national, and, therefore, in a certain sense, a privileged subject; which, in a perfect sense, he was not, until the controversial management of his reputation had irritated the public attention. Dr. Currie did not address the same alert condition of the public feeling, nor, by many hundred degrees, so diffused a condition of any feeling which might imperfectly exist, as a man must consciously address in these days, whether as the biographer or the critic of Burns. The lower-toned enthusiasm of the public was not of a quality to irritate any little enthusiasm which the worthy Doctor might have felt. The public of that day felt with regard to Burns exactly as with regard to Bloomfield--not that the quality of his poems was then the staple of the interest, but the extraordinary fact that a ploughman or a lady's shoemaker should have written The sole difference in the two cases, as any poems at all. regarded by the public of that day, was that Burns's case was terminated by a premature, and, for the public, a very sudden death this gave a personal interest to his case which was wanting in the other; and a direct result of this was that his executors were able to lay before the world a series of his letters recording his opinions upon a considerable variety of authors, and his feelings under many ordinary occasions of life.

Dr. Currie, therefore, if phlegmatic, as he certainly was, must be looked upon as upon a level with the public of his own day-a public how different, different by how many centuries, from the world of this present 1837 ! One thing I remember which powerfully illustrates the difference. Burns, as we all know, with his peculiarly wild and almost ferocious spirit of independence, came a generation too soon. In this day, he would have been forced to do that, clamorously called upon to do that, and would have found his pecuniary interest in doing that, which in his own generation merely to attempt doing loaded him with the reproach of Jacobinism. It must be remembered that the society of Liverpool wits on whom my retrospect is now glancing were all Whigs-all, indeed, fraternizers with French Republicanism. Yet so it was that not once, not twice, but daily almost, in the numerous conversations naturally elicited by this Liverpool monument to Burns's memory—I

heard every one, clerk or layman, heartily agreeing to tax Burns with ingratitude and with pride falsely directed, because he sate uneasily or restively under the bridle-hand of his noble self-called "patrons.” Aristocracy, then, the essential spirit of aristocracy—this I found was not less erect and clamorous amongst partisan democrats-democrats who were such merely in a party sense of supporting his Majesty's Opposition against his Majesty's Servants-than it was or could be among the most bigoted of the professed feudal aristocrats. For my part, at this moment, when all the world was reading Currie's monument to the memory of Burns and the support of his family, I felt and avowed my feeling most loudly-that Burns was wronged, was deeply, memorably wronged. A £10 bank note, by way of subscription for a few copies of an early edition of his poems— this is the outside that I could ever see proof given of Burns having received anything in the way of patronage; and doubtless this would have been gladly returned, but from the dire necessity of dissembling.

Lord Glencairn is the "patron" for whom Burns appears to have felt the most sincere respect. Yet even he did he give him more than a seat at his dinner table? Lord Buchan again, whose liberalities are by this time pretty well appreciated in Scotland, exhorts Burns, in a tone of one preaching upon a primary duty of life, to exemplary gratitude towards a person who had given him absolutely nothing at all. The man has not yet lived to whose happiness it was more essential that he should live unencumbered by the sense of obligation; and, on the other hand, the man has not lived upon whose independence as professing benefactors so many people practised, or who found so many others ready to ratify and give value to their pretences.1 Him, whom

1 Jacobinism—although the seminal principle of all political evil in all ages alike of advanced civilization-is natural to the heart of man, and, in a qualified sense, may be meritorious. A good man, a high-minded man, in certain circumstances, must be a Jacobin in a certain sense. The aspect under which Burns's Jacobinism appears is striking there is a thought which an observing reader will find often recurring, which expresses its peculiar bitterness. It is this: the necessity which in old countries exists for the labourer humbly to beg permission that he may labour. To eat in the sweat of a man's

beyond most men nature had created with the necessity of conscious independence, all men besieged with the assurance that he was, must be, ought to be dependent; nay, that it was his primary duty to be grateful for his dependence. I have not looked into any edition of Burns, except once for a quotation, since this year 1801-when I read the whole of Currie's edition, and had opportunities of meeting the editor --and once subsequently, upon occasion of a fifth or supplementary volume being published. I know not, therefore, how this matter has been managed by succeeding editors, such as Allan Cunningham, far more capable of understanding Burns's situation, from the previous struggles of their own honourable lives, and Burns's feelings, from something of congenial power.

I, in this year, 1801, when in the company of Dr. Currie, did not forget, and, with some pride I say that I stood alone in remembering, the very remarkable position of Burns: not merely that, with his genius, and with the intellectual pretensions generally of his family, he should have been called to a life of early labour, and of labour unhappily not prosperous, but also that he, by accident about the proudest of human spirits, should have been by accident summoned, beyond all others, to eternal recognitions of some mysterious gratitude which he owed to some mysterious patrons little and great, whilst yet, of all men, perhaps, he reaped the least obvious or known benefit from any patronage that has ever been put on record. Most men, if they reap little from patronage, are liberated from the claims of patronage, or, if they are summoned to a galling dependency, have at least the fruits of their dependency. But it was this man's unhappy fate with an early and previous irritability on

brow-that is bad; and that is a curse, and pronounced such by God. But, when that is all, the labourer is by comparison happy. The second curse makes that a jest: he must sue, he must sneak, he must fawn like an Oriental slave, in order to win his fellow-man, in Burns's indignant words, "to give him leave to toil." That was the scorpion thought that was for ever shooting its sting into Burns's meditations, whether forward-looking or backward-looking; and, that considered, there arises a world of allowance for that vulgar bluster of independence which Lord Jeffrey, with so much apparent reason, charges upon his prose writings.

this very point-to find himself saddled, by his literary correspondents, with all that was odious in dependency, whilst he had every hardship to face that is most painful in unbefriended poverty.

On this view of the case, I talked, then, being a schoolboy, with and against the first editor of Burns :-I did not, and I do not, profess to admire the letters (that is, the prose), all or any, of Burns. I felt that they were liable to the charges of Lord Jeffrey, and to others beside; that they do not even express the natural vigour of Burns's mind, but are at once vulgar, tawdry, coarse, and commonplace; neither was I a person to affect any profound sympathy with the general character and temperament of Burns, which has often been described as "of the earth, earthy"—unspiritualanimal-beyond those of most men equally intellectual. But still I comprehended his situation; I had for ever ringing in my ears, during that summer of 1801, those groans which ascended to heaven from his over-burthened heart-those harrowing words, "To give him leave to toil," which record almost a reproach to the ordinances of God-and I felt that upon him, amongst all the children of labour, the primal curse had fallen heaviest and sunk deepest. Feelings such as these I had the courage to express: a personal compliment, or so, I might now and then hear; but all were against me on the matter. Dr. Currie said "Poor Burns! such notions had been his ruin"; Mr. Shepherd continued to draw from the subject some scoff or growl at Mr. Pitt and the Excise; the laughing tailor told us a good story of some proud beggar; Mr. Clarke proposed that I should write a Greek inscription for a cenotaph which he was to erect in his garden to the memory of Burns ;--and so passed away the solitary protestation on behalf of Burns's jacobinism, together with the wine and the roses, and the sea-breezes of that same Everton, in that same summer of 1801. Mr. Roscoe is dead, and has found time since then to be half forgotten; Dr. Currie, the physician, has been found". unable to heal himself"; Mr. Shepherd of Gatacre is a name and a shadow; Mr. Clarke is a shadow without a name; the tailor, who set the table in a roar, is dust and ashes; and three men at the most remain of all who in those convivial

meetings held it right to look down upon Burns as upon one whose spirit was rebellious overmuch against the institutions of man, and jacobinical in a sense which “ property" and master manufacturers will never brook, albeit democrats by profession.1

men of

1 De Quincey's strictures in this paper of 1837 on the Liverpool literary coterie of 1801 gave great offence in that town. The Liverpool papers attacked him for it; and Dr. Shepherd of Gatacre, apparently then the sole survivor of the coterie, addressed a letter of remonstrance to the editor of Tait's Magazine. It appeared in the number of the magazine for May 1837, with some editorial comments. "The question of which I have to treat," wrote Dr. Shepherd, "is a question of accuracy of recollection; and I am constrained to remark that, as, from the appellation by which, with an extraordinary kind of taste, Mr. De Quincey chooses to designate himself in his literary character, he seems to have been at one period of his life the slave of a deleterious drug, which shakes the nerves, and, inflaming the brain, impairs the memory, whilst I have avoided that poison even in its medical application, therefore my recollection is more likely to be correct that his." The letter proceeds to vindicate Dr. Currie, Mr. Roscoe, and the writer himself, from the charge of defective appreciation of the manly demeanour of Burns in his relations with the Scottish aristocracy and lairds; after which come some words of special self-defence of the writer in the matters of his political consistency and his jests at Hannah More. The letter altogether is destitute of effective point; and the editor of Tait was quite justified in standing by De Quincey. This is done in every particular of the offending paper, with this included sting: "It may tempt a smile from the few who are likely to trouble themselves about this foolish affair to find that, though solemnly assuming the office of advocategeneral for the other members of the extinct coterie, Dr. Shepherd, as well as the newspaper writers, has entirely overlooked the vivacious tailor celebrated by Mr. De Quincey, of whom we think none of his literary friends have the least reason to be ashamed." -The main matter of interest now in this little controversy of 1837 respects De Quincey's own estimate of Burns. Although he had taken up the cudgels for Burns in that particular in which he thought Dr. Currie and the rest of the Liverpool coterie of 1801, professed democrats though they were, had done Burns injustice,-viz. his spirit of manly independence and superiority to considerations of mere worldly rank,it remains true that De Quincey's own estimate of Burns all in all fell woefully beneath the proper mark. There are evidences of this in the present paper, and there are other evidences at different points of De Quincey's life. Wordsworth in this respect differed immensely from his friend De Quincey, and might have taught him better. In that letter of Wordsworth's which is referred to by De Quincey (ante, p. 131) precisely because it had deprecated the republication in 1816 of Dr. Currie's Life of Burns in 1800, how enthusiastic was the feeling