tune we could only
oppose hard labour and the most rigid economy. We lived very sparingly.
For several years butcher's meat was a stranger in the house, while all
the members of the family exerted themselves to the utmost of their
strength, and rather beyond it, in the labours of the farm. My brother,
at the age of thirteen, assisted in thrashing the crop of corn, and at
fifteen was the principal labourer on the farm; for we had no hired
servant, male or female. The anguish of mind we felt at our tender years
under these straits and difficulties was very great. To think of our
father growing old (for he was now above fifty), broken down with the
long-continued fatigues of his life, with a wife and five other
children, and in a declining state of circumstances, these reflections
produced in my brother's mind and mine sensations of the deepest
distress. I doubt not but the hard labour and sorrow of this period of
his life was in a great measure the cause of that depression of spirits
with which Robert was so often afflicted through his whole life
afterwards. At this time he was almost constantly afflicted in the
evenings with a dull headache, which at a future period of his life was
exchanged for a palpitation of the heart and a threatening of fainting
and suffocation in his bed in the night-time.'

This, we doubt not, is a true picture--melancholy, yet beautiful. But
not only did this increasing toil and worry to make both ends meet,
injure the bodily health of the poet, but it did harm to him in other
ways. It affected, to a certain extent, his moral nature. Those bursts
of bitterness which we find now and again in his poems, and more
frequently in his letters, are assuredly the natural outcome of these
unsocial and laborious years. Burns was a man of sturdy independence;
too often this independence became aggressive. He was a man of
marvellous keenness of perception; too frequently did this manifest
itself in a sulky suspicion, a harshness of judgment, and a bitterness
of speech. We say this in no spirit of fault-finding, but merely point
it out as a natural consequence of a wretched and leisureless existence.
This was the education of circumstances--hard enough in Burns's case;
and if it developed in him certain sterling qualities, gave him an
insight into and a sympathy with the lives of his struggling fellows, it
at the same time warped, to a certain extent, his moral nature.

What was his outlook on the world at t