hem.

The remark applies alike to Beranger, who has been styled "The Burns
of France." Beranger was of the same bright incisive genius; he had
the same love of pleasure, the same love of popularity; and while he
flattered French vanity to the top of its bent, he also painted the
vices most loved by his countrymen with the pen of a master. Beranger's
songs and Thiers' History probably did more than anything else to
reestablish the Napoleonic dynasty in France. But that was a small evil
compared with the moral mischief which many of Beranger's songs are
calculated to produce; for, circulating freely as they do in French
households, they exhibit pictures of nastiness and vice, which are
enough to pollute and destroy a nation.

One of Burns's finest poems, written, in his twenty-eighth year, is
entitled 'A Bard's Epitaph.' It is a description, by anticipation, of
his own life. Wordsworth has said of it: "Here is a sincere and solemn
avowal; a public declaration from his own will; a confession at once
devout, poetical and human; a history in the shape of a prophecy." It
concludes with these lines:--

"Reader, attend--whether thy soul
Soars fancy's flights beyond the pole,
Or darkling grubs this earthly hole
In low pursuit;
Know--prudent, cautious self-control,
Is Wisdom's root."

One of the vices before which Burns fell--and it may be said to be
a master-vice, because it is productive of so many other vices--was
drinking. Not that he was a drunkard, but because he yielded to the
temptations of drink, with its degrading associations, and thereby
lowered and depraved his whole nature. [1513] But poor Burns did not stand
alone; for, alas! of all vices, the unrestrained appetite for drink was
in his time, as it continues to be now, the most prevalent, popular,
degrading, and destructive.

Were it possible to conceive the existence of a tyrant who should compel
his people to give up to him one-third or more of their earnings,
and require them at the same time to consume a commodity that should
brutalise and degrade them, destroy the peace and comfort of their
families, and sow in themselves the seeds of disease and premature
death--what indignation meetings, what monster processions there
would be! 'What eloquent speeches and apostrophes to the spirit
of liberty!--what appeals against a despotism so monstrous and so
unnatural! And yet such a