r cowards were erected,
Churches built to please the priest.

What is title? what is treasure?
What is reputation's care?
If we lead a life of pleasure,
'Tis no matter how or where!

With the ready trick and fable,
Round we wander all the day;
And at night, in barn or stable,
Hug our doxies on the hay. [mistresses]

Does the train-attended carriage
Thro' the country lighter rove?
Does the sober bed of marriage
Witness brighter scenes of love?

Life is all a variorum,
We regard not how it goes;
Let them cant about decorum
Who have characters to lose.

Here's to budgets, bags, and wallets!
Here's to all the wandering train!
Here's our ragged brats and callets! [wenches]
One and all cry out _Amen!_

The materials for rebuilding Burns's world are not confined to his
explicitly descriptive poems. Much can be gathered from the songs and
satires, and there are important contributions in his too scanty
essays in narrative. Of these last by far the most valuable is _Tam o'
Shanter_. The poem originated accidentally in the request of a certain
Captain Grose for local legends to enrich a descriptive work which he
was compiling. In Burns's correspondence will be found a prose
account of the tradition on which the poem is founded, and he is
supposed to have derived hints for the relations of Tam and his spouse
from a couple he knew at Kirkoswald.

It was a happy inspiration that led him to turn the story into verse,
for it revealed a capacity which otherwise we could hardly have
guessed him to possess. The vigor and rapidity of the action, the
vivid sketching of the background, the pregnant characterization, the
drollery of the humor give this piece a high place among stories in
verse, and lead us to conjecture that, had he followed this vein
instead of devoting his later years to the service of Johnson and
Thomson, he might have won a place beside the author of the
_Canterbury Tales_. He lacked, to be sure, Chaucer's breadth of
experience and richness of culture: being far less a man of the world
he would never have attained the air of breeding that distinguishes
the English poet: but with most of the essential qualities that charm
us in Chaucer's stories he was well equipped. He had the observant
eye, the power of selection, command of the telling phrase and happy
epithet, the sense o