only his own quarrel with
his parish minister and the stricter clergy to revenge, but the
quarrel also of his friend and landlord, Gavin Hamilton, a county
lawyer, who had fallen under Church censure for neglect of Church
ordinances, and had been debarred from the Communion. Burns espoused
Gavin's cause with characteristic zeal, and let fly new arrows one
after another from his satirical quiver.

The first of these satires against the orthodox ministers was _The Twa
Herds, or the Holy Tulzie_, written on a quarrel between two brother
clergymen. Then followed in quick succession _Holy Willie's Prayer_,
_The Ordination_, and _The Holy Fair_. His good mother and his brother
were pained by these performances, and remonstrated against them. But
Burns, though he generally gave ear to their counsel, in this (p. 020)
instance turned a deaf ear to it, and listened to other advisers. The
love of exercising his strong powers of satire and the applause of his
boon-companions, lay and clerical, prevailed over the whispers of his
own better nature and the advice of his truest friends. Whatever may
be urged in defence of employing satire to lash hypocrisy, I cannot
but think that those who have loved most what is best in Burns' poetry
must have regretted that these poems were ever written. Some have
commended them on the ground that they have exposed religious pretence
and Pharisaism. The good they may have done in this way is perhaps
doubtful. But the harm they have done in Scotland is not doubtful, in
that they have connected in the minds of the people so many coarse and
even profane thoughts with objects which they had regarded till then
with reverence. Even _The Holy Fair_, the poem in this kind which is
least offensive, turns on the abuses that then attended the
celebration of the Holy Communion in rural parishes, and with great
power portrays those gatherings in their most mundane aspects. Yet, as
Lockhart has well remarked, those things were part of the same
religious system which produced the scenes which Burns has so
beautifully described in _The Cotter's Saturday Night_. Strange that
the same mind, almost at the same moment, should have conceived two
poems so different in spirit as _The Cotter's Saturday Night_ and _The
Holy Fair_!

I have dwelt thus long on these unpleasant satires that I may not have
again to return to them. It is a more welcome task to turn to the
other poems of the same period. Though Burns had en