novels; nor can anything be more lamentable than that it should have found a patron in such a man as Burns and communicated to many of his productions a character of immorality, at once contemptible and hateful. It is humiliating to think how deeply Burns has fallen into this debasing He is perpetually making a parade of his thoughtlessness, inflammability, and impudence, and talking, with much complacency and exultation, of the offence he has occasioned to the sober and correct part of mankind."—Francis Jeffrey. error. "He carried conviviality to an excess, violated his own principles of virtue, and grafted license upon love."-Henry Ward Beecher. "You [Burns] combined in certain of your letters a libertine theory with your practice, you poured out in your song and raptures your shame and your scorn."—Andrew Lang. "Burns was as free of action as he was of words; broad jests crop up freely in his verses. He calls himself an unregenerate heathen, and he is right.. It seems to me women. that by his nature he was in love with all It was the excess of sap which overflowed within him and soiled the bark. Doubtless he did not boast of these excesses, he rather repented of them."-Taine. "Burns could hardly have described the excesses of mad, hairbrained, roaring mirth and convivial indulgence, which is the soul of it, if he himself had not ‘drunk full oftener of the tun than of the well.'"-William Hazlitt. "To the ill-starred Burns was given the power of making man's life more venerable, but that of wisely guiding his own life was not given. Destiny-for so in our ignorance we must speak his faults, the faults of others, proved too hard for him; and that spirit which might have soared, could it but have walked, soon sank to the dust, its glorious faculties trodden under foot in the blossom, and died, we may almost say, without ever having lived."-Carlyle. · "The magic of that countenance, making Burns at once tempter and tempted, may explain many a sad story."Charles Kingsley. ILLUSTRATIONS. "No churchman am I for to rail and to write, The peer I don't envy, I give him his bow; "Let other poets raise a fracas 'Bout vines an' wines, an' drunken Bacchus I sing the juice Scots bear can mak us, "What is title? what is treasure? With the ready trick and fable, Witness brighter scenes of love?" -The Jolly Beggars. II. Sublimity.-"Burns is one of those men who reach down to the perennial deeps, who take rank among the heroic men. He was born in a poor Ayrshire hut. The largest soul of all the British lands came among us in the shape of a hard-handed Scotch peasant. The hoar visage of winter delights him; he dwells with a sad and often-returning fondness on these scenes of solemn desolation; but the voice of the tempest becomes an anthem to his ears; he loves to walk in the sounding woods, for it raises his thoughts to him that walketh on the wings of the wind.' In his abasement, in his extreme need, he forgets not for a moment the majesty of poetry and manhood. But some beams from it [Burns's genius] did, by fits, pierce through; and it tinted those clouds with rainbow and orient colors into a glory and stern grandeur, which men silently gaze on with wonder and tears." — Carlyle. . "It ['The Cotter's Saturday Night'] is a noble and pathetic picture of human manners mingled with a fine religious awe. It comes over the mind like a slow and solemn strain of music. Repeatedly, in Burns's poems, we find touches of what the poet himself so finely calls the pathos and sublime of human life.'"-William Hazlitt. "He rises occasionally into a strain of beautiful description or lofty sentiment, far above the pitch of his original conception."-Francis Jeffrey. ILLUSTRATIONS. "The sweeping blast, the sky o'ercast, The joyless winter day, Let others fear, to me more dear Than all the pride of May: The tempest's howl it soothes my soul, My griefs it seems to join: The leafless trees my fancy please, Their fate resembles mine."-Winter. "O Thou, great Governor of all below! With that controlling power assist even me To rule their torrent in the allowed line: Oh, aid me with Thy help, omnipotence Divine.” -Stanzas on the Prospect of Death. "Ye holy walls that, still sublime, As through your ruins, hoar and gray- Crowd thick on Fancy's wondering eye, -Verses on the Ruins of Lincluden Abbey. COWPER, 1731-1800 at Biographical Outline. William Cowper, born Great Berkhampstead, November 26, 1731; father a clergyman and at one time chaplain to George II.; mother related to the poet Donne and descended indirectly from Henry II.; loses his mother at the age of six, a loss from which he never recovered; he is exceedingly timid and sensitive even as a child; soon after his mother's death Cowper is placed in the school of one Dr. Pitman, in Market Street, Hertfordshire, where he is abused and bullied by the older and stronger boys; he is removed from Dr. Pitman's school on account of inflammation of the eyes, caused, it is said, by excessive weeping, and is placed for two years in the home of an oculist; in 1741 he is placed in Westminster School, where he takes part in athletic sports and is less miserable than at Market Street; he studies Latin at Westminster under Vincent Bourne, to whom Cowper becomes attached; he becomes a good Latin scholar, and reads the "Iliad" and the 66 Odyssey" outside of school hours with a friend; he has Warren Hastings as a school-mate at Westminster; he writes his first poem, an imitation of Phillips's "Splendid Shilling," and helps his brother John, at Cambridge, to translate the "Henriade" in 1748, while still at Westminster; he leaves Westminster in 1748, spends nine months at his home in Great Berkhampstead, and is articled, in 1749, to one Chapman, a London attorney, with whom he remains three years, completing his articles; while in London Cowper frequently visits the home of his uncle, Ashley Cowper, with whose daughter Theodora he falls in love, and addresses to |