XL.

TAM SAMSON'S ELEGY.[49]

"An honest man's the noblest work of God."

POPE.

[Tam Samson was a west country seedsman and sportsman, who loved a
good song, a social glass, and relished a shot so well that he
expressed a wish to die and be buried in the moors. On this hint Burns
wrote the Elegy: when Tam heard o' this he waited on the poet, caused
him to recite it, and expressed displeasure at being numbered with the
dead: the author, whose wit was as ready as his rhymes, added the Per
Contra in a moment, much to the delight of his friend. At his death
the four lines of Epitaph were cut on his gravestone. "This poem has
always," says Hogg, "been a great country favourite: it abounds with
happy expressions.

'In vain the burns cam' down like waters,
An acre braid.'

What a picture of a flooded burn! any other poet would have given us a
long description: Burns dashes it down at once in a style so graphic
no one can mistake it.

'Perhaps upon his mouldering breast