rculated from the cellar to the garret; and ere ten minutes
had elapsed, the landlord and all his guests were assembled round the
ingle; the largest punch-bowl was produced; and "Be ours this night--who
knows what comes to-morrow?" was the language of every eye in the circle
that welcomed him.

At home, too, lion-gazers from all quarters beset him; they ate and
drank at his cost, and often went away to criticise him and his fare, as
if they had done Burns and his black bowl great honour in condescending
to be entertained for a single evening with such company. Among others
who called on him was Captain Grose, the antiquary, and it is to this
acquaintance that we owe "Tam o' Shanter," which Burns believed to be
the best of all his productions.

_V.--Closing Years of the Poet's Life_

Towards the close of 1791 he gave up his farm, and procuring an excise
appointment to the Dumfries division, removed to the county town. His
moral course from this time was downwards. "In Dumfries," says Heron,
speaking from personal knowledge, "his dissipation became still more
deeply habitual. He was here exposed more than in the country to be
solicited to share the riot of the dissolute and idle." His intemperance
was, as Heron says, in fits; his aberrations were occasional, not
systematic; they were all to himself the sources of exquisite misery in
the retrospect; they were the aberrations of a man whose moral sense was
never deadened, of one who encountered more temptations from without and
from within than the immense majority of mankind, far from having to
contend against, are even able to imagine; of one, finally, who prayed
for pardon, where alone effectual pardon could be found.

In how far the "thoughtless follies" of the poet did actually hasten his
end, it is needless to conjecture. They had their share, unquestionably,
along with other influences which it would be inhuman to characterise as
mere follies. In these closing years of his life he had to struggle
constantly with pecuniary difficulties, than which nothing could have
been more likely to pour bitterness intolerable into the cup of his
existence. His lively imagination exaggerated to itself every real evil;
and this among, and perhaps above, all the rest; at least, in many of
his letters we find him alluding to the probability of his being
arrested for debts, which we now know to have been of very trivial
amount.

In 1795 he was greatly upset by the death, in hi