His stay at Ellisland is now hastening to a close. Before passing, however, from that, on the whole the best period of his life since manhood, one or two incidents of the spring of 1791 must be mentioned. In the February of that year Burns received from the Rev. Archibald Alison, Episcopalian clergyman in Edinburgh, a copy of his once famous, but now, I believe, forgotten, _Essay on Taste_, which contained (p. 129) the authorized exposition of that theory, so congenial to Scotch metaphysics, that objects seem beautiful to us only because our minds associate them with sensible objects which have previously given us pleasure. In his letter to the author, acknowledging the receipt of his book, Burns says, "I own, sir, at first glance, several of your propositions startle me as paradoxical: that the martial clangour of a trumpet had something in it vastly more grand, heroic, and sublime than the twingle-twangle of a Jew's-harp; that the delicate flexure of a rose-twig, when the half-blown flower is heavy with the tears of the dawn, was infinitely more beautiful and elegant than the upright stub of a burdock; and that from something innate and independent of all association of ideas--these I had set down as irrefragable orthodox truths until perusing your book shook my faith." These words so pierce this soap-bubble of the metaphysicians, that we can hardly read them without fancying that the poet meant them to be ironical. Dugald Steward expressed surprise that the unschooled Ayrshire ploughman should have formed "a distinct conception of the general principles of the doctrine of association;" on which Mr. Carlyle remarks, "We rather think that far subtler things than the doctrine of association had been of old familiar to him." In looking over his letters at this time (1791), we are startled by a fierce outburst in one of them, apparently apropos of nothing. He had been recommending to the protection of an Edinburgh friend a schoolmaster, whom he thought unjustly persecuted, when all at once he breaks out: "God help the children of Dependence! Hated and persecuted by their enemies, and too often, alas! almost unexceptionally, received by their friends with disrespect and reproach, under the thin disguise of cold civility and humiliating advice. Oh to be a sturdy savage, (p. 130) stalking in the pride of his independence, amid the solitary wilds of his deserts, rather than in civilized life helplessly to tremble for a subsistence, precarious as the caprice of a fellow-creature! Every man has his virtues, and no man is without his failings; and curse on that privileged plain-speaking of friendship which, in the hour of my calamity, cannot reach forth the helping-hand without at the same time pointing out those failings, and apportioning them their share in procuring my present distress.... I do not want to be independent that I may sin, but I want to be independent in my sinning."