all his life on a voyage of discovery, but it does not appear
conclusively that he ever touched the happy isle. A man
brings to love a deal of ready-made sentiment, and even from
childhood obscurely prognosticates the symptoms of this vital
malady. Burns was formed for love; he had passion,
tenderness, and a singular bent in the direction; he could
foresee, with the intuition of an artist, what love ought to
be; and he could not conceive a worthy life without it. But
he had ill-fortune, and was besides so greedy after every
shadow of the true divinity, and so much the slave of a
strong temperament, that perhaps his nerve was relaxed and
his heart had lost the power of self-devotion before an
opportunity occurred. The circumstances of his youth
doubtless counted for something in the result. For the lads
of Ayrshire, as soon as the day's work was over and the
beasts were stabled, would take the road, it might be in a
winter tempest, and travel perhaps miles by moss and moorland
to spend an hour or two in courtship. Rule 10 of the
Bachelors' Club at Tarbolton provides that "every man proper
for a member of this Society must be a professed lover of ONE
OR MORE of the female sex." The rich, as Burns himself
points out, may have a choice of pleasurable occupations, but
these lads had nothing but their "cannie hour at e'en." It
was upon love and flirtation that this rustic society was
built; gallantry was the essence of life among the Ayrshire
hills as well as in the Court of Versailles; and the days
were distinguished from each other by love-letters, meetings,
tiffs, reconciliations, and expansions to the chosen
confidant, as in a comedy of Marivaux. Here was a field for
a man of Burns's indiscriminate personal ambition, where he