To Miss L with Beattie's Poems for a New-year's Gift 215

Epistle to a Young Friend

On a Scotch Bard gone to the West Indies :

To a Haggis

222

226

229

A Dedication to G***** H*******, Esq.

To a Louse, on seeing one on a Lady's Bonnet at Church 236

Address to Edinburgh

Epistle to J. L*****k, an Old Scottish Bard

Epistle to J. R******, inclosing some Poems

John Barleycorn. A Ballad

A Fragment,' When Guilford good our pilot stood

Written in Friars Carse Hermitage, on Nithside

Ode to the Memory of Mrs

Elegy on Captain M-

of

H-

To R***** G***** of F******, Esq.

Lament for James Earl of Glencairn

Lines sent to Sir John Whiteford with the foregoing

On seeing a wounded hare a fellow had shot at

Address to the Shade of Thomson

Epitaph on a celelebrated Ruling Elder

on a Noisy Polemic

ibid

317

AN

ACCOUNT

OF THE

LIFE AND CHARACTER

OF

ROBERT BURNS,

WITH

MISCELLANEOUS REMARKS

ON

HIS WRITINGS.

ACCOUNT

OF

THE LIFE AND CHARACTER

OF

ROBERT BURNS.

THE attention of biographers is naturally engaged by celebrity of two kinds altogether different. One is derived from the station, the other from the personal qualities, of its possessor. He who succeeds to the former may be a character undeserving of notice; but he who earns the latter, must be distinguished by extraordinary measures either of talent or of virtue. Both are proper subjects of history, though on different grounds. The lives of princes are recorded, chiefly to fix the date and connection of interesting phenomena with which they were contemporary; but the man of genius is himself the phenomenon by which all the interest is created. The names

of the former are preserved, like serviceable marks in a chronological index; but the character of the latter is described, as an important addition to the natural history of the human species. The stunted pine upon the height may overtop the loftiest cedar of the vale; but the first, however useful as a landmark, commands little attention on its own account, while the student of nature will repeatedly examine the progress of the last, from the period when it sprung from the soil, till it exhibited in its gigantic growth the full force of vegetation. In the same manner, intellectual eminence invites the frequent research of an enlightened curiosity; and literary biography, in which the charms of narrative and descriptive history are united, becomes, on this account, one of the most gratifying and instructive studies. If we can listen without weariness to a repetition of the personal memoirs of rulers, who often owe their importance to events occasioned by their own imbecility, we may surely accept with equal patience a plurality of attempts to illustrate the character of a man in whose life is to be read the power and the progress of talent, and who, by the mere recreations of his mind, rendered himself, in the humblest station, more the object of thought and of enquiry, than numbers whom Fortune had placed in the most exalted.