ut the unique
excellence of the piece consists in its variety, and a perfectly original
combination of the terrible and the ludicrous. Like Goethe's _Walpurgis
Nacht_, brought into closer contact with real life, it stretches from the
drunken humours of Christopher Sly to a world of fantasies almost as
brilliant as those of the _Midsummer Night's Dream_, half solemnized by the
severer atmosphere of a sterner clime. The contrast between the lines
"Kings may be blest," &c., and those which follow, beginning "But pleasures
are like poppies spread," is typical of the perpetual antithesis of the
author's thought and life, in which, at the back of every revelry, he sees
the shadow of a warning hand, and reads on the wall the writing, _Omnia
mutantur_. With equal or greater confidence other judges have pronounced
Burns's masterpiece to be "The Jolly Beggars." Certainly no other single
production so illustrates his power of exalting what is insignificant,
glorifying what is mean, and elevating the lowest details by the force of
his genius. "The form of the piece," says Carlyle, "is a mere cantata, the
theme the half-drunken snatches of a joyous band of vagabonds, while the
grey leaves are floating on the gusts of the wind in the autumn of the
year. But the whole is compacted, refined and poured forth in one flood of
liquid harmony. It is light, airy and soft of movement, yet sharp and
precise in its details; every face is a portrait, and the whole a group in
clear photography. The blanket of the night is drawn aside; in full ruddy
gleaming light these rough tatterdemalions are seen at their boisterous
revel wringing from Fate another hour of wassail and good cheer." Over the
whole is flung a half-humorous, half-savage satire--aimed, like a two-edged
sword, at the laws and the law-breakers, in the acme of which the graceless
crew are raised above the level of ordinary gipsies, footpads and rogues,
and are made to sit "on the hills like gods together, careless of mankind,"
and to launch their Titan thunders of rebellion against the world.

"A fig for those by law protected;
Liberty's a glorious feast;
Courts for cowards were erected,
Churches built to please the priest."

A similar mixture of drollery and defiance appears in the justly celebrated
"Address to the Deil," which, mainly whimsical, is relieved by touches oan
in the conception of such a being straying in lonely places and loitering
among trees, or in the fam