fuel nourishing the glow of happiness when friend meets friend. The epistles to David Sillar and Lapraik and Simpson (to which I have affixed titles for this occasion)[1] admit us directly into the presence of Burns in his familiar intercourse as the “social, friendly, honest man” beyond measure abundant. These were written while he was still an unprinted local poet, a man of mark among his neighbours, but marked also for misfortune and disgrace, and the future prospectless enough. But though he is cheering others on, and dauntless himself, we can divine that it is fast becoming the dauntlessness of desperation, the indifference of pride. What Nature has given him renders him more keenly conscious of what his lot in life denies, and the gifts and the lack between them are working together to sink this splendid misplaced being, half Apollo and half Pan, among the waste of humanity in whom the light of purpose has gone out. Then came the Edinburgh triumph, and it saved him at least from that. It opened new vistas, and promised a large future. The vistas closed and the promise was not kept; but in the course of being disappointed—in the course of encountering the successive misfortunes of the ten years remaining to him, who was then only twenty-seven—he added to his achievement nearly one-half of the whole. He wrote not only _Tam o’ Shanter_ and the thrice-noble _Lament for Glencairn_, but also the great bulk of his song work. And the result? Surely it is this: that all who read these pages to the end, to where the Muse of Scottish Song leaves him dreaming in the spence, must feel that the light in which she “fled away” has not itself fled, but remains for ever in his book, and he in the midst of it with the lyric crown still fresh from her hands. WILLIAM MACDONALD. FOOTNOTE: [1] Namely, _The Riches of the Poor_, _An Offer of Friendship_, _An Exhortation to Davie_, _Poets for ever!_ and _The Bards of Ayr_. A book of selections being in its nature an anthology, in which all the contents are there upon their individual merits as poetry, it seems right that each should have a title that carries some reference to its subject-matter. I have ventured upon this innovation in one or two other cases, with results which, I hope, will commend themselves to the judicious.