I, in this year, 1801, when in the company of Dr. Currie, did not forget, and, with some pride I say that I stood alone in remembering, the very remarkable position of Burns: not merely that, with his genius, and with the intellectual pretensions generally of his family, he should have been called to a life of early labour, and of labour unhappily not prosperous, but also that he, by accident about the proudest of human spirits, should have been by accident summoned, beyond all others, to eternal recognitions of some mysterious gratitude which he owed to some mysterious patrons little and great, whilst yet, of all men, perhaps, he reaped the least obvious or known benefit from any patronage that has ever been put on record. Most men, if they reap little from patronage, are liberated from the claims of patronage, or, if they are summoned to a galling dependency, have at least the fruits of their dependency. But it was this man's unhappy fate--with an early and previous irritability on this very point--to find himself saddled, by his literary correspondents, with all that was odious in dependency, whilst he had every hardship to face that is most painful in unbefriended poverty. On this view of the case, I talked, then, being a schoolboy, with and against the first editor of Burns:--I did not, and I do not, profess to admire the letters (that is, the prose), all or any, of Burns. I felt that they were liable to the charges of Lord Jeffrey, and to others beside; that they do not even express the natural vigour of Burns's mind, but are at once vulgar, tawdry, coarse, and commonplace; neither was I a person to affect any profound sympathy with the general character and temperament of Burns, which has often been described as "of the earth, earthy"--unspiritual--animal--beyond those of most men equally intellectual. But still I comprehended his situation; I had for ever ringing in my ears, during that summer of 1801, those groans which ascended to heaven from his over-burthened heart--those harrowing words, "_To give him leave to toil_," which record almost a reproach to the ordinances of God--and I felt that upon him, amongst all the children of labour, the primal curse had fallen heaviest and sunk deepest. Feelings such as these I had the courage to express: a personal compliment, or so, I might now and then hear; but all were against me on the _matter_. Dr. Currie said--"Poor Burns! such notions had been his ruin"; Mr. Shepherd continued to draw from the subject some scoff or growl at Mr. Pitt and the Excise; the laughing tailor told us a good story of some proud beggar; Mr. Clarke proposed that I should write a Greek inscription for a cenotaph which he was to erect in his garden to the memory of Burns;--and so passed away the solitary protestation on behalf of Burns's jacobinism, together with the wine and the roses, and the sea-breezes of that same Everton, in that same summer of 1801. Mr. Roscoe is dead, and has found time since then to