lted mind which had raised itself above the depression of its
original condition, with all the energy of the lion pawing to free his
hinder limbs from the yet encumbering earth.'

His health now began to give his friends serious concern. To Cunningham
he wrote, February 24, 1794: 'For these two months I have not been able
to lift a pen. My constitution and my frame were _ab origine_ blasted
with a deep, incurable taint of hypochondria, which poisons my
existence.' A little later he confesses: 'I have been in poor health. I
am afraid that I am about to suffer for the follies of my youth. My
medical friends threaten me with a flying gout, but I trust they are
mistaken.' His only comfort in those days was his correspondence with
Thomson and with Johnson. He kept pouring out song after song,
criticising, rewriting, changing what was foul and impure into songs of
the tenderest delicacy. He showed love in every mood, from the rapture
of pure passion in the _Lea Rig_, the maidenly abandon of _Whistle and
I'll come to you, my Lad_, to the humour of _Last May a Braw Wooer_ and
_Duncan Gray_, and the guileless devotion of _O wert thou in the Cauld
Blast_. But he sang of more than love. Turning from the coldness of the
high and mighty, who had once been his friends, he found consolation in
the naked dignity of manhood, and penned the hymn of humanity, _A Man's
a Man for a' that_. Perhaps he found his text in _Tristram Shandy_:
'Honours, like impressions upon coin, may give an ideal and local value
to a bit of base metal, but gold and silver pass all the world over with
no other recommendation than their own weight.' Something like this
occurs in Massinger's _Duke of Florence_, where it is said of princes
that

'They can give wealth and titles, but no virtues;
This is without their power.'

Gower also had written--

'A king can kill, a king can save;
A king can make a lord a knave,
And of a knave a lord also.'

But the poem is undoubtedly Burns's, and it is one he must have written
ere he passed away. _Scots wha hae_ is another of his Dumfries poems.
Mr. Syme gives a highly-coloured and one-sided view of the poet riding
in a storm between Gatehouse and Kenmure, where we are assured he
composed this ode. Carlyle accepts Syme's authority, and adds:
'Doubtless this stern hymn was singing itself, as he formed it, through
the soul of Burns; but to the external ear it should be sung with the
throat of the whirl