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exactly as it stood before he took his pen in his hand, and offered not a single word which can have the effect of sheltering him from those accusations of egotism, spleen, and scurrility, which had originally been brought against him, with apparently so much reason, by your English correspondent the "Observer."

It is very far from being my intention to go at any length into the merits of the original controversy about the proposed Memoir of Robert Burns. That great man, I am very proud to tell you, was an intimate friend of mine; and no one who knows me will suspect that my silence on that subject arises from any indifference to the memory of the departed poet. At present my business is not with Burns, but with Wordsworth, who has, as I and not a few of Burns' friends in this neighbourhood conceive, thrust himself into an affair of which he knows nothing, and with regard to which he has offered, and indeed can offer, no advice which is worthy of the smallest attention, either for Mr Gilbert Burns or any other sensible man. Indeed, were I to fix upon what sort of person I should fancy the least likely to give good counsel to a biographer of Burns, I have little hesitation in saying, that I should select just such a one as Mr Wordsworth,—a man who, if it be true that he possesses poetical genius, most certainly possesses no other quality in common with Robert Burns;—a retired, pensive, egotistical collector of stamps; one who has no notion of that merry, hearty life, that Burns delighted in; and one that seems to be completely overflowing with envy, malignity, and a thousand bad passions, of which Burns' nobler nature, whatever defects it might otherwise have, was at all times entirely incapable. How can a melancholy, sighing, half-parson sort of gentleman, who lives in a small circle of old maids and sonnetteers, and drinks tea now and then with the solemn Laureate, have any sympathy with the free and jolly dispositions of one who spent his evenings in drinking whisky punch at mason lodges with Matthew Henderson and David Lapraik? To my view it would be scarcely less absurd in Gilbert Burns to send Mr Wordsworth a long letter concerning the proper method of drawing the Recluse to a conclusion, than it was in Mr Wordsworth to prescribe rules to Gilbert with regard to that Memoir of his illustrious brother, which he is so well qualified in every way to make exactly what it should be, without the officious hints of any Laker in existence.

In the Edinburgh Review upon Burns, there occur several expressions which can never cease to appear both offensive and unjustifiable to every one who knew Burns' character, not from his letters, wherein he was originally too ill educated a man to be ever perfectly at his ease, but from his conversation, which all who have ever sat in company with him must allow to have been throughout, in the highest degree, manly, feeling, and amiable. But I must confess, that whatever faults may be found in the account of the Edinburgh Review, exist, to my apprehension at least, in a degree far more atrocious in that of the Quarterly. To quote either of them would be distressing to my own feelings, and I have little doubt that no extract I could make would appear either new or pleasing to the majority of your readers. But supposing, for a moment, that Mr Wordsworth is sincere in the opinion he expresses, how comes it that he, in a professed and formal defence of Robert Burns, takes no notice whatever of the abuse thrown out against the character of that poet in the Quarterly, and yet spends no less than eight pages of his Letter in railing at the Edinburgh, for its far less blameable paragraphs on the same topic? But I cannot resist giving your readers a small specimen of this very interesting part of the production.

"When a man, self-elected into the office of a public judge of the literature and life of his contemporaries, can have the audacity to go these lengths in framing a summary of the contents of volumes that are scattered over every quarter of the globe, and extant in almost every cottage of Scotland, to give the lie to his labours; we must not wonder if, in the plenitude of his concern for the interests of abstract morality, the infatuated slanderer should have found no obstacle to prevent him from insinuating that the poet, whose writings are to this degree stained and disfigured, was 'one of the sons of fancy and of song, who spend, in vain superfluities, the money that belongs of right to the pale industrious tradesman and his famishing infants; and who rave about friendship and philosophy in a tavern, while their wives' hearts,' &c. &c.

"It is notorious, that this persevering