claim for Hugh Miller. We allude, as our readers will easily comprehend, to the discord between the poet and the man, which has always constituted the chief difficulty with the critics of our national bard. There is a point of view from which Burns appears altogether lovely; and there is a point from which he appears quite the opposite of attractive. As either of these phases of his character is dwelt upon too exclusively, we obtain a false, or at best, imperfect view of Burns as a whole. Few, indeed, of his biographers, have been able to hold the balance with that scrupulous exactness even-handed justice demands-extenuating nothing, nor yet -setting down aught in malice. Certainly it is with no feeling of regret we have observed, the more attractive features of his character are the features on which writers in general have loved to linger. It is perhaps well that such should have been the case. Gloating over the errors of humanity or the aberrations of genius, displays no amiable feeling; and his must ever be a thankless task who seeks to break the spell by nature bound around the voiceless dead. Yet without gloating over, while in point of fact mourning, the errors of the bard, we cannot forget the jarring and the dissonance between his higher and his lower, his nobler and baser self. The powers of light and darkness seem to have been mated within him, and to have waged a terrible, and but too equal strife, during his entire earthly pilgrimage; now beckon

ing him to heaven, now bending him to earth: and alternately, as either principle waxed or waned, Burns is seen soaring into the region of the holiest sentiment, or sunk in the mire of an odious sensuality. Nor let it be supposed there is anything incongruous in all this. Man is neither an angel nor a demon; the wheat and the tares grow together in the soil of the human heart; and unless we shut our eyes to facts, there is no denying that black and polluting passions were often the tenants of the breast which poured forth the address to the mountain daisy, and that the bosom which heaved with emotions of the most touching tenderness and exquisite sensibility, was often set on fire of hell.

We say not these things because we have any pleasure in calling attention to the failings and shortcomings of one of whom Scotland has so much reason to be proud. Nor do we homologate, in any measure, the untenable opinion held by certain narrow souls, that Burns was wanting in what modern moralists have called the religious sentiment. The very opposite we believe to have been the case. Again and again throughout his letters we meet the genuine outbreathing of this sentiment. It is related by his brother Gilbert how very profoundly Burns was impressed with the solemn beauty and power of the words, "Let us worship God." That this simple utterance, heard from childhood beneath the paternal rooftree, known by him as the call which summoned

thousands of Scottish households, to offer up to heaven the morning and the evening sacrifice-should have so completely penetrated his soul, and bowed it beneath a sense of the awe and mystery of the infinite and the unseen, tells in language neither to be mistaken nor misinterpreted, the depth of religious feeling which, like a fountain sealed, lay struggling for utterance within his soul. Pity it was that this religious sentiment, naturally so deep and ardent, was not permitted to work itself clear of the dross which had gathered round it, "staining the white radiance of eternity." The men and the times on which he had fallen, in great part prevented this. That latent scepticism which good old Wodrow, in his Analecta, mourns as having entered the Church of Scotland, had, in Burns' day, borne some of its most noxious fruits. A false philosophy had eaten out the heart of the historic religion of Scotland amongst Scottish literati and Scottish theologians. The church of Knox, Melville, and Henderson, was now represented by Dr. William Robertson and Dr. Hugh Blair. Unhappily, the New-Light priesthood found in the rustic bard at once a powerful and popular ally; for, without doubt, the controversies into which he plunged with its approbation, exerted a most sinister influence, at a most critical hour, on his religious nature. Cut off, not by any innate want of sympathy, but by a fatal misdirection of his faculties, from the creed of his

country-nay, publicly pitted against it, as the fighting man of the illuminati of his age-Burns missed becoming Scotland's representative man.

Thus has it come to pass that neither in Abbotsford nor in Ayrshire-not by the banks of the Doon, but by the Bay of Cromarty, must we seek the embodiment of the genius and tendencies of our country. We again repeat, that however great, however potential in their respective individualities Scott and Burns undoubtedly were, the defects we have pointed out are fatal to their claims as representative men. A nation with such glorious souvenirs of freedom, could not crown the laureate of feudalism; and though he who sang "A man's a man for a' that," and "Scots wha hae wi' Wallace' bled," has infinitely higher claims, yet a nation whose religious struggles surpassed even the splendour of her conflicts for civil freedom, cannot call the author of the "Holy Fair" a type of the children of the covenant.

In his "Sartor Resartus," Carlyle, with that felicitous pictorial power for which he stands unrivalled among modern writers, has gathered up into a single sentence that photographs on the mind for ever, a magnificent image of the influence and the unity of mankind. "On the hardest adamant some footprint of us is stamped inon the last rear of the host shall be read traces of the earliest van." Subordinated to this general unity, and infolded in its ample circumference, lie the various

national unities; and he who would adequately represent a nation must be himself the heir of all the epochs through which that nation has passed. The puerile rant indulged about Scottish nationality by certain writers and speakers during recent years, has so burlesqued the subject, that it is all but impossible to obtain the public ear for the soberest and most philosophic statement of its claims. Fortunately, the object we contemplate in adverting to the topic now, will be sufficiently served by the recapitulation of a few facts which even the most sceptical will not attempt to challenge. It may be asserted with something like axiomatic accuracy, that the peculiar character of a nation is determined by the spirit with which it rises equal to those great crises in its history which sooner or later overtake all peoples in the development of the drama of the world. Three such epochs have occurred in Scottish story, and it has been the fortune of Scotland, on each occasion, to encounter the fiery trial through which she was called to pass, in the most heroic and dauntless spirit.

The first crisis was the patriotic struggle for Scottish nationality in the actual, not in the heraldic sense. Blind Harry's heroes were men of a very different stamp from the windbags who, a short while ago, set England a laughing at Scotland and Scotchmen. And, however easily Punch snuffed out the babblers about nationality in our own day, we believe southern chivalry found it