Debauchery and drinking;
O would they stay to calculate
Th' eternal consequences;
Or your more dreaded hell to state,
D--mnation of expenses!

VI.

Ye high, exalted, virtuous dames,
Ty'd up in godly laces,
Before ye gie poor frailty names,
Suppose a change o' cases;
A dear lov'd lad, convenience snug,
A treacherous inclination--
But, let me whisper, i' your lug,
Ye're aiblins nae temptation.

VII.

Then gently scan your brother man,
Still gentler sister woman;
Though they may gang a kennin' wrang,
To step aside is human:
One point must still be greatly dark,
The moving why they do it:
And just as lamely can ye mark,
How far perhaps they rue it.

VIII.

Who made the heart, 'tis He alone
Decidedly can try us,
He knows each chord--its various tone,
Each spring--its various bias:
Then at the balance let's be mute,
We never can adjust it;
What's done we partly may compute,
But know not what's resisted.

* * * * *

XL.

TAM SAMSON'S ELEGY.[49]

"An honest man's the noblest work of God."

POPE.

[Tam Samson was a west country seedsman and sportsman, who loved a
good song, a social glass, and relished a shot so well that he
expressed a wish to die and be buried in the moors. On this hint Burns
wrote the Elegy: when Tam heard o' this he waited on the poet, caused
him to recite it, and expressed displeasure at being numbered with the
dead: the author, whose wit was as ready as his rhymes, added the Per
Contra in a moment, much to the delight of his friend. At his death
the four lines of Epitaph were cut on his gravestone. "This poem has
always," says Hogg, "been a great country favourite: it abounds with
happy expressions.

'In vain the burns cam' down like waters,
An acre braid.'

What a picture of a flooded burn! any other poet would have given us a
long description: Burns dashes it down at once in a style so graphic
no one can mistake it.

'Perhaps upon his mouldering breast
Some spitefu' moorfowl bigs her nest.'

Match that sentence who can."]

Has auld Kilmarnock seen the deil?
Or great M'Kinlay[50] thrawn his heel?
Or Robinson[51] again grown weel,
To preach an' read?
"Na, waur than a'!" cries ilka chiel,