ptures of the Old and New Testament, nor have danced
in a brighter assembly than a penny pay wedding."

To Miss Chalmers he says:--

"I have married my Jean. I had a long and much-loved fellow-creature's
happiness or misery in my determination, and I durst not trifle with
so important a deposit, nor have I any cause to repent it. If I have
not got polite tittle-tattle, modish manners, and fashionable dress, I
am not sickened and disquieted with the multiform curse of
boarding-school affectation; and I have got the handsomest figure, the
sweetest temper, the soundest constitution, and the kindest heart in
the country.... A certain late publication of Scots poems she has
perused very devoutly, and all the ballads in the country, as she has
the finest wood-note wild I ever heard."

There have been many comments on this turning-point in Burns' life.
Some have given him high praise for it, as though he had done a heroic
thing in voluntarily sacrificing himself, when it might have been open
to him to form a much higher connexion. But all such praise seems
entirely thrown away. It was not, as it appears, open to him to form
any other marriage legally; certainly it was not open to him morally.
The remark of Lockhart is entirely true, that, "had he hesitated to
make her his wife, whom he loved, and who was the mother of his children,
he must have sunk into the callousness of a ruffian." Lockhart (p. 088)
need hardly have added, "or into that misery of miseries, the remorse
of a poet."

But even had law and morality allowed him to pass by Jean,--which they
did not,--would it have been well for Burns, if he had sought, as one
of his biographers regrets that he had not done, a wife among ladies
of higher rank and more refined manners? That he could appreciate what
these things imply, is evident from his own confession in looking back
on his introduction to what is called society: "A refined and
accomplished woman was a being altogether new to me, and of which I
had formed a very inadequate idea." It requires but little knowledge
of the world and its ways to see the folly of all such regrets. Great
disparity of condition in marriage seldom answers. And in the case of
a wayward, moody man, with the pride, the poverty, and the
irregularities of Burns, and the drudging toil which must needs await
his wife, it is easy to see what misery such a marriage would have
stored up for both. As it was, the marriage he made was, to put it