as Allan
Cunningham tells us, "but a putting-stone with which he loved to
exercise his strength, and 300_l._ of his money, sunk beyond
redemption in a speculation from which all had augured happiness."

It is not without deep regret that even now we think of Burns's (p. 134)
departure from this beautiful spot. If there was any position on earth
in which he could have been happy and fulfilled his genius, it would
have been on such a farm--always providing that it could have given
him the means of a comfortable livelihood, and that he himself could
have guided his ways aright. That he might have had a fair opportunity,
how often one has wished that he could have met some landlord who
could have acted towards him, as the present Duke of Buccleuch did
towards the Ettrick Shepherd in his later days, and have given a farm
on which he could have sat rent-free. Such an act, one is apt to
fancy, would have been honourable alike to giver and receiver. Indeed,
a truly noble nature would have been only too grateful to find such an
opportunity put in his way of employing a small part of his wealth for
so good an end. But the notions of modern society, founded as they are
so entirely on individual independence, for the most part preclude the
doing and the receiving of such favours. And with this social feeling
no man was ever more filled than Burns.

CHAPTER VI. (p. 135)

MIGRATION TO DUMFRIES.

A great change it must have been to pass from the pleasant holms and
broomy banks of the Nith at Ellisland to a town home in the Wee Vennel
of Dumfries. It was, moreover, a confession visible to the world of
what Burns himself had long felt, that his endeavour to combine the
actual and the ideal, his natural calling as a farmer with the
exercise of his gift as a poet, had failed, and that henceforth he
must submit to a round of toil, which, neither in itself nor in its
surroundings, had anything to redeem it from commonplace drudgery. He
must have felt from the time when he first became Exciseman, that he
had parted company with all thought of steadily working out his ideal,
and that whatever he might now do in that way must be by random
snatches. To his proud spirit the name of gauger must have been gall
and wormwood, and it is much to his credit that for the sake of his
wife and children he was content to undergo what he often felt to be a
social obloquy. It would have be