rns, as to
how far he really deteriorated in himself during those Dumfries years,
as to the extent and the causes of the social discredit into which he
fell, and as to the charge that he took to low company. His early
biographers, Currie, Walker, Heron drew the picture somewhat darkly;
Lockhart and Cunningham have endeavoured to lighten the depth of the
shadows. Chambers has laboured to give the facts impartially, has
faithfully placed the lights and the shadows side by side, and has
summed up the whole subject in an appendix on _The Reputation (p. 173)
of Burns in his Later Years_, to which I would refer any who desire to
see this painful subject minutely handled. Whatever extenuations or
excuses may be alleged, all must allow that his course in Dumfries was
on the whole a downward one, and must concur, however reluctantly, in
the conclusion at which Lockhart, while decrying the severe judgments
of Currie, Heron, and others, is forced by truth to come, that "the
untimely death of Burns was, it is too probable, hastened by his own
intemperances and imprudences." To inquire minutely, what was the
extent of those intemperances, and what the nature of those
imprudences, is a subject which can little profit any one, and on
which one has no heart to enter. If the general statement of fact be
true, the minute details are better left to the kindly oblivion,
which, but for too prying curiosity, would by this time have overtaken
them.

Dissipated his life for some years certainly had been--deeply
disreputable many asserted it to be. Others, however, there were who
took a more lenient view of him. Findlater, his superior in the
Excise, used to assert, that no officer under him was more regular in
his public duties. Mr. Gray, then teacher of Dumfries school, has left
it on record, that no parent he knew watched more carefully over his
children's education--that he had often found the poet in his home
explaining to his eldest boy passages of the English poets from
Shakespeare to Gray, and that the benefit of the father's instructions
was apparent in the excellence of the son's daily school performances.
This brighter side of the picture, however, is not irreconcilable with
that darker one. For Burns's whole character was a compound of the
most discordant and contradictory elements. Dr. Chambers has well
shown that he who at one hour was the _douce_ sober Mr. Burns, in (p. 174)
the next was changed to the maddest of Bacchanal