sympathy. "By the way," he writes to Thomson, "are you not
vexed to think that those men of genius, for such they certainly were,
who composed our fine Scottish lyrics, should be unknown?"

Many of the songs of that autumn were, as usual, love-ditties; but
when the poet could forget the lint-white locks of Chloris, of which
kind of stuff there is more than enough, he would write as good songs
on other and manlier subjects. Two of these, written, the one in (p. 166)
November, 1794, the other in January, 1795, belong to the latter
order, and are worthy of careful regard, not only for their excellence
as songs, but also as illustrations of the poet's mood of mind at the
time when he composed them.

The first is this,---

Contented wi' little, and cantie wi' mair,
Whene'er I forgather wi' sorrow and care,
I gie them a skelp as they're creepin' alang,
Wi' a cog o' gude swats, and an auld Scottish sang.

I whyles claw the elbow o' troublesome thought;
But man is a soger, and life is a faught;
My mirth and gude humour are coin in my pouch,
And my Freedom's my lairdship nae monarch dare touch.

A towmond o' trouble, should that be my fa',
A night o' gude fellowship sowthers it a';
When at the blythe end o' our journey at last,
Wha the deil ever thinks o' the road he has past?

Blind Chance, let her snapper and stoyte on her way;
Be't to me, be't frae me, e'en let the jade gae:
Come Ease, or come Travail, come Pleasure or Pain,
My warst word is--Welcome, and welcome again.

This song gives Burns's idea of himself, and of his struggle with the
world, when he could look on both from the placid, rather than the
despondent side. He regarded it as a true picture of himself; for,
when a good miniature of him had been done, he wrote to Thomson that
he wished a vignette from it to be prefixed to this song, that, in his
own words, "the portrait of my face, and the picture of my mind may go
down the stream of time together." Burns had more moods of mind than
most men, and this was, we may hope, no unfrequent one with him. But
if we would reach the truth, we probably ought to strike a balance (p. 167)
between the spirit of this song and the dark moods depicted in some of
those letters already quoted.

The other song of the same time is the