r and sweetness, with simple,
eager, gentle surprise--a gleam as of the morning star, looking forth
upon the wonder of a new-born world--altogether

A station like the herald Mercury,
New lighted on a heaven-kissing hill.

Bestow on such a man the wittiest and most winning eloquence--a rich
flow of spirits and fulness of health and life--a deep sense of
wonder and beauty in the earth and man--an instinct of the dynamic
and supernatural laws which underlie and vivify this material
universe and its appearances, healthy, yet irregular and
unscientific, all but superstitious--turn him loose in any country in
Europe, during the latter half of the eighteenth century, and it will
not be difficult, alas! to cast his horoscope.

And what an age in which to be turned loose!--for loose he must go,
to solve the problem of existence for himself. The grand simple old
Scottish education which he got from his parents must prove narrow
and unsatisfying for so rich and manifold a character; not because it
was in itself imperfect; not because it did not contain implicitly
all things necessary for his "salvation"--in every sense, all laws
which he might require for his after-life guidance; but because it
contained so much of them as yet only implicitly; because it was not
yet conscious of its own breadth and depth, and power of satisfying
the new doubts and cravings of such minds and such times as Burns's.
It may be that Burns was the devoted victim by whose fall it was to
be taught that it must awaken and expand and renew its youth in
shapes equally sound, but more complex and scientific. But it had
not done so then. And when Burns found himself gradually growing
beyond his father's teaching in one direction, and tempted beyond it
in another and a lower one, what was there in those times to take up
his education at the point where it had been left unfinished? He saw
around him in plenty animal good-nature and courage, barbaric honesty
and hospitality--more, perhaps, than he would see now; for the upward
progress into civilised excellences is sure to be balanced by some
loss of savage ones--but reckless, shallow, above all, drunken. It
was a hard-drinking, coarse, materialist age. The higher culture, of
Scotland especially, was all but exclusively French--not a good kind,
while Voltaire and Volney still remained unanswered, and "Les
Liaisons Dangereuses" were accepted by all young gentlemen, and a
great many young ladies who