on was at the plough. Long years afterwards
his sister, Mrs. Begg, used to tell how when her brother had gone
forth again to field work, she would steal up to the garret and search
the drawer of the deal table for the verses which Robert had newly
transcribed."

In which of the poems of this period his genius is most conspicuous it
might not be easy to determine. But there can be little question about
the justice of Lockhart's remark, that "_The Cotter's Saturday Night_
is of all Burns's pieces the one whose exclusion from the collection
would be most injurious, if not to the genius of the poet, at least to
the character of the man. In spite of many feeble lines, and some
heavy stanzas, it appears to me that even his genius would suffer more
in estimation by being contemplated in the absence of this poem, than
of any other single poem he has left us." Certainly it is the one
which has most endeared his name to the more thoughtful and earnest of
his countrymen. Strange it is, not to say painful, to think that this
poem, in which the simple and manly piety of his country is so finely
touched, and the image of his own religious father so beautifully
portrayed, should have come from the same hand which wrote nearly at
the same time _The Jolly Beggars_, _The Ordination_, and _The Holy
Fair_.

During those two years at Mossgiel, from 1784 to 1786, when the times
were hard, and the farm unproductive, Burns must indeed have found
poetry to be, as he himself says, its own reward. A nature like his
required some vent for itself, some excitement to relieve the pressure
of dull farm drudgery, and this was at once his purest and noblest
excitement. In two other more hazardous forms of excitement he was by
temperament disposed to seek refuge. These were conviviality and (p. 026)
love-making. In the former of these, Gilbert says that he indulged
little, if at all, during his Mossgiel period. And this seems proved
by his brother's assertion that during all that time Robert's private
expenditure never exceeded seven pounds a year. When he had dressed
himself on this, and procured his other necessaries, the margin that
remained for drinking must have been small indeed. But love-making--that
had been with him, ever since he reached manhood, an unceasing
employment. Even in his later teens he had, as his earliest songs
show, given himself enthusiastically to those nocturnal meetings,
which were then and are still customary among the pe