great variety of topics, illuminating whatever he touched. He related the tales of his infancy and his youth; he recited some of the gayest, and some of the tenderest of his poems: in the wildest of his strains of mirth he threw in some touches of melancholy, and spread around him the electric emotions of his powerful mind. The Highland whiskey improved in its flavor; the bowl was more than once emptied, and as often replenished: the guests of our poet forgat the flight of time and the dictates of prudence; at the hour of midnight they lost their way in returning to Dumfries, and could scarcely distinguish it, when assisted by the morning's dawn." On his farm at Ellisland, Burns continued some few years; but the novelty of his situation soon wore off, and then returned the irregularities, to which, from his warm imagination, and his love of society, and his independent turn of mind, he was so strongly predisposed. Fearing that his farm alone would be insufficient to procure for him that independence, which he had hoped one day or other to attain, he applied for and obtained the office of exciseman, or as it was vulgarly called _guager_, for the district in which he lived. About the year 1792, he was solicited to contribute to a collection of Scottish songs, to be published by Mr. Thompson, of Edinborough. Abandoning his farm, which, from neglect and mismanagement was by no means productive, and receiving from the Board of Excise an appointment to a new district, with a salary of 70_l._ per annum, he removed to a small house in Dumfries, and commenced the fulfilment of his literary engagement with Mr. Thompson. His principal songs were written during this time, and day after day was adding heighth and durability to the towering and imperishable monument, which will hand down his name and fame to many generations. But now commences his rapid and melancholy decay, the fast withering consumption of his mental and physical faculties. His had been a short but brilliant course in literature--a short and melancholy one indeed, in other respects. Defeated in his hopes, mortified in the discovery that of the two classes of friends who offered him their society and their example in the outset of his career, he had chosen the least improving and efficient as his guides and counsellors--he fast declined into that common receptacle of dust which covers alike the remains of the gifted and the simple, the prudent and the weak. He was worn with toil and poverty, and disappointed hope. "Can the laborer rest from his labor too soon? He had toiled all the morning, and slumbered at noon." * * * * *