hee.'

Compare the reading of the sacred page, when the family is gathered
round the ingle, and 'the sire turns o'er with patriarchal grace the big
ha'-bible' and 'wales a portion with judicious care,' with the reading
of _Peebles frae the Water fit_--

'See, up he's got the word o' God,
And meek and mim has viewed it.'

What a contrast! The two readings are as far apart as is heaven from
hell, as far as the true from the false. It is strange that both
Lockhart and Shairp should have stumbled on the explanation of Burns's
righteous satire in these poems; should have been so near it, and yet
have missed it. It was just because Burns could write _The Cotter's
Saturday Night_ that he could write _The Holy Tulzie_, _Holy Willie's
Prayer_, _The Ordination_, and _The Holy Fair_. Had he not felt the
beauty of that family worship at home; had he not seen the purity and
holiness of true religion, how could such scenes as those described in
_The Holy Fair_, or such hypocrisy as Holy Willie's, ever have moved him
to scathing satire? Where was the poet's indignation to come from? That
is not to be got by tricks of rhyme or manufactured by rules of metre;
but let it be alive and burning in the heart of the poet, and all else
will be added unto him for the perfect poem, as it was to Burns. That
Burns, though he wrote in humorous satire, was moved to the writing by
indignation, he tells us in his epistle to the Rev. John M'Math--

'But I gae mad at their grimaces,
Their sighin', cantin', grace-prood faces,
Their three-mile prayers, and half-mile graces,
Their raxin' conscience,
Whase greed, revenge, and pride disgraces
Waur nor their nonsense.'

The first of Burns's satires, if we except his epistle to John Goudie,
wherein we have a hint of the acute differences of the time, is his poem
_The Twa Herds_, or _The Holy Tulzie_. The two herds were the Rev. John
Russell and the Rev. Alexander Moodie, both afterwards mentioned in _The
Holy Fair_. These reverend gentlemen, so long sworn friends, bound by a
common bond of enmity against a certain New Light minister of the name
of Lindsay, 'had a bitter black outcast,' and, in the words of Lockhart,
'abused each other _coram populo_ with a fiery virulence of personal
invective such as has long been banished from all popular assemblies.'
This degrading spectacle of two priests ordained to preach the gospel of
love, attacking eac