worked no more, and only amused
himself with letters. The man who had written a volume of masterpieces
in six months, during the remainder of his life rarely found courage for
any more sustained effort than a song. And the nature of the songs is
itself characteristic of these idle later years; for they are often as
polished and elaborate as his earlier works were frank, and headlong,
and colloquial; and this sort of verbal elaboration in short flights is,
for a man of literary turn, simply the most agreeable of pastimes. The
change in manner coincides exactly with the Edinburgh visit. In 1786 he
had written the "Address to a Louse," which may be taken as an extreme
instance of the first manner; and already, in 1787, we come upon the
rosebud pieces to Miss Cruikshank, which are extreme examples of the
second. The change was, therefore, the direct and very natural
consequence of his great change in life; but it is not the less typical
of his loss of moral courage that he should have given up all larger
ventures, nor the less melancholy that a man who first attacked
literature with a hand that seemed capable of moving mountains, should
have spent his later years in whittling cherry-stones.

Meanwhile, the farm did not prosper; he had to join to it the salary of
an exciseman; at last he had to give it up, and rely altogether on the
latter resource. He was an active officer; and, though he sometimes
tempered severity with mercy, we have local testimony, oddly
representing the public feeling of the period, that, while "in
everything else he was a perfect gentleman, when he met with anything
seizable he was no better than any other gauger."

There is but one manifestation of the man in these last years which
need delay us: and that was the sudden interest in politics which arose
from his sympathy with the great French Revolution. His only political
feeling had been hitherto a sentimental Jacobitism, not more or less
respectable than that of Scott, Aytoun, and the rest of what George
Borrow has nicknamed the "Charlie over the water" Scotsmen. It was a
sentiment almost entirely literary and picturesque in its origin, built
on ballads and the adventures of the Young Chevalier; and in Burns it is
the more excusable, because he lay out of the way of active politics in
his youth. With the great French Revolution, something living,
practical, and feasible appeared to him for the first time in this realm
of human action. The young pl