Bousin o’er the nappy
  And gettin’ fou and unco happy.

To these experiences we owe not only those excellent drinking songs, John Barleycorn and Willie Brewed a Peck o’ Maut, but the headlong fun of Tam O’Shanter, the visions, grotesquely terrible, of Death and Dr. Hornbook, and the dramatic humor of the Jolly Beggars.  Cowper had celebrated “the cup which cheers but not inebriates.”  Burns sang the praises of Scotch Drink.  Cowper was a stranger to Burns’s high animal spirits, and his robust enjoyment of life.  He had affections, but no passions.  At Mauchline, Burns, whose irregularities did not escape the censure of the kirk, became involved, through his friendship with Gavin Hamilton, in the controversy between the Old Light and New Light clergy.  His Holy Fair, Holy Tulzie, Twa Herds, Holy Willie’s Prayer, and Address to the Unco Gude, are satires against bigotry and hypocrisy.  But in spite of the rollicking profanity of his language, and the violence of his rebound against the austere religion of Scotland, Burns was at bottom deeply impressible by religious ideas, as may be seen from his Prayer under the Pressure of Violent Anguish, and Prayer in Prospect of Death.

His farm turned out a failure, and he was on the eve of sailing for Jamaica, when the favor with which his volume of poems was received stayed his departure, and turned his steps to Edinburgh.  There the peasant poet was lionized for a winter season by the learned and polite society of the Scotch capital, with results in the end not altogether favorable to Burns’s best interests.  For when society finally turned the cold shoulder on him he had to go back to farming again, carrying with him a bitter sense of injustice and neglect.  He leased a farm at Ellisland, in 1788, and some friends procured his appointment as exciseman for his district.  But poverty, disappointment, irregular habits, and broken health clouded his last years, and brought him to an untimely death at the age of thirty-seven.  He continued, however, to pour forth songs of unequaled sweetness and force.  “The man sank,” said Coleridge, “but the poet was bright to the last.”

Burns is the best of British song-writers.  His songs are singable; they are not merely lyrical poems.  They were meant to be sung, and they are sung.  They were mostly set to old Scottish airs, and sometimes they were built up from ancient fragments of anonymous popular poetry, a chorus, or stanza, or even a single line.  Such are, for example, Auld Lang Syne, My Heart’s in the Highlands, and Landlady, Count the Lawin.  Burns had a great, warm heart.  His sins were sins of passion, and sprang from the same generous soil that nourished his impulsive virtues.  His elementary qualities as a poet were sincerity, a healthy openness to all impressions of the beautiful, and a sympathy which embraced men,