There are others. Those devoted to convivial joy touch a point of glory in letters quite equalling that ever reached by the true devotee in life. _Willie Brewed a Peck o’ Maut_ tells of the escape of three mortal men, for the space of one night, from the dominion of Fate and from the common ignoble respect for the solar system; while in _Rattlin’ Roarin’ Willie_ there are heroic reverberations, and the last verse shows us Willie seated on high—“at yon board en’”—in a mist of glory as though the guid companie were the gods themselves, and he in Asgard! As for the graver national theme, Burns’s love of Scotland was so implicit and pervading, that he rarely wrote upon it—apart from incidental allusions—even as a man, among all the things that he does for his wife and thinks for her, may rarely think of saying that he loves her. But _when_ he wrote it was _Scots Wha Hae_; and that Jacobite lyric, _It was a’ for our Rightfu’ King_, in which the romantic and adventurous spirit of old Scotland, and its proscribed loyalties and lost causes early and late, quintessentialise into the immortal formula of heroic defeat: Now a’ is done that men can do And a’ is done in vain. Of the Lyrics (other than songs) there is no room to speak at length, but the preceding argument renders this less necessary. They all converge to illustrate Burns’s kindness and his love of all who were kind, his manly independence and his respect for that character in others. His kindness, indeed, passes beyond his own species to embrace all life, from the Daisy to the Devil, and even as a farmer he has no animosity against the Field Mouse. The Devil, indeed, he would not publicly encourage, though he would like him to escape the extreme penalty; but the Daisy and the Mouse he brings for good within the sympathies and almost within the circuit of human nature. They are fellow-travellers with him on the strange road of life and stand equally within the menace of calamity. We see the same humane, dissolving, imaginative aptitude in _The Farmer’s Salutation_ and the _Death of Poor Mailie_, pieces in which there is, however, a richness of humanity, involving many qualities besides sympathy, hardly to be described. The knowledge, the moral and social inwardness of the former, and in the latter the finely balanced play of humour, never for an instant excessive where excess would have been easy and spoilt all, have hardly been equalled even by himself. The impulse which made him compassionate towards his fellow-creatures ranged him against those who habitually, and on peculiarly insufficient warrant, judged them harshly. Hence the _Address to the Unco Guid_, which would not have remained unwritten even had he never come personally within the range and shot of their malice. Hence also, in part, _Scotch Drink_, that plenary libation of soul in honour of those cordials, especially the supreme national one, which are as a divine