urgh poet,
Fergusson. He was a delicate youth, I take it, and willingly slunk from
the robustious winter to an inn fireside. Love was absent from his
life, or only present, if you prefer, in such a form that even the least
serious of Burns's amourettes was ennobling by comparison; and so there
is nothing to temper the sentiment of indoor revelry which pervades the
poor boy's verses. Although it is characteristic of his native town, and
the manners of its youth to the present day, this spirit has perhaps
done something to restrict his popularity. He recalls a supper-party
pleasantry with something akin to tenderness; and sounds the praises of
the act of drinking as if it were virtuous, or at least witty, in
itself. The kindly jar, the warm atmosphere of tavern parlours, and the
revelry of lawyers' clerks, do not offer by themselves the materials of
rich existence. It was not choice, so much as an external fate, that
kept Fergusson in this round of sordid pleasures. A Scot of poetic
temperament, and without religious exaltation, drops as if by nature
into the public-house. The picture may not be pleasing; but what else is
a man to do in this dog's weather?

To none but those who have themselves suffered the thing in the body,
can the gloom and depression of our Edinburgh winters be brought home.
For some constitutions there is something almost physically disgusting
in the bleak ugliness of easterly weather; the wind wearies, the sickly
sky depresses them; and they turn back from their walk to avoid the
aspect of the unrefulgent sun going down among perturbed and pallid
mists. The days are so short that a man does much of his business, and
certainly all his pleasure, by the haggard glare of gas lamps. The roads
are as heavy as a fallow. People go by, so drenched and draggle-tailed
that I have often wondered how they found the heart to undress. And
meantime the wind whistles through the town as if it were an open
meadow; and if you lie awake all night, you hear it shrieking and raving
overhead with a noise of shipwrecks and of falling houses. In a word,
life is so unsightly that there are times when the heart turns sick in
a man's inside; and the look of a tavern, or the thought of the warm,
firelit study, is like the touch of land to one who has been long
struggling with the seas.

As the weather hardens towards frost, the world begins to improve for
Edinburgh people. We enjoy superb, sub-arctic sunsets, with the profile