merry-making in the cottage?


"The luntin' pipe an' sneeshin' mill,
Are handed round wi' richt guid will;
The canty auld folks crackin' crouse,
The young anes rantin' through the house -
My heart has been sae fain to see them
That I for joy hae barkit wi' them."


It was this ardent power of sympathy that was fatal to so
many women, and, through Jean Armour, to himself at last.
His humour comes from him in a stream so deep and easy that I
will venture to call him the best of humorous poets. He
turns about in the midst to utter a noble sentiment or a
trenchant remark on human life, and the style changes and
rises to the occasion. I think it is Principal Shairp who
says, happily, that Burns would have been no Scotchman if he
had not loved to moralise; neither, may we add, would he have
been his father's son; but (what is worthy of note) his
moralisings are to a large extent the moral of his own
career. He was among the least impersonal of artists.
Except in the JOLLY BEGGARS, he shows no gleam of dramatic
instinct. Mr. Carlyle has complained that TAM O' SHANTER is,
from the absence of this quality, only a picturesque and
external piece of work; and I may add that in the TWA DOGS it
is precisely in the infringement of dramatic propriety that a
great deal of the humour of the speeches depends for its
existence and effect. Indeed, Burns was so full of his