ub and other such haunts,
the habits he there indulged in, and the associates with whom he
consorted, these were well known. And it was not possible that either
the ways, the conversation, or the cronies of the Crochallan Club
could be welcomed in quieter and more polished circles. Men of the
Ainslie and Nicol stamp would hardly have been quite in place there.

Again--what is much to the honour of Burns--he never in the highest
access of his fame, abated a jot of his intimacy and friendship
towards the men of his own rank, with whom he had been associated in
his days of obscurity. These were tradesmen, farmers, and peasants.
The thought of them, their sentiments, their prejudices and habits, if
it had been possible, their very persons, he would have taken with
him, without disguise or apology, into the highest circles of rank or
of literature. But this might not be. It was impossible that Burns
could take Mauchline with its belles, its Poosie-Nansies and its
Souter Johnnies, bodily into the library of Dr. Blair or the
drawing-room of Gordon Castle.

A man, to whom it is open, must make his choice; but he cannot live at
once in two different and widely sundered orders of society. To (p. 092)
no one is it given, not even to men of genius great as that of
Burns, for himself and his family entirely to overleap the barriers
with which custom and the world have hedged us in, and to weld the
extremes of society into one. To the speculative as well as to the
practically humane man, the great inequality in human conditions
presents, no doubt, a perplexing problem. A little less worldly pride,
and a little more Christian wisdom and humility, would probably have
helped Burns to solve it better than he did. But besides the social
grievance, which though impalpable is very real, Burns had another
more material and tangible. The great whom he had met in Edinburgh,
whose castles he had visited in the country, might have done something
to raise him at once above poverty and toil, and they did little or
nothing. They had, indeed, subscribed liberally for his Second
Edition, and they had got him a gauger's post, with fifty or sixty
pounds a year, that was all. What more could they, ought they to have
done? To have obtained him an office in some one of the higher
professions was not to be thought of, for a man cannot easily at the
age of eight-and-twenty change his whole line and adapt himself to an
entirely new employment. The one t