with which it recalled to him the circumstances and feelings of his opening manhood.  These are the only two of his very early productions in which there is nothing expressly about love.  The rest were composed to celebrate the charms of those rustic beauties who followed each other in the domain of his fancy, or shared the capacious throne between them.  The excursions of the rural lover form the theme of almost all the songs which Burns is known to have produced about this period; and such of these juvenile performances as have been preserved are beautiful.  They show how powerfully his boyish fancy had been affected by the old rural minstrelsy of his own country, and how easily his native taste caught the secret of its charm.

In 1781, despairing of farming, he went to Irvine to learn flax-dressing with a relative.  He was diligent at first, but misfortune soon overtook him.  The shop where he was engaged caught fire, and he “was left, like a true poet, not worth a sixpence.”  Gilbert Burns dates a serious change in his character and conduct from this six months’ residence in the seaport town.  “He contracted,” he says, “some acquaintance of a freer manner of thinking than he had been accustomed to, whose society prepared him for overleaping the bounds of rigid virtue which had hitherto restrained him.”

He had certainly not come unscathed out of the society of those persons of “liberal opinions” with whom he consorted in Irvine; and he expressly attributes to their lessons the scrape into which he fell soon after “he put his hand to plough again.”  He was compelled, according to the then all but universal custom of rural parishes in Scotland, to do penance in church, before the congregation, in consequence of the birth of an illegitimate child.  But not the amours, or the tavern, or drudging manual labour could keep him long from his true calling.  “Rhyme,” he says, “I had given up [on going to Irvine], but meeting with Fergusson’s ‘Scottish Poems,’ I strung anew my wildly sounding lyre with emulating vigour.”  It was probably this accidental meeting with Fergusson that in a great measure finally determined the Scottish character of his poetry.

II.—­The Loves of a Peasant Poet

Just before their father’s death, Robert and Gilbert took the cold and ungrateful farm of Mossgiel, in the parish of Mauchline, to which the family now removed.  The four years of Burns’s connection with this place were the most important of his life.  It was then that his genius developed its highest energies; on the works produced in these years his fame was first established, and must ever continue mainly to rest; it was then also that his personal character came out in all its brightest lights, and in all but its darkest shadows; and indeed from the commencement of this period the history of the man may be traced, step by step, in his own immortal writings.