r considerations aside, was clearly improper in a salaried official
of the Crown, and thereby got into disgrace with the authorities, and
also with society in and about Dumfries. His habits of living, though
their recklessness has been vastly exaggerated, were not careful, and
helped to injure both his reputation and his health. Before long he
broke down completely, and died on the first of July 1796, his poetical
powers being to the very last in fullest perfection.

Burns' work, which even in bulk--its least remarkable characteristic--is
very considerable when his short life and his unfavourable education and
circumstances are reckoned, falls at once into three sharply contrasted
sections. There are his poems in Scots; there are the verses that, in
obedience partly to the incompetent criticism of his time, partly to a
very natural mistake of ambition and ignorance, he tried to write in
conventional literary English; and there is his prose, taking the form
of more or less studied letters. The second class of the poems is almost
worthless, and fortunately it is not bulky. The letters are of unequal
value, and have been variously estimated. They show indeed that, like
almost all poets, he might, if choice and fate had united, have become a
very considerable prose-writer, and they have immense autobiographic
value. But they are sometimes, and perhaps often, written as much in
falsetto as the division of verse just ruled out; their artificiality
does not take very good models; and their literary attraction is
altogether second-rate. How far different the value of the Scots poems
is, four generations have on the whole securely agreed. The moral
discomfort of Principal Shairp, the academic distaste of Mr. Matthew
Arnold for a world of "Scotch wit, Scotch religion, and Scotch drink,"
and the purely indolent and ignorant reluctance of others to grapple
with Scottish dialect, need not trouble the catholic critic much. The
two first may be of some use as cautions and drags; the third may be
thrown aside at once. Scots, though a dialect, is not a patois; it has a
great and continuous literature; it combines in an extraordinary degree
the consonant virtues of English and the vowel range of the Latin
tongues. It is true that Burns' range of subject, as distinct from that
of sound, was not extremely wide. He could give a voice to
passion--passion of war, passion of conviviality, passion above all of
love--as none but the very greatest