on the necks of the people. So long as it had been new; so long as it had been of their own choosing, it had been endured willingly. But a generation was springing up—stiff-necked they might have been called, in that they fretted under the yoke of their fathers—that sought to be delivered from the tyranny of their pastors and the fossilised formalism of their creed. Tothe people in their bondage a prophet was born, and that prophet was Robert Burns.

It was natural that a man of Burns's temperament and clearness of perception should be on the side of the 'common-sense' party. In one of his letters to Mr. James Burness, Montrose, wherein he describes the strange doings of a strange sect called the Buchanites,—surely in itself a convincing proof of the degeneracy of the times in the matter of religion,—we have an interesting reflection which gives us some insight into the poet's mind. 'This, my dear Sir, is one of the many instances of the folly in leaving the guidance of sound reason and common sense in matters of religion. Whenever we neglect or despise those sacred monitors, the whimsical notions of a perturbed brain are taken for the immediate influences of the Deity, and the wildest fanaticism and the most inconsistent absurdities will meet with abettors and converts. Nay, I have often thought that the more out of the way and ridiculous their fancies are, if once they are sanctified under the name of religion, the unhappy, mistaken votaries are the more firmly glued to them.'

The man who wrote that was certainly not the man, when the day of battle came, to join himself with the orthodox party, the party that stuck to the pure, undiluted Puritanism of Covenanting times. Yet many biographers have not seen the bearing that such a letter has on Burns's attitude to the Church. Principal Shairp seems to say that Burns, had it not been for the accident of ecclesiastical discipline to which he had been subjected, would have joined the orthodox party. The notion is absurd. Burns had attacked orthodox Calvinismeven in his boyhood, and was already tainted with heresy. 'These men,' the worthy Principal informs us, 'were democratic in their ecclesiastical views, and stout protesters against patronage. All Burns's instincts would naturally have been on the side of those who wished to resist patronage and "cowe the lairds" had not this, his natural tendency, been counteracted by a stronger bias drawing him in an opposite direction.' This is a narrowing—if not even a positive misconception—of the case with a vengeance. The question was not of patronage at all, but of moral and religious freedom; while the democracy of those ministers was a terribly one-sided democracy. The lairds may have dubbed them democrats, but they were aristocratic enough, despotic even, to their herds. But Principal Shairp has been led altogether wrong by imagining that 'Burns, smarting under the strict church discipline, naturally threw himself into the arms of the opposite or New Light party, who were more easy in their life and in their doctrine.' More charitable also, and Christ-like in their judgments, I should fain hope; less blinded by a superstitious awe of the Church. 'Nothing could have been more unfortunate,' he continues, 'than that in this crisis of his career he should have fallen into intimacy with those hard-headed but coarse-minded men.' Surely this zeal for the Church has carried him too far. Were these men all coarse minded? Nobody believes it. The coarse-minded Dr. Dalrymple of Ayr, and the coarse-minded Mr. Lawrie of Loudon! This is not argument. Besides, it is perfectly gratuitous. The question, again, is not one of men—that ecclesiastical discipline has been an offence and a stumbling-block—eithercoarse minded or otherwise. It is a question of principle, and Burns fought for it with keen-edged weapons.

It would be altogether a mistake to identify Burns with the New Light party, or with any other sect. He was a law unto himself in religion, and would bind himself by no creed. Because he attacked rigid orthodoxy as upheld by Auld Light doctrine, that does not at all mean that he was espousing, through thick and thin, the cause of the New Light party. He fought in his own name, with his own weapons, and for humanity. It ought to be clearly understood that in his series of satires he was not attacking the orthodoxy of the Auld Lights from the bulwarks of any other creed. His criticism was altogether destructive. From his own conception of a wise and loving God he satirised what he conceived to be their irrational and inhuman conception of Deity, whose attitude towards mankind was assuredly not that of a father to his children. Burns's God was a God of love; the god they worshipped was the creation of their creed, a god of election. It is quite true that Burns made many friends amongst the New Lights, but we are certain he did not hold by all their tenets or subscribe to their doctrine. In theDictionary of National Biographywe read: 'Burns represented the revolt of a virile and imaginative nature against a system of belief and practice which, as he judged, had degenerated into mere bigotry and pharisaism.... That Burns, like Carlyle, who at once retained the sentiment and rejected the creed of his race more decidedly than Burns, could sympathise with the higher religious sentiments of his class is proved byThe Cotter's Saturday Night.'

Principal Shairp, however, has not seen the matter in this broad light. All he sees is a man of keen insight and vigorous powers of reasoning, who 'has not only his own quarrel with the parish minister and the stricter clergy to revenge, but the quarrel also of his friend and landlord, Gavin Hamilton, a county lawyer who had fallen under church censure for neglect of church ordinances,'—a question of new potatoes in fact,—'and had been debarred from the communion.'

It is pleasing to see that the academic spirit is not always so blinding and blighting. Professor Blackie recognises that the abuses Burns castigated were real abuses, and admits that the verdict of time has been in his favour. 'In the case ofHoly WillieandThe Holy Fair,' he remarks, 'the lash was wisely and effectively wielded'; and on another occasion he wrote, 'Though a sensitive pious mind will naturally shrink from the bold exposure of devout abuses in holy things, inThe Holy Fairand other similar satires, on a broad view of the matter we cannot but think that the castigation was reasonable, and the man who did it showed an amount of independence, frankness, and moral courage that amply compensates for the rudeness of the assault.'

Rude, the assault certainly was and overwhelming. Augean stables are not to be cleansed with a spray of rose-water.

Lockhart, whilst recognising the force and keenness of these satires, has regretfully pointed out that the very things Burns satirised were part of the same religious system which produced the scenes described inThe Cotter's Saturday Night. But is this not really the explanation of the whole matter? It was just becauseBurns had seen the beauty of true religion at home, that he was fired to fight to the death what was false and rotten. It was the cause of true religion that he espoused.

'All hail religion! Maid divine,Pardon a muse so mean as mine,Who in her rough imperfect lineThus dares to name thee.To stigmatise false friends of thineCan ne'er defame thee.'

Compare the reading of the sacred page, when the family is gathered round the ingle, and 'the sire turns o'er with patriarchal grace the big ha'-bible' and 'wales a portion with judicious care,' with the reading ofPeebles frae the Water fit—

'See, up he's got the word o' God,And meek and mim has viewed it.'

What a contrast! The two readings are as far apart as is heaven from hell, as far as the true from the false. It is strange that both Lockhart and Shairp should have stumbled on the explanation of Burns's righteous satire in these poems; should have been so near it, and yet have missed it. It was just because Burns could writeThe Cotter's Saturday Nightthat he could writeThe Holy Tulzie,Holy Willie's Prayer,The Ordination, andThe Holy Fair. Had he not felt the beauty of that family worship at home; had he not seen the purity and holiness of true religion, how could such scenes as those described inThe Holy Fair, or such hypocrisy as Holy Willie's, ever have moved him to scathing satire? Where was the poet's indignation tocome from? That is not to be got by tricks of rhyme or manufactured by rules of metre; but let it be alive and burning in the heart of the poet, and all else will be added unto him for the perfect poem, as it was to Burns. That Burns, though he wrote in humorous satire, was moved to the writing by indignation, he tells us in his epistle to the Rev. John M'Math—

'But I gae mad at their grimaces,Their sighin', cantin', grace-prood faces,Their three-mile prayers, and half-mile graces,Their raxin' conscience,Whase greed, revenge, and pride disgracesWaur nor their nonsense.'

The first of Burns's satires, if we except his epistle to John Goudie, wherein we have a hint of the acute differences of the time, is his poemThe Twa Herds, orThe Holy Tulzie. The two herds were the Rev. John Russell and the Rev. Alexander Moodie, both afterwards mentioned inThe Holy Fair. These reverend gentlemen, so long sworn friends, bound by a common bond of enmity against a certain New Light minister of the name of Lindsay, 'had a bitter black outcast,' and, in the words of Lockhart, 'abused each othercoram populowith a fiery virulence of personal invective such as has long been banished from all popular assemblies.' This degrading spectacle of two priests ordained to preach the gospel of love, attacking each other with all the rancour of malice and uncharitableness, and foaming with the passion of a pothouse, was too flagrant an occasion for satire for Burns to miss. He held them up to ridicule inThe Holy Tulzie, and showed them themselves as others saw them. It has been objectedby some that Burns made use of humorous satire; did not censure with the fiery fervour of a righteous indignation. Burns used the weapon he could handle best; and a powerful weapon it is in the hands of a master. We acknowledge Horace's satires to be scathing enough, though they are light and delicate, almost trifling and flippant at times. He has not the volcanic utterance of Juvenal, but I doubt not his castigations were quite as effective. 'Quamquam ridentem dicere verum quid vetat?' Burns might have well replied to his censors with the same question. Quick on the heels of this poem cameHoly Willie's Prayer, wherein he took up the cudgels for his friend, Mr. Gavin Hamilton, and fought for him in his own enthusiastic way. The satire here is so scathing and scarifying that we can only read and wonder, shuddering the while for the wretched creature so pitilessly flayed. Not a word is wasted; not a line without weight. The character of the self-righteous, sensual, spiteful Pharisee is a merciless exposure, and, hardest of all, the picture is convincing. For Burns believed in his own mind that these men, Holy Willie and the crew he typified, were thoroughly dishonest. They were not in his judgment—and Burns had keen insight—mere bigots dehumanised by their creed, but a pack of scheming, calculating scoundrels.

'They take religion in their mouth,They talk o' mercy, grace, and truth,For what? to gie their malice skouthOn some puir wight,And hunt him down, o'er right and ruthTo ruin straight.'

But it must be noted inHoly Williethat the poet isnot letting himself out in a burst of personal spleen. He is again girding at the rigidity of a lopped and maimed Calvinism, and attacking the creed through the man. The poem is a living presentment of the undiluted, puritanic doctrine of the Auld Light party, to whom Calvinism meant only a belief in hell and an assurance of their own election. It is evident that Burns was not sound on either essential.The Address to the Unco Guidis a natural sequel to this poem, and, in a sense, its culmination. There is the same strength of satire, but now it is more delicate and the language more dignified. There is the same condemnation of pharisaism; but the poem rises to a higher level in its appeal for charitable views of human frailty, and its kindly counsel to silence; judgment is to be left to Him who

'Knows each cord, its various tone,Each spring its various bias.'

Of all the series of satires, however,The Holy Fairis the most remarkable. It is in a sense a summing up of all the others that preceded it. The picture it gives of the mixed and motley multitude fairing in the churchyard at Mauchline, with a relay of ministerial mountebanks catering for their excitement, is true to the life. It is begging the question to deplore that Burns was provoked to such an attack. The scene was provocation sufficient to any right-thinking man who associated the name of religion with all that was good and beautiful and true. Such a state of things demanded reformation. The churchyard—that holy ground on which the church was built and sanctified by the dust of pious and saintly men—cried aloud against the desecration to which itwas subjected; and Burns, who alone had the power to purify it from such profanities, would have been untrue to himself and a traitor to the religion of his country had he merely shrugged his shoulders and allowed things to go on as they were going. And after all what was the result? For the poem is part and parcel of the end it achieved. 'There is a general feeling in Ayrshire,' says Chambers, 'thatThe Holy Fairwas attended with a good effect; for since its appearance the custom of resorting to the occasion in neighbouring parishes for the sake of holiday-making has been much abated and a great increase of decorous observance has taken place.' To that nothing more need be added.

In this series of satiresThe Address to the Deilought also to be included. Burns had no belief at all in that Frankenstein creation. It was too bad, he thought, to invent such a monster for the express purpose of imputing to him all the wickedness of the world. If such a creature existed, he was rather sorry for the maligned character, and inclined to think that there might be mercy even for him.

'I'm wae to think upon yon den,Even for your sake.'

Speaking of this address, Auguste Angellier says: 'All at once in their homely speech they heard the devil addressed not only without awe, but with a spice of good-fellowship and friendly familiarity. They had never heard the devil spoken of in this tone before. It was a charming address, jocund, full of raillery and good-humour, with a dash of friendliness, as if the two speakers had been cronies and companions ready to jog alongarm in arm to the nether regions. He simply laughs Satan out of countenance, turns him to ridicule, pokes his fun at him, scolds and defies him just as he might have treated a person from whom he had nothing to fear. Nor is that all. He must admonish him, tell him he has been naughty long enough, and wind up by giving him some good advice, counselling him to mend his ways. This was certainly without theological precedent. It was, however, a simple idea which would have arranged matters splendidly.... Even to-day to speak well of the devil is an abomination almost as serious as to speak evil of the Deity. There was assuredly a great fortitude of mind as well as daring of conduct to write such a piece as this.'

The poem has done more than anything else to kill the devil of superstition in Scotland. After his death he found, it is averred, a quiet resting-place in Kirkcaldy, where pious people have built a church on his grave.

When Burns later in life made the witches and warlocks dance to the piping of the devil in Alloway's auld haunted kirk, he was but assembling them in their fit and proper house of meeting. Here had they been called into being; here had they the still-born children of superstition been thrashed into life and trained in unholiness. One can imagine them oozing out from the walls that had echoed their names so often through centuries of Sabbath days. The devil himself, by virtue of his rank, takes his place in the east, rising we have no doubt from the very spot on which the pulpit once had stood. In the church had superstition exorcised this hellish legion out of the dead mass of ignorance into the swarming maggots that batten on corruption; and it wasin accordance with the eternal fitness of things that here their spirits should abide, and, when they took bodily shape, that they should assume the form and feature in which their mother Superstition had conceived them.

Upon the holy table too lay 'twa span-lang wee unchristened bairns.' For this hell the poet pictures is the creation of a creed that throngs it with the souls of innocent babes. 'Suffer little children to come unto me,' Christ had said; 'for of such is the kingdom of heaven.' 'But unbaptized children must come unto me,' the devil of superstition said; 'for of such is the kingdom of hell.'

What pathos is in this line of Burns! There is in its slow spondaic movement an eternity of tears. Could satire or sermon have shown more forcibly the revolting inhumanity of a doctrine upheld as divine? Yet were there devout men, in other things gentle and loving and charitable, who preached this as the law of a loving God. With one stroke of genius they were brought face to face with the logical sequence of their barbarous teaching, and that without a word of coarseness or a touch of caricature.

Only once again did Burns return to this attack on bigotry and superstition, and that was when he was induced to fight for Dr. Macgill inThe Kirk's Alarm. But he had done his part in the series of satires of this year to expose the loathsomeness of hypocrisy and to purge holy places and the most solemn ceremonies of what was blasphemous and grossly profane. That in this Burns was fulfilling a part of his mission as a poet, we can hardly doubt; and that his work wrought for righteousness, the purer religious life that followedamply proves. The true poet is also a prophet; and Robert Burns was a prophet when he spoke forth boldly and fearlessly the truth that was in him, and dared to say that sensuality was foul even in an elder of the kirk, and that profanities were abhorred of God even though sanctioned and sanctified under the sacred name of religion.

The Holy Tulziehad been written probably in April 1785, and the greatest of the satires,The Holy Fair, is dated August of the same year. It may, however, have been only drafted, and partly written, when the recent celebration of the sacrament at Mauchline was fresh in the poet's mind. At the very latest, it must have been taken up, completed, and perfected, in the early months of 1786. That is a period of some ten months between the first and the last of this series of satires; and during that time he had composedHoly Willie's Prayer,The Address to the Deil,The Ordination, andThe Address to the Unco Guid. But this represents a very small part of the poetry written by Burns during this busy period. From the spring of 1785 on to the autumn of 1786 was a time of great productiveness in his life, a productiveness unparalleled in the life of any other poet. If, according to Gilbert, the seven years of their stay at Lochlea were not marked by much literary improvement in his brother, we take it that the poet had been 'lying fallow' all those years; and what a rich harvest do we have now! Here, indeed, was a reward worth waiting for. To read over the names of the poems, songs, and epistles written within such a short space of time amazes us. And thereis hardly a poem in the whole collection without a claim to literary excellence. A month or two previous to the composition of his first satire he had written what Gilbert calls his first poem,The Epistle to Davie, 'a brother poet, lover, ploughman, and fiddler.' It is worthy of notice that, in the opening lines of this poem—

'While winds frae aff Ben Lomond blaw,And bar the doors wi' driving snaw,And hing us ower the ingle'—

we see the poet and his surroundings, as he sets himself down to write. He plunges, as Horace advises, inmedias res, and we have the atmosphere of the poem in the first phrase. This is Burns's usual way of beginning his poems and epistles, as well as a great many of his songs. The metre of this poem Burns has evidently taken fromThe Cherry and the Slae, by Alexander Montgomery, which he must have read in Ramsay'sEvergreen. The stanza is rather complicated, although Burns, with his extraordinary command and pliancy of language, uses it from the first with masterly ease. But there is much more than mere jugglery of words in the poem. Indeed, such is this poet's seeming simplicity of speech that his masterly manipulation of metres always comes as an afterthought. It never disturbs us in our first reading of the poem. Gilbert's opinion of this poem is worth recording, the more especially as he expressly tells us that the first idea of Robert's becoming an author was started on this occasion. 'I thought it,' he says, 'at least equal to, if not superior, to many of Allan Ramsay's epistles, and that the merit of these and much other Scottish poetry seemed to consist principally in the knackof the expression; but here there was a strain of interesting sentiment, and the Scotticism of the language scarcely seemed affected, but appeared to be the natural language of the poet.' It startles us to hear Gilbert talking thus of the Scotticism, after having heard so much of Robert Burns writing naturally in the speech of his home and county. In this poem we have, at least, the first proof of that graphic power in which Burns has never been excelled, and in it we have the earliest mention of his Bonnie Jean. In his next poem,Death and Dr. Hornbook, his command of language and artistic phrasing are more apparent, while pawky humour and genial satire sparkle and flash from every line. The poem is written in that form of verse which Burns has made particularly his own. He had become acquainted with it, it is most likely, in the writings of Fergusson, Ramsay, and Gilbertfield, who had used it chiefly for comic subjects; but Burns showed that, in his hands at least, it could be made the vehicle of the most pensive and tender feeling. In an interesting note to theCentenary Burns, edited by Henley and Henderson, it is pointed out that 'the six-line stave in rime couée built on two rhymes,' was used by the Troubadours in theirChansons de Gestes, and that it dates at the very latest from the eleventh century. Burns's happiest use of it was in those epistles which about this time he began to dash off to some of his friends; and it is with these epistles that the uninterrupted stream of poetry of this season may be said properly to begin. Perhaps it was in the use of this stanza that Burns first discovered his command of rhymes and his felicity of phrasing. Certain it is, that after his first epistle to Lapraik, we have epistles, poems, songs, satires flowingfrom his pen, uninterrupted for a period, and apparently with marvellous ease. It has to be remembered, too, that he was now inspired by the dream of becoming an author—in print. When or where or how, had not been determined; but the idea was delightful all the same; the hope was inspiration itself. Some day his work would be published, and he would be read and talked about! He would have done something for poor auld Scotland's sake. The one thing now was to make the book, and to that he set himself deliberately. Poetry was at last to have its chance. Farming had been tried, with little success. The crops of 1784 had been a failure, and this year they were hardly more promising. In these discouraging circumstances the poet was naturally driven in upon himself. His eyes were turnedad intra, and he sought consolation in his Muse. He was conscious of some poetical ability, and he knew that his compositions were not destitute of merit. Poetry, too, was to him, and particularly so at this time, its own exceeding great reward. He rhymed 'for fun'; and probably he was finding in the exercise that excitement his passionate nature craved. Herein was his stimulant after the routine of farm-work—spiritless work that was little better than slavery, incessant and achieving nothing. We can imagine him in those days returning from the fields, 'forjesket, sair, with weary legs,' and becoming buoyant as soon as he has opened the drawer of that small deal table in the garret.

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