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"But pleasures are like poppies spread,
You seize the flower, its bloom is shed;
Or like the snow-fall in the river,
A moment white-then melts for ever;
Or like the borealis race,

That flit ere you can point their place;
Or like the rainbow's lovely form,
Evanishing amid the storm."

mortal; had he written an epic or dramatic | haunted kirk, the accumulated horrors on the poem, the author of "The Cottar's Saturday table, the dance of witches to the unearthly Night," and of "Tam o' Shanter," could not music of the demon-piper on the bunker, the have failed; and in any view he must rank, not furious rush of the startled legion with Cuttymerely as the greatest poet of humble station, sark at their head, the crisis of Tam's fate at but as one of the greatest poets whom the world the keystane of the brig, and the gray mare has produced. (Cheers) In my humble opin- skelping hame without her tail! (Laughter ion there is more genius in Burns' songs than and applause.) In the midst of this wild in volumes of our modern poetry. Sometimes description, where horror and humour prevail in sublimity, sometimes in pathos, sometimes by turns, how beautiful is the vanity of earthly in graphic description, sometimes in elevated pleasure touched off:— sentiment, sometimes in exquisite humour, and always in tender and passionate emotion, Burns is without a rival. (Loud applause.) Let petty fault-finders and carping cavillers object as they may-(vehement and renewed cheering)—the true test of the power of Burns' poetry is, that, like what is recorded of his society, criticism is disarmed by intense emotional impression. There are deep springs in the human heart, often covered and hidden by the rubbish and débris which the tide of life deposits as it rolls along; other poets pass over the surface and pierce not the interposed earthiness; but these hidden springs are stirred by the power of a spirit like Burns, and Nature, evoked from her deep and rarely-reached recesses, owns the touch of a master-spirit, and bursts forth responsive to the call of true genius. (Loud cheering.) I should trespass too long on your time if I once began to quote in illustration of this peculiar character of Burns' poetry. What heart does not feel that "The Cottar's Satur-"Fechting Jamie Fleck "day Night," ," "The Vision," the "Lament," and the address "To Mary in Heaven," with others too numerous to mention, are poems of the rarest and highest order? What can be finer, wild and startling as it is, than the "Address to the Deil," and the picture of the great enemy

as

"Whyles, ranging like a roaring lion,

For prey a' holes and corners tryin';
Whyles on the strong-winged tempest flyin',
Tirlin' the kirks;

Whyles in the human bosom pryin',
Unseen thou furks!"

(Great cheering.) "Tam o' Shanter," to any one well acquainted with the Scottish dialect, is magnificent. (Great cheering and laughter.) It is scarcely possible to refrain from quoting; but I must forbear. Notwithstanding the supernatural ingredients so admirably wrought into the tale, it has all the air of a reality. Every Scotsman, especially every Ayrshire-man, with a mind above the clods of the valley(loud cheers)-can close his vision on existing objects, and in his mind's eye can see Tam, and the Soutar, and the landlady, and the parting cup, and the ride in the storm, the auld

But wonderful as "Tam o' Shanter" is, our admiration is increased by the extraordinary fact that the whole poem was written, not in Ayrshire, where he was in the midst of the scenes, but at Ellisland, and between breakfast and sunset of one day. Among the many specimens of the broad and hearty humour of Burns, I may mention "Meg o' the Mill," "Tam Glen,” "Death and Dr. Hornbook," where rare caustic humour alternates with a power almost sublime; and "Hallowe'en," where the rustic sports of that now almost forgotten festivity are charmingly described. Think of the adventure of

"Who whistled up Lord Lennox' march
To keep his courage cheerie;
Although his hair began to arch,
He was sae fley'd and eerie:
Till presently he hears a squeak,
An' then a grane and gruntle,
He by his shouther ga'ed a keek,
An' tumbled wi' a wintle

Out-ower that night.

He roared a horrid murder-shout
In dreadfu' desperation!

And young and auld came rinnin' out,
To hear the sad narration;

He swore 'twas hilchin Jean M'Craw
Or crouchie Merran Humphie,
Till, stop-she trotted through them a',
An' wha was it but grumphie,
Asteer that night!"

(Laughter.) Or call to mind the scaring of
Leezie on the brae-a sketch in which the
graphic and humorous spirit is relieved by a
bit of exquisitely beautiful description:—

"A wanton widow Leezie was,
As canty as a kittlin;
But, och! that night, amang the shaws,
She got a fearfu' settlin'!

She through the whins, and by the cairn,
And owre the hill gaed scrievin,

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Or what say you to his epigram on a certain lawyer?—

"He clenched his pamphlets in his fist,
He quoted and he hinted,

Till in a declamation-mist,

His argument he tint it;

He gaped for't, he graped for't,
He fand it was awa', man,

But what his common-sense cam' short,
He eked it out wi' law, man."

(Great laughter.) I cannot pause to give
specimens of the tender and passionate poetry
of Burns. His songs abound in stanzas of
surpassing beauty, chiefly inspired by his love
to Bonnie Jean, his good and faithful wife-
a love which was, I think, his deepest and
tenderest feeling. His famous lines, said to
be addressed to Clarinda, and containing the
stanza adopted by Byron as the motto of the
"Bride of Abydos,"

"

"Had we never loved so kindly,
Had we never loved so blindly,
Never met, or never parted,

We had ne'er been broken-hearted,"

were not, I believe, meant for Clarinda, but for Bonnie Jean, whose image was never long absent from his heart. His best letters, to my mind, were those to Mrs. Dunlop, not those to Clarinda; and his most tender and touching songs were inspired by Bonnie Jean. He walks by the burn-side at night and sings

"As in the bosom of the stream
The moonbeam dwells at dewy e'en,
So trembling, pure, is tender love
Within the breast of Bonnie Jean."

He plods his way across the hills from Ellisland to Mossgiel, and love prompts the charming song to Jean, "Of a' the airts the wind can blaw." When Lapraik's verses are sent him, his heart chooses

"There was ae sang amang the rest
Aboon them a' it pleased me best,
That some kind husband had addressed
To some sweet wife;

It thrilled the heart-strings through the breast,
A' to the life."

He sees in fancy the genius of Coila, and Jean recurs to his mind as alone rivalling the celestial visitant

"Down flowed her robe-a tartan sheen,
Till half a leg was scrimply seen,

And such a leg-my bonnie Jean
Alane could peer it;

Sae straight and taper, tight and clean,
Nane else came near it."

(Great cheering and laughter.)

And then,

with all his high aspirings, and all his love for social pleasures and even social excesses, where does he place the scene of his highest duties and his dearest joys?

"To make a happy fireside clime,
For weans and wife,

That's the true pathos and sublime
Of human life."

(Loud applause.) Had this man not a heart, and a heart with some rare qualities-sensitive, passionate, and tender? (Enthusiastic and long-continued cheering). I believe that, next to the blessing of a conscience divinely enlightened and divinely cleared, the greatest happiness permitted to man in this life, is the happiness of loving and being beloved. (Cheers.) The heart is the true spring of happiness, as Burns himself well says—

"It's no in titles nor in rank,

It's no in wealth like London bank
To purchase peace and rest.
It's no in books, it's no in lair,
It's no in making mickle mair,
To make us truly blest.
If happiness have not her seat
And centre in the breast,

We may be wise, or rich, or great,
We never can be blest.

Nae treasures, nae pleasures
Can make us happy lang;
The heart aye's the part aye

That makes us right or wrang."

Of the moral character of Burns I must say a word. Let us not be misunderstood. I am no hero-worshipper, no unqualified eulogist of Burns. I protest against the thought that for what is morally wrong an excuse can be found in the rarest talents; and deeply should I regret if any word fell from me tending to lower the standard of character, or loosen the obligations of religion and morality. There are few sadder subjects of contemplation than a noble generous spirit like that of Burns, manly, tender, and true, full of the love of nature, of country, and of liberty, yet floating rudderless and helpless on the tide of life, till

dashed on the fatal rocks which have wrecked impure particles have subsided, and we now so many of his countrymen. His lot, indeed, rejoice only in the pure and generous qualiwas cast on evil times,-on times peculiarly ties which remain. I do not seek to disguise perilous to such a temperament as his. The or to palliate his faults-but who among us is tone of morality in his day was not pure or without faults? Charity, which hopeth all high; the tone of religion was cold, and hard, things and thinketh no evil, ought to be our and low. To the prevailing devotion of his monitor. (Applause.) Let us "gently scan day, generally cold, frequently ascetic, some- our brother man "-let us judge ourselves times hypocritical, there was an antagonism in severely, and others leniently-let us gather Burns' nature. (Loud cheers.) Genuine, prac- the good we can, though it be intermingled tical, and loving piety might have charmed with evil-let us use aright the more favourand won him. If, instead of the stern or the able appliances which surround us-let us cold preachers who repelled his feelings and strive ourselves to cultivate a purer morality, stimulated his opposition, there had met Burns and adorn by our lives a sounder religious a pastor in whose large and genial heart dwells profession; but let us admire in Burns whatlove and sympathy as well as faithfulness, who, ever is worthy of admiration, and honour his true to his own convictions, recognises in others genius as it deserves. Those who object to the rights of conscience, whose preaching and this demonstration must remember that the whose life presents religion in her most at- power of Burns over the popular mind of tractive aspect, and whose imperishable me- Scotland is a great fact which cannot be morial will be read in the statistics of dimin- ignored. (Enthusiastic applause.) Burns has ished crime, in the testimony of reclaimed lived, and has written, and has a hold upon children, and in the records of converted the heart of Scotland. (Renewed cheering.) souls, who can tell what impression might It is well to qualify our praises, and to inculhave been made on him? He was not so cate the warning lessons of his life. But surely fortunate. To him was rarely presented the it is not the part of wisdom or of virtue so to instructive illustration of the influence of true repudiate such a man as to consign to the cause religion on human character. That influence and the friends of mischief a name and fame so comes in no harsh or ascetic spirit, it diverts attractive and so potent. (Long-continued no noble aim, it extinguishes no honourable applause.) Let us rather deal with the power ambition, it quenches no pure fire of genius, of Burns' name as science has dealt with the no flame of virtuous love, no generous senti- electric element. Science has not stood afar ment or kindly feeling, but, entering with off, scared by each flash, mourning each shivsearching power into the heart, out of which ered tower; science has caught and purified are the issues of life, it expels from the the power, and chained it to the car of com"dome of thought" and the fountain of feel- merce and the chariot of beneficence, and ing the dark spirits of evil, it raises man to applied it to the noble purpose of consolidathis true dignity, and directs his faculties to ing humanity-uniting all the world by the their appropriate aims. We must deplore and interchange of thought and feeling. On this condemn much in the character and in the day Burns is to us, not the memory of a writings of Burns; we must lament that the departed, but the presence of a living power spirit in which he wrote the "Cottar's Satur-(enthusiastic cheering) the electric chain day Night" did not always prompt his pen or guide his life; but there was much to deplore in the character of the times in which he lived. Time has not passed in vain over the influence of Burns. Shakspeare says—

"The evil that men do lives after them;

The good is oft interred with their bones."

The popular enthusiasm of Scotland has reversed the process. From the grave of Burns it has resuscitated the buried good,-and the evil now only lives that the lesson and the warning may be learnt. As a mountain torrent, depositing its earthiness as it flows, comes after a long course to reflect the face of heaven on its bosom, time has cleared and mellowed the influence of Burns-(applause) -like an old and rich wine, the coarse and

which knits the hearts of Scotchmen in every part of the world, stirring us not only to admiration of the poet's genius, but to the love of country, of liberty, and of home, and of all things beautiful and good. Therefore, I call on you to pledge me, not in solemn silence, but with our heartiest honours, to "The Immortal Robert Burns." (The chairman, whose speech was delivered with great power and fervour, resumed his seat amidst volleys of cheers.)

Song "There was a lad was born in Kyle "-Mr. Stewart.

Mr. JAMES BALLANTINE (Secretary), then read the following verses, composed by himself for the

occasion.

BURNS' CENTENARY BANQUET.

I dreamed a dream o' sitting here,
Delighted wi' our canty cheer,

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are here to-night, there is not one probably, except myself, who may hesitate for a moment to regret the absence of Henry, Lord Brougham. Right gladly, too, could I have seen the hearts of this vast assembly, like boughs of the windstricken forest, swayed to and fro by the resistless impulse of his living words. But I doubt if in his own presence, had I then been privileged to speak of him, I could have ventured to have given full utterance to all my honest admiration of his great-hearted and many-handed life. (Cheers.) And yet it is possible perhaps that even as I had looked upon him face to face, there might have touched me one spark of his own impetuous and irrepressible fire, which has now for more than half-a-century flamed in the forehead of his country's story. (Applause.) He is not with us, but depend upon it, and indeed we are sure, that his sympathies are not far away from a meeting which means to appreciate the sturdy independence and the blunt honesty of a nature on which the shadows of hypocrisy or duplicity never fell—(cheers) a meeting which means to commemorate the victorious progress of an inborn vigour, which, against the barriers of social condition, ay, and even of individual temperament, held on its earnest way till glory filled the furrows of its plough-and a meeting which means to wreathe with green gratitude the wonderful achievements of that Æolian sensibility which, placed in the window of a peasant's breast, vibrated to every whispering air or stirring breeze, or even stormy gust, which moves man's strange and chequered life, and gave back the exquisite melody, of which the undying echoes have been, and will be, wafted over "a' the airts the wind can blaw" till time shall cease to be. (Loud cheering.) Brougham is not with us, but I see him now, the Demosthenes of Britain, as he sits on the shore of the bright Mediterranean and revokes across its tideless mirror the magnificent renown and the terrible ruin of which the colossal annals, from the pillars of Hercules to the blue Symplegades, strew the whole margin of its waters. (Applause.)

"Thy shores are empires, changed in all save thee,
Assyria, Rome, Greece, Carthage, what are they?
Thy waters wasted them while they were free,
And many a tyrant since."

(Cheers.) And I hear him murmur to this unchangeable witness of the awful vicissitudes of nations and kingdoms-" Does then the past always teach us the future? for if the free and brilliant race who conquered at Marathon, the Bannockburn of Greece, and if the majestic and proud people who survived Cannæ, the Flodden of Italy, are now crumbled into littleness almost worse than nothingness-shall I fear or

may I hope for my own grand country?" (Applause.) But it is not for the sea, but for us ourselves, his countrymen and his fellowcitizens, to answer his query, and I think we may bid him be of good cheer; or at all events I think we may tell him with a cheerful pride that there has not often lived in the world any man who more truly than Henry Brougham, looking back with an undimmed eye through a retrospect of fourscore years, can track the steady and large improvement of his country. by the very footprints of his own luminous and indefatigable career. That very spirit of indomitable vitality, of which, as active yesterday when he wrote that long letter with his own hand as in the vehement ardour of his prime, he scattered the seeds so broadly among us, has ripened, under his guidance, into not only abundant and general, but healthful and invigorating, harvest both of thought and of action. But I suspect that the pilgrimages of many generations of men must begin and end before there can be fairly estimated or properly fixed the precious value and the vast extent of what, directly and indirectly in every corner of the commonweal, the energy of his efforts and the influence of his example have done or helped to do. Remember that I cannot now justify this large eulogy, or even illustrate it, by particular incidents in his career. I cannot be a miniature painter. I cannot even give you his portrait in colours. I must rather try, however roughly and imperfectly, to put before you, as it were, in a model of sculpture, the muscular massive outline of the image of that individual force and that individual activity which has made itself felt throughout the length and breadth of the British empire. I set before you an avenging giant with a hundred arms, but I must leave you to select what head of the hundred-headed hydra you wish to bring down, which the hundred arms of Brougham were ever ready to attack and destroy. (Applause.) I do not dwell, therefore, upon the manifestations, I dwell upon the reality, the intensity, and the efficacy of a power which, on memorable, momentous, and even vital occasions, has photographed so vividly the existing wrong, and has telegraphed so unmistakably the coming right. (Cheers.) And I will draw the general conclusion, that when a man has spoken and written as Brougham has done, whether his cause was right or wrong, he has done so with a glowing consciousness of enormous mental strength(cheers)—and knowing his strength, the question is, How has he used it? And I say that he has used it invariably, perseveringly, and enthusiastically, and with a glorious success, for the intellectual expansion, for the social

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