Poor, perturbed
spirit! he was indeed exercised in vain; those who share and
those who differ from his sentiments about the Revolution,
alike understand and sympathise with him in this painful
strait; for poetry and human manhood are lasting like the
race, and politics, which are but a wrongful striving after
right, pass and change from year to year and age to age. The
TWA DOGS has already outlasted the constitution of Sieyes and
the policy of the Whigs; and Burns is better known among
English-speaking races than either Pitt or Fox.
Meanwhile, whether as a man, a husband, or a poet, his steps
led downward. He knew, knew bitterly, that the best was out
of him; he refused to make another volume, for he felt that
it would be a disappointment; he grew petulantly alive to
criticism, unless he was sure it reached him from a friend.
For his songs, he would take nothing; they were all that he
could do; the proposed Scotch play, the proposed series of
Scotch tales in verse, all had gone to water; and in a fling
of pain and disappointment, which is surely noble with the
nobility of a viking, he would rather stoop to borrow than to
accept money for these last and inadequate efforts of his
muse. And this desperate abnegation rises at times near to
the height of madness; as when he pretended that he had not
written, but only found and published, his immortal AULD LANG
SYNE.
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