into this state of being with the sceptre of rule,
and the keys of riches in his puny fist, and I am kicked into the
world, the sport of folly, or the victim of pride?... Often as I (p. 090)
have glided with humble stealth through the pomp of Princes Street, it
has suggested itself to me, as an improvement on the present human
figure, that a man, in proportion to his own conceit of his own
consequence in the world, could have pushed out the longitude of his
common size, as a snail pushes out his horns, or as we draw out a
prospect-glass.'"

This is a feeling which Burns has uttered in many a form of prose and
verse, but which probably never possessed him more bitterly than when
he retired from Edinburgh. Many persons in such circumstances may have
felt thoughts of this kind pass over them for a moment. But they have
felt ashamed of them as they rose, and have at once put them by. Burns
no doubt had a severer trial in this way than most, but he never could
overcome it, never ceased to chafe at that inequality of conditions
which is so strongly fixed in the system in which we find ourselves.

It was natural that he should have felt some bitterness at the changed
countenance which Edinburgh society turned on him, and it is easy to
be sarcastic on the upper ranks of that day for turning it; but were
they really so much to blame? There are many cases under the present
order of things, in which we are constrained to say, "It must needs be
that offences come." Taking men and things as they are, could it well
have been otherwise?

First, the novelty of Burns's advent had worn off by his second winter
in Edinburgh, and, though it may be a weakness, novelty always counts
for something in human affairs. Then, again, the quiet decorous men of
Blair's circle knew more of Burns's ways and doings than at first, and
what they came to know was not likely to increase their desire for (p. 091)
intimacy with him. It was, it seems, notorious that Burns kept that
formidable memorandum-book already alluded to, in which he was
supposed to sketch with unsparing hand, "stern likenesses" of his
friends and benefactors. So little of a secret did he make of this,
that we are told he sometimes allowed a visitor to have a look at the
figures which he had sketched in his portrait-gallery. The knowledge
that such a book existed was not likely to make Blair and his friends
more desirous of his society.

Again, the festivities at the Crochallan Cl