dreary wilds of this world, and scare
away the ravening bird or beast that would annoy you." Again, on the
21st: "Will you open, with satisfaction and delight, a letter from a man
who loves you, who has loved you, and who will love you, to death,
through death, and for ever?... How rich am I to have such a treasure as
you!... 'The Lord God knoweth,' and, perhaps, 'Israel he shall know,' my
love and your merit. Adieu, Clarinda! I am going to remember you in my
prayers." By the 7th of April, seventeen days later, he had already
decided to make Jean Armour publicly his wife.

A more astonishing stage-trick is not to be found. And yet his conduct
is seen, upon a nearer examination, to be grounded both in reason and in
kindness. He was now about to embark on a solid worldly career; he had
taken a farm; the affair with Clarinda, however gratifying to his heart,
was too contingent to offer any great consolation to a man like Burns,
to whom marriage must have seemed the very dawn of hope and
self-respect. This is to regard the question from its lowest aspect; but
there is no doubt that he entered on this new period of his life with a
sincere determination to do right. He had just helped his brother with a
loan of a hundred and eighty pounds; should he do nothing for the poor
girl whom he had ruined? It was true he could not do as he did without
brutally wounding Clarinda; that was the punishment of his bygone fault;
he was, as he truly says, "damned with a choice only of different
species of error and misconduct." To be professional Don Juan, to accept
the provocation of any lively lass upon the village green, may thus lead
a man through a series of detestable words and actions, and land him at
last in an undesired and most unsuitable union for life. If he had been
strong enough to refrain or bad enough to persevere in evil; if he had
only not been Don Juan at all, or been Don Juan altogether, there had
been some possible road for him throughout this troublesome world; but a
man, alas! who is equally at the call of his worse and better instincts,
stands among changing events without foundation or resource.[3]

DOWNWARD COURSE

It may be questionable whether any marriage could have tamed Burns; but
it is at least certain that there was no hope for him in the marriage he
contracted. He did right, but then he had done wrong before; it was, as
I said, one of those relations in life which it seems equally wrong to
break or to