re at the staff's end for at least one evening. You have not yet seen
my stone punch-bowl, nor my Tam o'Shanter, nor a hundred other fine
things beside. And yet, vile wretch that I am, I am sometimes so
unconscionable as to be unhappy with them all. But come along."

We spent this evening together with as much of happiness as it has ever
been my lot to enjoy. Never was there a fonder father than Burns, a more
attached husband, or a warmer friend. There was an exuberance of love
in his large heart, that encircled in its flow, relatives, friends,
associates, his country, the world; and, in his kinder moods, the
sympathetic influence which he exerted over the hearts of others seemed
magical. I laughed and cried this evening by turns; I was conscious of
a wider and warmer expansion of feeling than I had ever experienced
before; my very imagination seemed invigorated by breathing, as it were,
in the same atmosphere with his. We parted early next morning--and when
I again visited Dumfries, I went and wept over his grave. Forty years
have now passed since his death, and in that time many poets have arisen
to achieve a rapid and brilliant celebrity; but they seem the meteors of
a lower sky; the flush passes hastily from the expanse, and we see but
one great light looking steadily upon us from above. It is Burns who is
exclusively the poet of his country. Other writers inscribe their names
on the plaster which covers for the time the outside structure of
society; his is engraved, like that of the Egyptian architect, on the
ever-during granite within. The fame of the others rises and falls with
the uncertain undulations of the mode on which they have reared it;
his remains fixed and permanent, as the human nature on which it is
based. Or, to borrow the figures Johnson employs in illustrating the
unfluctuating celebrity of a scarcely greater poet--"The sand heaped by
one flood is scattered by another, but the rock always continues in its
place. The stream of time, which is continually washing the dissoluble
fabrics of other poets, passes, without injury, by the adamant of
Shakspeare."

THE PROFESSOR'S TALES.

THE CONVIVIALISTS.

We must introduce our readers, with an apology for our abruptness, into
a party of about half-a-dozen young gallants, who had evidently been
making deep and frequent libations at the shrine of Bacchus. The loud
bursts of hearty laughter which rang round the room like so many triple
bobmajors, t