en well for him if this had been the
only drawback to his new calling. Unfortunately the life into which it
led him, exposed him to those very temptations which his nature was
least able to withstand. If social indulgence and irregular habits had
somewhat impaired his better resolves, and his power of poetic (p. 136)
concentration, before he left Ellisland, Dumfries, and the society
into which it threw him, did with increased rapidity the fatal work
which had been already begun. His biographers, though with varying
degrees of emphasis, on the whole agree, that from the time he settled
in Dumfries, "his moral course was downwards."

The social condition of Dumfries at the time when Burns went to live
in it was neither better nor worse than that of other provincial towns
in Scotland. What that was, Dr. Chambers has depicted from his own
youthful experience of just such another country town. The curse of
such towns, he tells us, was that large numbers of their inhabitants
were either half or wholly idle; either men living on competences,
with nothing to do, or shopkeepers with their time but half employed;
their only amusement to meet in taverns, soak, gossip, and make stupid
personal jokes. "The weary waste of spirits and energy at those
soaking evening meetings was deplorable. Insipid toasts, petty
raillery, empty gabble about trivial occurrences, endless disputes on
small questions of fact, these relieved now and then by a song,"--such
Chambers describes as the items which made up provincial town life in
his younger days. "A life," he says, "it was without progress or
profit, or anything that tended to moral elevation." For such dull
companies to get a spirit like Burns among them, to enliven them with
his wit and eloquence, what a windfall it must have been! But for him
to put his time and his powers at their disposal, how great the
degradation! During the day, no doubt, he was employed busily enough
in doing his duty as an Exciseman. This could now be done with less
travelling than in the Ellisland days, and did not require him as
formerly to keep a horse. When the day's work was over, his small (p. 137)
house in the Wee Vennel, and the domestic hearth with the family
ties gathered round it, were not enough for him. At Ellisland he had
sung,--

To make a happy fire-side clime,
For weans and wife,
Is the true pathos and sublime
Of human life.

But it is one