way he visited several persons of celebrity, including the traveller Brydone, and at Jedburg was presented with the freedom of the town. July saw him with his family, at the farm at Mossgiel, which he left a few days after his arrival for Edinburgh, and a tour by Stirling and Inverary, on his way round to his home again. In the autumn, he journeyed along the eastern region by Inverness and Aberdeen, and the next year passed much of his time in Edinburgh, where he was for awhile under the care of a surgeon, in consequence of an injury to his knee from the overturning of a hackney coach. This gave him opportunity for reflection; he saw his prospects clouded and fell into the most gloomy forebodings. His half-wife, as she might be termed, Jean Armour, was again to become a mother, which provoked fresh unkindness on the part of her father, and brought about the formal ceremony of a marriage between her and the poet. Though he had become a regular contributor to the collection of Scottish songs published by James Johnson, in the plan of which, with its revival of the old national airs with appropriate adaptations of the old words or with new compositions, he took much interest, he does not seem to have looked to literature as a profession. Indeed, he contributed his poems to that work out of pure affection for the cause, without fee or reward. His thoughts were still turned to his former farming occupations as a means of livelihood. Concluding a negotia tion which had been for some time in progress, in the spring of 1788, he entered upon the possession of the new farm of Elliesland, in Dumfrieshire

where he was for many months em ployed in constructing a simple cottage, barely meeting the necessities of his mode of life. In December, he was joined by his wife and children, and early in the following year, occupied his new house. His success as a farmer, notwithstanding his earnest efforts, was not very encouraging. That required closer calculation and more methodical industry than were to be expected from the temperament and intellectual habits of the poet. He consequently was soon compelled to seek some additional means of living. While at Edinburgh, he had secured a commission in the excise department, which had given him some employment in the Ayr district; he was now appointed excise officer in the district in which he resided. While discharging these two-fold duties of farmer and exciseman, he was contributing songs to Johnson's collection and producing various minor occasional poems. An accidental visit to the region of the Engglish antiquary, Captain Grose, led to the composition of one of the most admired and perhaps the best known of his works, the tale of Tam O'Shanter. Grose with his comical obese figure was a humorist of the first water, abounding in anecdote and merry stories. Burns met him at a friend's house, was delighted with his social qualities, and took a pleasant view of the object of his journey, which was to sketch and describe the antiquities of the country. With some quizzing, there is a deal of kindly feeling in the poem which he wrote on this redoubtable knight errant's "peregrinations through Scotland."

Seeing these predilections, Burns bethought himself of the old kirk at Alloway, the familiar scene of his childhood and the burial place of his father, and suggested the old ruin as a suitable illustration for Grose's book, recommending it as the scene of various ghostly legends. The antiquarian promised to insert a sketch of the place if Burns would furnish a witch story to accompany it. This he undertook to do and Tam o' Shanter was the result, composed in one day while the poet was "crooning to himself" by the banks of the Nith, which ran by his abode. The poem, gathering up the humors of a life-time, the quintessence of many a study of provincial life, thus made its first appearance in Grose's Antiquities of Scotland. No one can think of the burly antiquarian without an emotion of gratitude for his having been the occasion of that poem; nor of the engraver, Johnson's, and its sequel George Thomson's enterprize, without recollecting what we incidentally owe to them for calling forth that wondrous series of Songs, familiarized in every Scottish and English household in the world, which should cover with a redeeming mantle of charity any errors of the poet's life. What a splendid galaxy in the literary heaven they form-the songs of Burns sacred to love and friendship, to patriotism and humanity, to history and common life, breathing the warmest

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affections, inspired by the noblest sentiments. Were it only for "Bruce's Address to his Army at Bannockburn," Scotland could never forget him; were it only for "John Anderson my Joe," the universal heart of home would take him to its embrace.

The ode commemorative of Bannockburn was written while the poet resided at Dumfries, his last place of abode, whither, having given up his farm of Elliesland as unprofitable, he had gone in 1791 to be engaged exclusively in the discharge of his duties as exciseman with an income which reached about seventy pounds a year. He passed his time here actively employed in his office, which did not prevent his partaking freely in such somewhat reckless convivialities as the society of the place afforded, doubtless to the prejudice of his health; and in engaging, not a little to the injury of any prospect of advancement in office he might have had, in the political fervors of the day in behalf of democratic liberty engendered by the enthusiasm of the French Revolution. In the autumn of 1795 he exhibited symp. toms of failing health, which increased at intervals during the ensuing months not without provocation from repeated indulgences, till, on the 21st of July, 1796, he breathed his last at his home in Dumfries. So fell at the age of thirty-seven the greatest of Scotland's poets.