olic daft,
To Hague or Calais takes a waft,
To make a tour an' tak a whirl,
To learn _bon ton_, an' see the worl'.
Then, at Vienna or Versailles,
He rives his father's auld entails;
Or by Madrid he takes the rout,
To thrum guitars and fecht wi' nowt.

* * * * *

For Britain's guid! for her destruction!
Wi' dissipation, feud an' faction.

Then exclaims Luath, the poor man's dog,--

Hech, man! dear sirs! is that the gate
They waste sae many a braw estate!
Are we sae foughten and harass'd
For gear to gang that gate at last?

And yet he allows, that for all that

---- Thae frank, rantin', ramblin' billies,
Fient haet o' them's ill-hearted fellows.

"Mark the power of that one word, 'nowt,'" said the late Thomas Aird.
"If the poet had said that our young fellows went to Spain to fight
with bulls, there would have been some dignity in the thing, but think
of his going all that way 'to fecht wi' nowt.' It was felt at once to
be ridiculous. That one word conveyed at once a statement of the
folly, and a sarcastic rebuke of the folly."

Or turn to the poem of _Halloween_. Here he has sketched the Ayrshire
peasantry as they appeared in their hours of merriment--painted with a
few vivid strokes a dozen distinct pictures of country lads and (p. 195)
lasses, sires and dames, and at the same time preserved for ever
the remembrance of antique customs and superstitious observances,
which even in Burns's day were beginning to fade, and have now all but
disappeared.

Or again, take _The auld Farmer's New-year-morning Salutation to his
auld Mare_. In this homely, but most kindly humorous poem, you have
the whole toiling life of a ploughman and his horse, done off in two
or three touches, and the elements of what may seem a commonplace, but
was to Burns a most vivid, experience, are made to live for ever. For
a piece of good graphic Scotch, see how he describes the sturdy old
mare in the plough setting her face to the furzy braes.

Thou never braing't, an' fetch't, and fliskit,
But thy auld tail thou wad hae whiskit,
An spread abreed thy weel-fill'd brisket,
Wi' pith an' pow'r,
Till spritty knowes wad rair't and riskit,