any cases glasses were supplied so constructed that they had to be
drained at every toast. 'Occasional hard drinking,' he confessed to Mrs.
Dunlop, 'is the devil to me; against this I have again and again set my
resolution, and have greatly succeeded. Taverns I have totally
abandoned; it is the private parties in the family way among the
hard-drinking gentlemen of this county that do me the mischief; but even
this I have more than half given over.' Most assuredly whatever these
men charged against Robert Burns it was not drunkenness. But he has been
accused of mixing with low company! That is something nearer the mark,
and goes far to explain the aversion of those stately Tories. But again,
what is meant by low company? Are we to believe that the poet made
associates of depraved and abandoned men? Not for a moment! This low
company was nothing more than men in the rank of life into which he had
been born; mechanics, tradesmen, farmers, ploughmen, who did not move in
the aristocratic circles of patrician lairds or ministers ordained to
preach the gospel to the poor. It was simply the old, old cry of
'associating with publicans and sinners.'

We do not defend nor seek to hide the poet's aberrations; he confessed
them remorselessly, and condemned himself. But we do raise our voice
against the exaggeration of occasional over-indulgence into confirmed
debauchery; and dare assert that Burns was as sober a man as the average
lairds and ministers who had the courage of their prejudices, and wrote
themselves down asses to all posterity.

But here again the work the poet managed to do is a sufficient disproof
of his irregular life. He was at this time, besides working hard at his
Excise business, writing ballads and songs, correcting for Creech the
two-volume edition of his poems, and managing somehow or other to find
time for a pretty voluminous correspondence. His hands were full and his
days completely occupied. He would not have been an Excise officer very
long had he been unable to attend to his duties. William Wallace, the
editor of _Chambers's Burns_, has studied very carefully this period of
the poet's life, and found that in those days of petty faultfinding he
has not once been reprimanded, either for drunkenness or for dereliction
of duty. There were spies and informers about who would not have left
the Excise Commissioners uninformed of the paltriest charge they could
have trumped up against Burns. Nor is there, when w