Page:Interesting history of Robert Burns (1).pdf/10

latter of whom was Burns’ landlord. As to these pieces various opinions have been held— some heaping upon Burns the charge of irreligion, &c, while others have praised him for so meritorious a task as the exposure of what they are pleased to call hypocrisy and fanaticism. To the presen generation it is not easy to convey an adequate notion of the height to which parties ran in the West Country at this period, nor of the acrimony that was ingrafted on the polemical controversies then raging. These considerations should go far in the eyes of even the most austere to exculpate Burns from the charges alluded to, and incline them rather to impute to the fiery vehemence of his temperament those sallies which overleap the bounds of decorum— for that Burns, in spite of the levity of certain passages to be found in his works, was embued, and deeply embued, with the solemn and contemplative thoughts which belong to religious feeling, and in the longrun generally issue in strict religious principle, cannot fairly be denied. But no one had, on the other hand, a keener perception of the ludicrous, and such peculiarities in his opponents as offered a tempting mark for the shafts of the satirist were sure to be taken advantage of; at all events, the humour of these pieces is confessedly unrivalled. Halloween, a descriptive poem, perhaps more exquisitely wrought than the Holy Fair, and containing