January 25, 1759, Birth at Ayr, parish of Alloway. 1765, School at Alloway Mill; with Murdoch. 1766–1777, At Mount Oliphant, parish of Ayr (1766). 1768, Early associations on the farm. Taught at home by his father. 1769, Books. Love and song. Jenny Wilson. 1777–84, At Lochlea, parish of Tarbolton. 1778, School at Kirkoswald. 1780, The Bachelor’s Club. 1781, Flax-dressing at Irvine. 1782, Finds Fergusson’s Poems. 1783, A Freemason. February 1784, His father’s death. 1784–1786, At Mossgiel, parish of Mauchline. 1785, Early friends: Gavin Hamilton, Robert Aiken. Struggle with Auld Lichts. Poetic Springtide. Epistles. Satirical Poems. Descriptive Poems. Songs. August 1786, Kilmarnock (first) edition of poems published. Literary friendships: Dr. Blacklock, Dugald Stewart, Dr. Blair, Rev. Mr. Laurie, Mrs. Dunlop. Visits Katrine, meets Lord Daer and Mrs. Stewart. November 1786, Visits Edinburgh. Among the celebrities. April 1787, Second edition of poems. Travels in Scotland, May, Border Tour. June, Returns to Mossgiel. First Highland Tour. Second Highland Tour. Third Highland Tour. September, Returns to Edinburgh. Johnson’s Museum. March 1788, Leaves Edinburgh. 1788–1791, At Ellisland. August 1788, Marries Jean Armour, At Friar’s Carse. 1790, Appointed Excise Officer. 1791–1796, At Dumfries. Bank Vennel. Dumfries Volunteers. Thomson’s Collection. 1792, Patriotic Songs. 1793, Visits Galloway. 1794, Removes to Mill Hill Brae. Failing Health. July 21, 1796, Death.

Personal

  This kind of life—the cheerless gloom of a hermit, with the unceasing moil of a galley-slave, brought me to my sixteenth year; a little before which period I first committed the sin of Rhyme. You know our country custom of coupling a man and woman together as partners in the labours of harvest. In my fifteenth autumn my partner was a bewitching creature, a year younger than myself. My scarcity of English denies me the power of doing her justice in that language; but you know the Scottish idiom—she was a bonnie sweet, sonie lass. In short, she altogether, unwittingly to herself, initiated me in that delicious passion, which, in spite of acid disappointment, gin-horse prudence, and book-worm philosophy, I hold to be the first of human joys, our dearest blessing here below! How she caught the contagion, I cannot tell: you medical people talk much of infection from breathing the same air, the touch, &c.; but I never expressly said I loved her, indeed, I did not know myself why I liked so much to loiter behind with her, when returning in the evening from our labours; why the tones of her voice made my heart-strings thrill like an Æolian harp; and particularly my pulse beat such a furious ratan when I looked and fingered over her little hand to pick out the cruel nettle-stings and thistles. Among her other love-inspiring qualities, she sung sweetly; and it was her favourite reel to which I attempted giving an embodied vehicle in rhyme. I was not so presumptuous as to imagine that I could make verses like printed ones, composed by men who had Greek and Latin; but my girl sung a song, which was said to be composed by a small country laird’s son, on one of his father’s maids, with whom he was in love! and I saw no reason why I might not rhyme as well as he; for, excepting that he could smear sheep, and cast peats, his father living in the moor-lands, he had no more scholar-craft than myself.

  After all my boasted independence, curst necessity compels me to implore you for five pounds. A cruel scoundrel of a haberdasher, to whom I owe an account, taking it into his head that I am dying, has commenced a process, and will infallibly put me into jail. Do, for God’s sake, send me that sum, and that by return of post. Forgive me this earnestness; but the horrors of a jail have made me half distracted. I do not ask all this gratuitously; for, upon returning health, I hereby promise and engage to furnish you with five pounds’ worth of the neatest song-genius you have seen. I tried my hand on Rothermurchie this morning. The measure is so difficult, that it is impossible to infuse much genius into the lines; they are on the other side. Forgive, forgive me!

  If others have climbed more successfully to the heights of Parnassus, none certainly out-shone Burns in the charms—the sorcery I would almost call it, of fascinating conversation; the spontaneous eloquence of social argument, or the unstudied poignancy of brilliant repartee. His personal endowments were perfectly correspondent with the qualifications of his mind. His form was manly; his action energy itself; devoid, in a great measure, however, of those graces, of that polish, acquired only in the refinement of societies, where in early life he had not the opportunity to mix; but, where, such was the irresistible power of attraction that encircled him, though his appearance and manners were always peculiar, he never failed to delight and to excel. His figure certainly bore the authentic impress of his birth and original station in life; it seemed rather moulded by nature for the rough exercises of agriculture, than the gentler cultivation of the belles lettres. His features were stamped with the hardy character of independence, and the firmness of conscious, though not arrogant pre-eminence. I believe no man was ever gifted with a larger portion of the vivida vis animi: the animated expressions of his countenance were almost peculiar to himself. The rapid lightenings of his eye were always the harbingers of some flash of genius, whether they darted the fiery glances of insulted and indignant superiority, or beamed with the impassioned sentiment of fervent and impetuous affections. His voice alone could improve upon the magic of his eye; sonorous, replete with the finest modulations, it alternately captivated the ear with the melody of poetic numbers, the perspicuity of nervous reasoning, or the ardent sallies of enthusiastic patriotism.

  My pupil, Robert Burns, was then between six and seven years of age; his preceptor about eighteen. Robert, and his younger brother, Gilbert, had been grounded a little in English before they were put under my care. They both made a rapid progress in reading, and a tolerable progress in writing. In reading, dividing words into syllables by rule, spelling without book, phrasing sentences, &c., Robert and Gilbert were generally at the upper end of the class, even when ranged with boys by far their seniors. The books most commonly used in the school were the “Spelling Book,” the “New Testament,” the “Bible,” “Masson’s Collection of Prose and Verse,” and “Fisher’s English Grammar.” They committed to memory the hymns, and other poems of that collection, with uncommon facility. This facility was partly owing to the method pursued by their father and me in instructing them, which was, to make them thoroughly acquainted with the meaning of every word in each sentence that was to be committed to memory…. Gilbert always appeared to me to possess a more lively imagination, and to be more of the wit, than Robert. I attempted to teach them a little church-music. Here they were left far behind by all the rest of the school. Robert’s ear, in particular, was remarkably dull, and his voice untunable. It was long before I could get them to distinguish one tune from another. Robbert’s countenance was generally grave, and impressive of a serious, contemplative, and thoughtful mind. Gilbert’s face said, Mirth, with thee I mean to live; and certainly, if any person who knew the two boys, had been asked which of them was the most likely to court the muses, he would surely never have guessed that Robert had a propensity of that kind.

  The first time I saw Robert Burns was on the 23d of October, 1786, when he dined at my house at Ayrshire, together with our common friend Mr. John Mackenzie, surgeon, in Mauchline, to whom I am indebted for the pleasure of his acquaintance…. His manners were then, as they continued ever afterwards, simple, manly, and independent; strongly expressive of conscious genius and worth; but without any thing that indicated forwardness, arrogance, or vanity. He took his share in conversation, but not more than belonged to him; and listened with apparent attention and deference, on subjects where his want of education deprived him of the means of information. If there had been a little more of gentleness and accommodation in his temper, he would, I think, have been still more interesting; but he had been accustomed to give law in the circle of his ordinary acquaintance; and his dread of any thing approaching to meanness or servility, rendered his manner somewhat decided and hard. Nothing, perhaps, was more remarkable among his various attainments, than the fluency, and precision, and originality of his language, when he spoke in company; more particularly as he aimed at purity in his turn of expression, and avoided more successfully than most Scotchmen, the peculiarities of Scottish phraseology…. The attentions he received during his stay in town from all ranks and descriptions of persons, were such as would have turned any head but his own. I cannot say that I could perceive any unfavourable effect which they left on his mind. He retained the same simplicity of manners and appearance which had struck me so forcibly when I first saw him in the country; nor did he seem to feel any additional self-importance from the number and rank of his new acquaintance. His dress was perfectly suited to his station, plain and unpretending, with a sufficient attention to neatness. If I recollect right he always wore boots; and, when on more than usual ceremony, buck-skin breeches…. All the faculties of Burns’s mind were, as far as I could judge, equally vigorous; and his predilection for poetry was rather the result of his own enthusiastic and impassioned temper, than of a genius exclusively adapted to that species of composition. From his conversation I should have pronounced him to be fitted to excel in whatever walk of ambition he had chosen to exert his abilities.

  Burns died in great poverty; but the independence of his spirit, and the exemplary prudence of his wife, had preserved him from debt. He had received from his poems a clear profit of about nine hundred pounds. Of this sum, the part expended on his library (which was far from extensive) and in the humble furniture of his house, remained; and obligations were found for two hundred pounds advanced by him to the assistance of those to whom he was united by the ties of blood, and still more by those of esteem and affection. When it is considered, that his expenses in Edinburgh, and on his various journeys, could not be inconsiderable; that his agricultural undertaking was unsuccessful; that his income, from the Excise was for some time as low as fifty, and never rose to above seventy pounds a year; that his family was large and his spirit was liberal—no one will be surprised that his circumstances were so poor, or that, as his health decayed, his proud and feeling heart sunk under the secret consciousness of indigence, and the apprehensions of absolute want. Yet poverty never bent the spirit of Burns to any pecuniary meanness. Neither chicanery nor sordidness ever appeared in his conduct. He carried his disregard of money to blameable excess. Even in the midst of distress he bore himself loftily to the world, and received with a jealous reluctance every offer of friendly assistance…. Burns, as has already been mentioned, was nearly five feet ten inches in height, and of a form that indicated agility as well as strength. His well-raised forehead, shaded with black curling hair, indicated extensive capacity. His eyes were large, dark, full of ardour and intelligence. His face was well formed; and his countenance uncommonly interesting and expressive. His mode of dressing which was often slovenly, and a certain fulness and bend in his shoulders, characteristic of his original profession, disguised in some degree the natural symmetry and elegance of his form. The external appearance of Burns was most strikingly indicative of the character of his mind.

  We turned again to Burns’s house. Mrs. Burns was gone to spend some time by the seashore with her children. We spoke to the servant-maid at the door, who invited us forward, and we sate down in the parlour. The walls were coloured with a blue wash; on one side of the fire was a mahogany desk, opposite to the window a clock, and over the desk, a print from “Cotter’s Saturday Night,” which Burns mentions in one of his letters having received as a present. The house was cleanly and neat in the inside, the stairs of stone, scoured white, the kitchen on the right side of the passage, the parlour on the left. In the room above the parlour the poet died, and his son after him in the same room.

  Till he fixed his residence in Dumfries, his irregularities, though by no means unfrequent, had not become inveterately habitual; the temptations, however, to which he was now exposed proved too powerful for his better impressions; after various struggles against the stream of dissipation which was gradually surrounding him, he at length suffered himself to be rapidly carried along by its fatal current. A large proportion of the more genteel, or more idle inhabitants of Dumfries, consists of men connected with the profession of law: and in some of these, as well as in other inhabitants of the town and its vicinity, Burns found associates from whom it was not to be expected that he should learn sobriety. The fame of his literary character also exposed him to the company of every stranger who professed a respect for poetry. As their interviews commonly took place in taverns, his familiarity with riotous excess was daily increasing. In the midst of such distractions, it must have been impossible for him to discharge the duties of his office with that regularity which is almost indispensable.

  I was not much struck with his first appearance, as I had previously heard it described. His person, though strong and well knit, and much superior to what might be expected in a ploughman, was still rather coarse in its outline. His stature, from want of setting up, appeared to be only of the middle size, but was rather above it. His motions were firm and decided, and though without any pretentions to grace, were at the same time so free from clownish constraint, as to show that he had not always been confined to the society of his profession. His countenance was not of that elegant cast, which is most frequent among the upper ranks, but it was manly and intelligent, and marked by a thoughtful gravity which shaded at times into sternness. In his large dark eye the most striking index of his genius resided. It was full of mind; and would have been singularly expressive, under the management of one who could employ it with more art, for the purpose of expression…. In conversation he was powerful. His conceptions and expression were of corresponding vigour, and on all subjects were as remote as possible from common places. Though somewhat authoritative, it was in a way which gave little offence, and was readily imputed to his inexperience in those modes of smoothing dissent and softening assertion, which are important characteristics of polished manners. After breakfast I requested him to communicate some of his unpublished pieces, and he recited his farewell song to the Banks of Ayr, introducing it with a description of the circumstances in which it was composed, more striking than the poem itself. I paid particular attention to his recitation, which was plain, slow, articulate, and forcible, but without any eloquence or art. He did not always lay the emphasis with propriety, nor did he humour the sentiment by the variations of his voice. He was standing, during the time, with his face towards the window, to which, and not to his auditors, he directed his eye—thus depriving himself of any additional effect which the language of his composition might have borrowed from the language of his countenance.

  No person can regret more than I do the tendency of some of my Brother’s writings to represent irregularity of conduct as a consequence of genius, and sobriety the effect of dulness; but surely more has been said on that subject than the fact warrants: and it ought to be remembered that the greatest part of his writings, having that tendency, were not published by himself, nor intended for publication. But it may likewise be observed, and every attentive reader of Burns’s Works, must have observed, that he frequently presents a caricature of his feelings, and even of his failings—a kind of mock-heroic account of himself and his opinions, which he never supposed could be taken literally. I dare say it never entered into his head, for instance, that when he was speaking in that manner of Milton’s Satan, any one should gravely suppose that was the model on which he wished to form his own character. Yet on such rants, which the author evidently intends should be considered a mere play of imagination, joined to some abstract reasoning of the critic, many of the heavy accusations brought against the Poet for bad taste and worse morals, rest.

	IN AETERNUM HONOREM
	ROBERTI BURNS
	POETARUM CALEDONIÆ SUI ÆVI LONGE PRINCIPIS
	CUJUS CARMINA EXIMIA, PATRIO SERMONE SCRIPTA,
	ANIMI MAGIS ARDENTIS VIQUE INGENII
	QUAM ARTE VEL CULTU CONSPICUA,
	FACETIIS JUCUNDITATE LEPORE AFFLUENTIA,
	OMNIBUS LITTERARUM CULTORIBUS SATIS NOTA;
	CIVES SUI, NECNON PLERIQUE OMNES
	MUSARUM AMANTISSIMI, MEMORIAMQUE VIRI
	ARTE POETICA TAM PRAECLARI FOVENTES
	HOC MAUSOLEUM,
	SUPER RELIQUIAS POETÆ MORTALES,
	EXTRUENDUM CURAVERE.
	PRIMUM HUJUS ÆDIFICII LAPIDEM
	GULIELMUS MILLER, ARMIGER,
	REIPUBLICÆ ARCHITECTONICÆ APUD SCOTOS,
	IN REGIONE AUSTRALI, CURIO MAXIMUS PROVINCIALIS,
	GEORGIO TERTIO REGNANTE,
	GEORGIO, WALLIARUM PRINCIPE,
	SUMMAM IMPERII PRO PATRE TENENTE,
	JOSEPHO GASS, ARMIGERO, DUMFRISIÆ PRÆFECTO
	THOMA F. HUNT, LONDINENSI, ARCHITECTO, POSUIT,
	NONIS JUNIIS ANNO LUCIS VMDCCCXV.
	SALUTIS HUMANÆ MDCCCXV.

  The truth is, that the convivial excesses or other errors of Robert Burns, were neither greater nor more numerous than those which we every day see in the conduct of men who stand high in the estimation of society;—of some men, who, like Burns, have, in their peculiar spheres, conferred splendid gifts of genius on their country, and whose names are breathed in every voice, with pride and enthusiasm, as the benefactors of society. Are their errors officiously dragged from the tomb, or emblazoned amidst the trophies of victory without universal reprobation? All we ask is the same measure of justice and of mercy for Burns.

  One song of Burns’s is of more worth to you than all I could think for a whole year in his native country. His misery is a dead weight upon the nimbleness of one’s quill; I tried to forget it—to drink toddy without any care—to write a merry sonnet—it won’t do—he talked with bitches, he drank with blackguards; he was miserable. We can see horribly clear, in the works of such a man, his whole life, as if we were God’s spies.

  He had a strong mind, and a strong body, the fellow to it. He had a real heart of flesh and blood beating in his bosom—you can almost hear it throb. Some one said, that if you had shaken hands with him, his hand would have burnt yours. The gods, indeed, “made him poetical;” but nature had a hand in him first. His heart was in the right place. He did not “create a soul under the ribs of death,” by tinkling siren sounds, or by piling up centos of poetic diction; but for the artificial flowers of poetry, he plucked the mountain-daisy under his feet; and a field mouse, hurrying from its ruined dwelling, could inspire him with the sentiments of terror and pity. He held the plough or the pen with the same firm, manly grasp; nor did he cut out poetry as we cut out watch-papers, with finical dexterity, nor from the same flimsy materials. Burns was not like Shakspeare in the range of his genius; but there is something of the same magnanimity, directness, and unaffected character about him. He was not a sickly sentimentalist, a namby-pamby poet, a mincing metre ballad-monger, any more than Shakspeare. He would as soon hear “a brazen candlestick tuned, or a dry wheel grate on the axletree.” He was as much of a man—not a twentieth as much of a poet—as Shakspeare. With but little of his imagination or inventive power, he had the same life of mind: within the narrow circle of personal feeling or domestic incidents, the pulse of his poetry flows as healthily and vigorously. He had an eye to see; a heart to feel:—no more.

  To-day our Burns’s dinner…. Burns’s son was brought forward, and spoke sensibly: very like the father to judge by the engravings, and worthy of him in the manly sentiments he expressed about politics; too manly and free, poor fellow, for his advancement as a placeman.

  Dumfries was like a besieged place. It was known that he was dying, and the anxiety, not of the rich and the learned only, but of the mechanics and peasants, exceeded all belief. Wherever two or three people stood together, their talk was of Burns, and of him alone. They spoke of his history—of his person—of his works—of his family—of his fame—and of his untimely and approaching fate, with a warmth and an enthusiasm which will ever endear Dumfries to my remembrance. All that he said or was saying—the opinions of the physicians (and Maxwell was a kind and a skillful one), were eagerly caught up and reported from street to street, and from house to house…. His good humour was unruffled, and his wit never forsook him. He looked to one of his fellow volunteers with a smile, as he stood by the bed-side with his eyes wet, and said, “John, don’t let the awkward squad fire over me.” He repressed with a smile the hopes of his friends, and told them he had lived long enough. As his life drew near a close, the eager, yet decorous solicitude of his fellow-townsmen, increased. It is the practice of the young men of Dumfries to meet in the streets during the hours of remission from labour, and by these means I had an opportunity of witnessing the general solicitude of all ranks and of all ages. His difference with them on some important points were forgotten and forgiven; they thought only of his genius—of the delight his compositions had diffused—and they talked of him with the same awe as of some departing spirit, whose voice was to gladden them no more…. I went to see him laid out for the grave, several elder people were with me. He lay in a plain unadorned coffin, with a linen sheet drawn over his face, and on the bed, and around the body, herbs and flowers were thickly strewn, according to the usage of the country. He was wasted somewhat by long illness; but death had not increased the swarthy hue of his face, which was uncommonly dark and deeply marked—his broad and open brow was pale and serene, and around it his sable hair lay in masses, slightly touched with grey. The room where he lay was plain and neat, and the simplicity of the poet’s humble dwelling pressed the presence of death more closely on the heart than if his bier had been embellished by vanity, and covered with the blazonry of high ancestry and rank. We stood and gazed on him in silence for the space of several minutes—we went, and others succeeded us—not a whisper was heard. This was several days after his death…. The multitude who accompanied Burns to the grave went step by step with the chief mourners. They might amount to ten or twelve thousand. Not a word was heard…. It was an impressive and mournful sight to see men of all ranks and persuasions and opinions mingling as brothers, and stepping side by side down the streets of Dumfries, with the remains of him who had sung of their loves and joys and domestic endearments, with a truth and a tenderness which none perhaps have since equalled.

  I was a lad of fifteen in 1786–7, when he came first to Edinburgh, but had sense and feeling enough to be much interested in his poetry, and would have given the world to know him; but I had very little acquaintance with any literary people, and still less with the gentry of the west country, the two sets that he most frequented. Mr. Thomas Grierson was at that time a clerk of my father’s. He knew Burns, and promised to ask him to his lodgings to dinner, but had no opportunity to keep his word, otherwise I might have seen more of this distinguished man…. His person was strong and robust: his manners rustic, not clownish; a sort of dignified plainness and simplicity which received part of its effect perhaps from one’s knowledge of his extraordinary talents. His features are represented in Mr. Nasmyth’s picture, but to me it conveys the idea that they are diminished as if seen in perspective. I think his countenance was more massive than it looks in any of the portraits. I would have taken the poet, had I not known what he was, for a very sagacious country farmer of the old Scotch school—i. e. none of your modern agriculturists, who keep labourers for their drudgery, but the douce gudeman who held his own plough. There was a strong expression of sense and shrewdness in all his lineaments; the eye alone, I think, indicated the poetical character and temperament. It was large, and of a dark cast, and glowed (I say literally glowed) when he spoke with feeling or interest. I never saw such another eye in a human head, though I have seen the most distinguished men in my time. His conversation expressed perfect self-confidence, without the slightest presumption. Among the men who were the most learned of their time and country, he expressed himself with perfect firmness, but without the least intrusive forwardness; and when he differed in opinion, he did not hesitate to express it firmly, yet at the same time with modesty. I do not remember any part of his conversation distinctly enough to be quoted, nor did I ever see him again, except in the street, where he did not recognize me, as I could not expect he should. He was much caressed in Edinburgh, but (considering what literary emoluments have been since his day) the efforts made for his relief were extremely trifling.

  Burns, eager of temper, loud of tone, and with declamation and sarcasm equally at command, was, we may easily believe, the most hated of human beings, because the most dreaded, among the provincial champions of the administration of which he thought fit to disapprove. But that he ever, in his most ardent moods, upheld the principles of those whose applause of the French Revolution was but the mask of revolutionary designs at home, after these principles had been really developed by those that maintained them, and understood by him, it may be safely denied. There is not in all his correspondence, one syllable to give countenance to such a charge…. Here, then, as in most other cases of similar controversy, the fair and equitable conclusion would seem to be, “truth lies between.” To whatever Burns’s excesses amounted, they were, it is obvious, and that frequently, the subject of rebuke and remonstrance even from his own dearest friends—even from men who had no sort of objection to potations deep enough in all conscience. That such reprimands, giving shape and form to the thoughts that tortured his own bosom, should have been received at times with a strange mixture of remorse and indignation, none that have considered the nervous susceptibility and haughtiness of Burns’s character, can hear with surprise.

  To the ill-starred Burns was given the power of making man’s life more venerable, but that of wisely guiding his own was not given. Destiny—for so in our ignorance we must speak—his faults, the faults of others, proved too hard for him; and that spirit, which might have soared, could it but have walked, soon sank to the dust, its glorious faculties trodden under foot in the blossom, and died, we may almost say, without ever having lived. And so kind and warm a soul; so full of inborn riches, of love of all living and lifeless things!… He has a just self-consciousness, which too often degenerates into pride; yet it is a noble pride, for defence, not for offence, no cold, suspicious feeling, but a frank and social one. The peasant poet bears himself, we might say, like a king in exile: he is cast among the low, and feels himself equal to the highest; yet he claims no rank that none may be disputed to him…. And this was he for whom the world found no fitter business than quarreling with smugglers and vintners, computing excise dues upon tallow, and gauging ale barrels! In such toils was that mighty spirit sorrowfully wasted: and a hundred years may pass on before another such is given us to waste…. We had something to say on the public moral character of Burns, but this also we must forbear. We are far from regarding him as guilty before the world, as guiltier than the average; nay, from doubting that he is less guilty than one of ten thousand. Tried at a tribunal far more rigid than that where the plebiscita of common civic reputations are pronounced, he had seemed to us even there less worthy of blame than of pity and wonder.

  In early life he laboured under a disorder of the stomach, accompanied by palpitations of the heart, depression of the spirits, and nervous pains in the head, the nature of which he never appears to have understood, but which evidently arose from dyspepsia. These sufferings, be it remembered, are complained of in his letters years before he had committed any excess; and so far from being the consequence of intemperance, as they are generally considered to have been, the exhaustion they produced was probably the cause which drove him in his moments of hypochondria, to the excitement of the bottle for a temporary palliation of his symptoms.

  The cranial bones were perfect in every respect, if we except a little erosion of their external table, and firmly held together by their sutures; even the delicate bones of the orbits, with the trifling exception of the os unguis in the left, were sound, and uninjured by death and the grave. The superior maxillary bones still retained the four most posterior teeth on each side, including the dentes sapientiæ, and all without spot or blemish; the incisores, cuspidati, &c., had in all probability recently dropped from the jaw, for the alveoli were but little decayed. The bones of the face and palate were also sound. Some small portions of black hair, with a very few gray hairs intermixed, were observed while detaching some extraneous matter from the occiput. Indeed, nothing could exceed the high state of preservation in which we found the bones of the cranium, or offer a fairer opportunity of supplying what has so long been desiderated by phrenologists—a correct model of our immortal poet’s head: and in order to accomplish this in the most accurate and satisfactory manner, every particle of sand, or other foreign body, was carefully washed off, and the plaster of Paris applied with all the tact and accuracy of an experienced artist. The cast is admirably taken, and cannot fail to prove highly interesting to phrenologists and others. Having completed our intention, the skull, securely enclosed in a leaden case, was again committed to the earth, precisely where we found it.

	I. DIMENSIONS OF THE SKULL.
	Greatest circumference … inches	221/4
	From Occipital Spine to Individuality, over the top of the head, …	14
	… Ear to Ear vertically over the top of the head, …	13
	… Philoprogenitiveness to Individuality (greatest length) …	8
	… Concentrativeness to Comparison …	71/8
	… Ear to Philoprogenitiveness, …	47/8
	… … Individuality, …	43/4
	… … Benevolence, …	51/2
	… … Firmness, …	51/2
	… Destructiveness to Destructiveness, …	53/4
	… Secretiveness to Secretiveness, …	57/8
	… Cautioness to Cautioness, …	51/2
	… Ideality to Ideality, …	45/8
	… Constructiveness to Constructiveness, …	41/2
	… Mastoid Process to Mastoid Process, …	43/4

  A £10 bank note, by way of subscription for a few copies of an early edition of his poems—this the outside that I could ever see proof given of Burns having received anything in the way of patronage; and doubtless this would have been gladly returned, but from the dire necessity of dissembling. Lord Glencairn is the “patron” for whom Burns appears to have felt the most sincere respect. Yet even he—did he give him more than a seat at his dinner table? Lord Buchan again, whose liberalities are by this time pretty well appreciated in Scotland, exhorts Burns, in a tone of one preaching upon a primary duty of life, to exemplar gratitude towards a person who had given him absolutely nothing at all. The man has not yet lived to whose happiness it was more essential that he should live unencumbered by the sense of obligation; and, on the other hand, the man has not lived upon whose independence as professing benefactors so many people practised, or who found so many others ready to ratify and give value to their pretences. Him, whom beyond most men nature had created with the necessity of conscious independence, all men beseiged with the assurance that he was, must be, ought to be dependent; nay, that it was his primary duty to be grateful for his dependence … not merely that, with his genius, and with the intellectual pretentions generally of his family, he should have been called to a life of early labour, and of labour unhappily not prosperous, but also that he, by accident about the proudest of human spirits, should have been by accident summoned, beyond all others, to eternal recognitions of some mysterious gratitude which he owed to some mysterious patrons little and great, whilst yet, of all men, perhaps, he reaped the least obvious or known benefit from any patronage that has ever been put on record.

  Altogether independently of his writings, the character of Burns, like that of Johnson, was one of great massiveness and power. There was a cast of true tragic greatness about it. There was a largeness in his heart, and a force in his passions, that corresponded with the mass of his intellect and the vigour of his genius. We receive just such an impression from reading his life as we do from perusing one of the greater tragedies of Shakspeare. Like the Othellos or Macbeths of the dramatist,—characters that fasten upon the imagination and sink into the memory from causes altogether unconnected with either literary taste or moral feeling,—we feel in him, perforce, an interest which exists and grows alike independently of the excesses into which his passions betrayed him, or the trophies which his genius enabled him to erect. Burns was not merely a distinguished poet,—he was a man on a large scale.

  He married his Jean, and chose his farm on the banks of the Nith, as Allan Cunningham’s father remarked to him at the time, not with a farmer’s, but a poet’s choice. But here, half farmer, half exciseman, poverty came rapidly upon him once more; in three years’ time only he quitted it, a man ruined in substance and constitution, and went to depend on his excise salary of £70 a year in the town of Dumfries. I visited this farm in August, 1845…. The farm, as I have said, is a very pleasant one. Burns is supposed to have chosen the particular situation of his house not only for its fine situation on the banks of the river, and overlooking the vale and country round, but on account of a beautiful spring which gushes from the slope just below the house. The ground-plan of his house is very much like that of most Scotch farms. The buildings form three sides of a quadrangle. The house and buildings are only one story high, white, and altogether a genuine Scotch steading. The house is on the lower side, next to the river. Burns’s bedroom has yet two beds in it, of that sort of cupboard fashion, with check curtains, which are so often seen in Scotch farm-houses. The humble rooms are much as they were in his time. Near the house, and running parallel with the river, is a good large garden which he planted. The side of the farm-yard opposite to the house is pleasantly planted off with trees. The farm is just as it was, about one hundred acres. By places it exhibits that stony soil which made Burns call it “the riddlings of creation,” and say that when a ploughed field was rolled it looked like a paved street; but still it carries good crops. Burns had it for £50 a year, or ten shillings an acre. I suppose the present tenant pays three times the sum, and is proud of his bargain. He observed that it was an ill wind that blew nobody any profit. “Mr. Burns,” said he, “had the farm on lease for ninety years, and had he not thrown it up, I should not have been here now.”… The view from the house is very charming. The river runs clear and fleet below, broad as the Thames at Hampton Court, or the Trent at Nottingham, and its dark trees hang far along it over its waters. Beyond the stream lie the broad, rich meadows and house of Dalswinton, a handsome mansion of red freestone aloft amid its woods, and still beyond and higher up the river rise still bolder hills.

  Could he have remained always at the plough, and worn always the mantle of inspiration which fell on him there, and enjoyed ever the lawful intoxication of natural scenery and solitary thought, he had been as happy as he was glorious. But night came, and found him weary and jaded in mind and body, thirsting for some new excitement, and eager to pass (O human nature! O hideous anti-climax!) from an Elisha-like plough—to a penny-wedding! There the lower part of his nature found intense gratification and unrestricted play. There the “blood of John Barleycorn” furnished him with a false and hollow semblance of the true inspiration he had met in the solitary field, or on “the side of a plantain, when the wind was howling among the trees, and raving over the plain.” And there, through the misty light of the presiding punch-bowl, he saw the most ordinary specimens of female nature transformed into angels; and fancied that, like divinities they should be adored.

  Burns was a grand Man. I am not going to praise him; I leave that to Scotland and to you; supported, and sympathised with, by the universal heart of humanity. All this is so very well known that it has almost degenerated into common-place. Miss Edgeworth once remarked to me that such or such a thing “had been said till it was not believed!” A splendid remark, as I thought at the time but the fame of your Burns can survive it.

  Beholding his poor, mean dwelling and its surroundings, and picturing his outward life and earthly manifestations from these, one does not so much wonder that the people of that day should have failed to recognize all that was admirable and immortal in a disreputable, drunken, shabbily clothed, and shabbily housed man, consorting with associates of damaged character, and, as his only ostensible occupation, gauging the whiskey, which he too often tasted…. For my part, I chiefly wonder that his recognition dawned so brightly while he was still living. There must have been something very grand in his immediate presence, some strangely impressive characteristic in his natural behavior, to have caused him to seem like a demigod so soon…. There is no writer whose life, as a man, has so much to do with his fame, and throws such a necessary light upon whatever he has produced.

  Mighty is the hallowing of death to all,—to him more than to most. As he lay stretched, his dark locks already streaked with unnatural gray, all unworthiness fell away from him—every stain of passion and debauch, every ignoble word, every ebullition of scorn and pride—and left pure nobleness. Farmer no longer, exciseman no longer, subject no longer to criticism, to misrepresentation, to the malevolence of mean natures and evil tongues, he lay there the great poet of his country, dead too early for himself and for it. He had passed from the judgments of Dumfries, and made his appeal to Time.

  In 1856 I spent an afternoon with Mrs. Begg, the poet’s sister. She said that Robert took their father’s place in conducting household worship, and that he instructed her in the Shorter Catechism. “He was a father to me,” said Mrs. Begg, “and my knowledge of the Scriptures in my youth I derived from his teachings.”

  Another happy man, after all, seems to be Allingham, for all his want of “success.” Nothing but the most absolute calm and enjoyment of outside Nature could account for so much gadding hither and thither on the soles of his two feet. Fancy carrying about grasses for hours and days from the field where Burns ploughed up a daisy! Good God, if I found the daisy itself there, I would sooner swallow it than be troubled to carry it twenty yards.

	This is the cottage room as ’twas of old:
	The window four small panes, and in the wall
	The box-bed, where the first daylight did fall
	Upon their new-born infant’s narrow fold
	And poor, when times were hard and winds were cold,
	As they were still with him. Lo! now close by
	Above Corinthian columns mounted high
	The old Athenian Tripod shines in gold!
	The lumbering carriages of these dull years
	Have passed away: their dust has ceased to whirr
	About the footsore: silent to our ears
	Is that maelstrom of Scottish men; this son
	Of all that age we count the kingliest one:
	Such is Time’s justice, Time the harvester.

	But, not frae Life’s rough work was brought
	For him, the least exemption:
	At his ain task, he painfu’ wrought:
	He strugglit, suff’rit, felt, and thought,
	Eschewin’ name, and shrinkin’ naught,
	Till Death brought him redemption.
	Nae thornless road through Life he sought,
	Just where he was, he entered:
	He dealt his blows, where ithers fought,
	There where the battle centered!
	Frae early dawn, ahint the plew,
	Until the sun was settin’:
	The mornin’ an’ the e’enen dew
	His fit right manly wettin’.

  The name of Robert Burns is a well-understood signal for an overflow of all sorts of commonplaces from the right-minded critic. These commonplaces run mainly in three channels:—ecstatic astonishment at finding that a ploughman was also a poet; wringing of hands over the admission that the ploughman and poet was like-wise a drunkard, and a somewhat miscellaneous lover; and caustic severity upon the lionizers and “admirers of native genius” who could find no employment more appropriate than that of excise-officer for the brightest and finest mind of their country and generation. All these commonplaces must stand confessed as warranted by the facts: they are truths, but they are also truisms. We have heard them very often, and have always sat in a meek acquiescence and unfeigned concurrence. But the time comes when they have been repeated frequent enough to make the enlarging upon them a weariness, and the profuse and argumentative re-enforcement of them a superfluity.

  Here was a man, a son of toil, looking out on the world from his cottage, on society low and high, and on nature homely or beautiful, with the clearest eye, the most piercing insight, and the warmest heart; touching life at a hundred points, seeing to the core all the sterling worth, nor less the pretence and hollowness of the men he met, the humour, the drollery, the pathos, and the sorrow of human existence; and expressing what he saw, not in the stock phrases of books, but in his own vernacular, the language of his fireside, with a directness, a force, a vitality that tingled to the finger tips, and forced the phrases of his peasant dialect into literature, and made them for ever classical. Large sympathy, generous enthusiasm, reckless abandonment, fierce indignation, melting compassion, rare flashes of moral insight, all are there. Everywhere you see the strong intellect made alive, and driven home to the mark, by the fervid heart behind it. And if the sight of the world’s inequalities, and some natural repining at his own obscure lot, mingled from the beginning, as has been said, “some bitterness of earthly spleen and passion with the workings of his inspiration, and if these in the end ate deep into the great heart they had long tormented,” who that has not known his experience may venture too strongly to condemn him?

  He was born poor, he lived poor, he died poor, and he always felt his poverty to be a curse. He was fully conscious of himself and of his intellectual superiority. He disdained and resented the condecension of the great, and he defiantly asserted his independence. I do not say that he might not or ought not to have lived tranquilly and happily as a poor man. Perhaps, as Carlyle suggests, he should have divided his hours between poetry and virtuous industry. We only know that he did not. Like an untamable eagle he dashed against the bars he could not break, and his life was a restless, stormy alternation of low and lofty moods, of pure and exalted feeling, of mad revel and impotent regret…. Distracted by poetry and poverty and passion, and brought to public shame, he determined to leave the country, and in 1786, when he was twenty-seven years old, Burns published his poems by subscription, to get the money to pay his passage to America. Ah! could that poor, desperate ploughman of Mossgiel have foreseen this day, could he have known that because of those poems—an abiding part of literature, familiar to every people, sung and repeated in American homes from sea to sea—his genius would be honored and his name blessed, and his statue raised with grateful pride to keep his memory in America green forever, perhaps the amazing vision might have nerved him to make his life as noble as his genius; perhaps the full sunshine of assured glory might have wrought upon that great, generous, wilful soul to

“tak’ a thought an’ men’.”

  He set out for Edinburgh on a pony he had borrowed from a friend. The town that winter was “agog with the ploughman poet.” Robertson, Dugald Stewart, Blair, “Duchess Gordon and all the gay world,” were of his acquaintance. Such a revolution is not to be found in literary history. He was now, it must be remembered, twenty-seven years of age; he had fought since his early boyhood an obstinate battle against poor soil, bad seed, and inclement seasons, wading deep in Ayrshire mosses, guiding the plough in the furrow, wielding “the thresher’s weary flingin’-tree;” and his education, his diet, and his pleasures, had been those of a Scotch countryman. Now he stepped forth suddenly among the polite and learned. We can see him as he then was, in his boots and buckskins, his blue coat and waistcoat striped with buff and blue, like a farmer in his Sunday best; the heavy ploughman’s figure firmly planted on its burly legs; his face full of sense and shrewdness, and with a somewhat melancholy air of thought, and his large dark eye “literally glowing” as he spoke. “I never saw such another eye in a human head,” says Walter Scott, “though I have seen the most distinguished men of my time.” With men, whether they were lords or omnipotent critics, his manner was plain, dignified, and free from bashfulness or affectation. If he made a slip he had the social courage to pass on and refrain from explanation.

  That night, at my lonely dinner in the King’s Arms, I had the Edinburgh papers. There were in them three editorials headed with quotations from Burns’s poems, and an account of the sale in Edinburgh, that week, of an autograph letter of his for ninety-four pounds! Does he think sadly, even in heaven, how differently he might have done by himself and by Earth, if Earth had done for him then a tithe of what it does now? Does he know it? Does he care? And does he listen when, in lands he never saw, great poets sing of him in words simple and melodious as his own?

  It was at a slightly earlier date than I have been referring to that our first visit to Scotland was paid. Our tour was limited as to extent, and was made without any special purpose, except to describe and report “the Burns Festival” held at Ayr on the 6th of August, 1844. I had been engaged by Mr. Herbert Ingram of the Illustrated London News, to write the descriptive article, which was to be illustrated by wood-engravings…. THE BURNS FESTIVAL! I do not think, if we ransacked the annals of the world from the earliest ages, they would furnish the record of a ceremonial more truly glorious. Was it a stretch of fancy to believe the poet was present on that day, to receive part of his reward? It was not in “the Pavilion,” when two thousand guests drank in silence the toast, “The memory of Robert Burns,” and with cheers that shook the canvas of the tent, the healths of his three sons, seated at the side of the chairman, the Earl of Eglinton, that the real business of the day, was, so to speak, transacted. The glory and the triumph were for the prodigious crowd of peasants and artisans who passed slowly and in order before the platform, where the family of the poet had their seats, bowing or courtesying as each passed on receiving in return a recognition the memory of which, no doubt, all of them carried to their graves. It was the cheers in Gaelic or “broad Scotch,” and the waving of Glengarry bonnets, tartan shawls and shepherd plaids, that made the triumph and glory of that marvelous day, when one continually asked, “Was it only a man who had written verses, who was of no account in the world’s estimation during his earth-life, who was born in the hovel within ken, lived in a continual struggle with poverty, and, to say the least, died needy—was it really to commemorate such a man that these plaudits went up from a Scottish field to a Scottish sky?”

  I had come to Dumfries because it was for some time the home of Robert Burns, because here he had found his death-bed, and here lay buried. I had been at Ayr, and stood in the small cottage where the baby-poet was tossed up and down, like an ordinary child, by his thrifty, loving mother, who little dreamed that this tiny, nervous, weird-eyed creature was to make her name remembered as long as mothers exist…. “Yon building across the way” proved to be a hospital,—in fact, a kind of more genteel poorhouse,—established by some wealthy men of the town. To this institution poor people were admitted, who by birth, talents, or other cause, were considered too good for the common work-house. And here I found him,—a grandson of Robert Burns, a man of the same given name, a man whose father was of the same given name, and, in truth, resembling wonderfully the best pictures of the poet…. He was a stout, soldierly-looking old man, with a considerable appearance of neatness peeping out through all his poverty. His face was cleanly shaven, except that he wore closely trimmed side-whiskers: his eyes were large and bright, and his manners and language those of a gentleman. Throughout the interview, he maintained what might be called a nervous, restless sort of dignity, although evidently feeling the awkwardness of his position; for few really sensitive and proud people like to be exhibited as some distinguished person’s descendant, unless they themselves have done something to add to the family renown…. I could almost fancy that the poetic hero of my boy-days had come back for an hour into this old town of Dumfries, had met me in some rude inn, and was modestly telling his own trials and triumphs as those of another person. But, at last, the old man came to speak of the squalor and wretchedness that marked the last months of the poet’s life,—a state of which his own must often have reminded him. It was then that he burst forth in a torrent of eloquence that showed him to be possessed of some of the talent, and much of the fire, of his immortal ancestor…. As I parted with this interesting acquaintance of an hour, there came a pang of hopeless pity for this poor man, who, with the warning before him of his grandfather’s misery and early death, had all his days followed the same broad, misery-seeking road.

	In fancy, as wi’ dewy een,
	I part the clouds aboon the scene
	Where thou wast born, and peer atween,
	I see nae spot
	In a’ the Hielands half sae green
	And unforgot!

  He was utterly incapable of anything like baseness. No man could be more jealous of his honour; no man had a greater pride in being largely and loftily a man.

  “The Ayrshire Bard,” “The Ayrshire Ploughman,” “The Ayrshire Poet,” “The Bard of Ayrshire,” “The Glory and Reproach of Scotland,” “The Peasant Bard.”

  Burns was but a visitor, the lion of a season and therefore we are not called upon to associate with Edinburgh the whole tragic story of his life. And yet his appearance was one of the most remarkable that had distinguished the ancient town…. All the accounts we have of his appearance in Edinburgh agree in this. He was neither abashed nor embarrassed; no rustic presumption or vulgarity, but quite as little any timidity or awkwardness, was in the Ayrshire ploughman. His shoulders a little bent with the work to which he had been accustomed, his dress like a countryman, a rougher cloth perhaps, a pair of good woollen stockings rig and fur, his mother’s knitting, instead of the silk which covered limbs probably not half so robust—but so far as manners went, nothing to apologise for or smile at. The accounts all agree in this. If he never put himself forward too much, he never withdrew with any unworthy shyness from his modest share in the conversation. Sometimes he would be roused to eloquent speech, and then the admiring ladies said he carried them “off their feet” in the contagion of his enthusiasm and emotion. But this was a very strange phenomenon for the Edinburgh professors and men of letters to deal with: a novice who had not come humbly to be taught, but one who had come to take up his share of the inheritance, to sit down among the great, as in his natural place. He was not perhaps altogether unmoved by their insane advices to him, one of the greatest of lyrical poets, a singer above all—to write a tragedy, to give up the language he knew and write his poetry in the high English which, alas! he uses in his letters. Not unmoved, and seriously inclining to a more lofty measure, he compounded addresses to Edinburgh:

“Edina, Scotia’s darling seat!”

and other such intolerable effusions.

  Robert Burns was a great man and a great poet, and the influence of his truly tremendous satiric lyrical genius has been one of the great factors in the disintegration of Scottish superstition…. He was a convivial creature, and his conviviality was that of a fearless and liberal nature, overflowing with love, and honest as the day. But what was to some extent a virtue in him has become to my mind, a very curious vice in his disciples. The fact is, Scotchmen seem to have granted Burns his apotheosis chiefly on account of its being an excuse for the consumption of Whiskey. So they celebrate his Birthday. So they fill their glasses, hiccup “Auld Langsyne,” and cry in chorus:

	“Robin was a rovin’ boy,
	Rantin’ rovin’, rantin’ rovin’;
	Robin was a rovin’ boy,
	Rantin’ rovin’ Robin!”

The drunken squirearchy, whose progenitors broke the poet’s heart, and who, if the poet were alive now, would break his heart again, are full of enthusiasm for his memory. Even some of the more liberal-minded ministers of the Gospel join in the acclaim. Farmers and shepherds, factors and ploughmen, all come together on the one great occasion to honour the bard whom everybody can understand, because his synonym is the Whiskey Bottle. They weep over his woes; they smack their lips over his satire; they shriek at his denunciations and they murmur his songs. Burns or Bacchus—it is all one. The chief point is that, now or never, there is an excuse for getting “reeling ripe” or “mortal drunk.” It is poetic, it is literary, it is—hiccup?—honouring the Muses. Any frenzy, however maniacal, is justifiable under the circumstances. “Glorious Robin!” Pledge him again and again, pledge him and bless him; and when you can’t pledge him upright, pledge him prone, as you lie, with your fellow Burns-worshippers, under the table.

  When it is remembered how much he suffered, how much he vanquished, and how much he accomplished, with what misery his genius had to fight to be born and to live, the perseverance of his years of apprenticeship, his intellectual exploits, and, after all, his glory; one cannot help saying that what he did not succeed in, or what he did not undertake, was as nothing compared to what he achieved, and he was a man who achieved much. What remains to be said except that the clay of which he was made was full of diamonds, and that his life was one of the bravest and proudest ever lived by a poet?

  Adequate length of days is indispensable to the production of any monumental work. Milton spent nearly as much time as was granted for the whole mortal career of Burns in what he regarded as a mere apprenticeship to the art of poetry. It is indispensable too, opportunity should be granted as well as time. Those Greek philosophers, whose superb wisdom, discredited for a while by the youthful self-assurance of modern science, is again enforcing recognition, insist upon nothing so much as the need of σχολή to the noble mind. In this respect Burns was still more unfortunate than in the matter of time. His thirty-seven years of life were shorter for effective purposes of art than the nine-and-twenty of Shelley, hardly longer than five-and-twenty of Keats. The crushing weight of circumstance becomes evident when we contemplate his career from his first introduction to the world till his death. A period of ten years passed between the publication of the Kilmarnock edition and the closing of the grave. For the purposes of poetry they ought to have been far more valuable than all the time that went before. They did not prove so. The cause must lie either in the man or his environment. The man was not blameless; but it was not he who was chiefly to blame. Few probably who study Burns will arrive at the conclusion that his was one of those minds which bloom early and fade early. A shrewd observer remarked of his great countryman and successor, Scott, that his sense was even more extraordinary than his genius. Strange as it may seem to many, the same assertion may be made with only a little less truth of Burns. He possessed a clear, penetrating, logical intellect, a sound and vigorous judgment. Once and again in his poems he delights the idealist with his flashes of inspiration; but just as frequently he captivates the man of common sense, who finds his own sober views of life expressed by the poet with infinitely more of force and point than he could give them.

  The picture [Nasmyth Portrait] has been painted with a careful and a loving hand. It renders the ripe contours of cheek and chin, the fine arching of the eyebrows, the rippling lines of the lips and the exquisite dimples that end them; and it seems to catch not a little of what must have been the normal look of the poet’s rich brown, widely-opened eyes, which were so memorable a feature in his face, and which, when an impassioned moment arrived, actually “glowed”—“I say literally glowed”—as Sir Walter Scott has so emphatically recorded. Yet we feel here that the kindly painter has a little softened down the actual man; we miss something of the rustic strength that must have been visible in the peasant-bard.

  In his family Burns was the watchful, kindly, diligent father,—not to be spoken of in the same day with the father who neglects his household for himself, who forgets their need, and loses their love; and the man who degrades him as an habitual drunkard, unable to meet life’s daily duties, does not know what he is speaking of.

  “On the fourth day,” we are told, “when his attendant held a cordial to his lips, he swallowed it eagerly, rose almost wholly up, spread out his hands, sprang forward nigh the whole length of the bed, fell on his face and expired.” I suppose there are many who can read the account with composure. They are more fortunate than I. There is nothing much more melancholy in all biography. The brilliant poet, the delight of all society, from the highest to the lowest, sits brooding in silence over the drama of his spent life; the early innocent home, the plough and the savour of fresh turned earth, the silent communion with nature and his own heart, the brief hour of splendour, the dark hour of neglect, the mad struggle for forgetfulness, the bitterness of vanished homage, the gnawing doubt of fame, the distressful future of his wife and children—and endless witch-dance of thought without clew or remedy, all perplexing, all soon to end while he is yet young, as men reckon youth; though none know so well as he that his youth is gone, his race is run, his message is delivered.

  At least 50,000 people celebrated the centenary of Robert Burns’s death, at Dumfries, on Tuesday. In the morning a long procession, accompanied by bands, filed through the streets, and hundreds of persons visited the poet’s grave, on which wreaths were laid, many being sent by Scottish societies in the most distant parts of the world. At two o’clock within the Drill Hall a conversazione, attended by 4,000 persons was held…. Burns has become the patron saint of Dumfries, and he had borne aloft the banner of the essential equality of man. At St. Michael’s Church-yard, wreaths presented by 130 Burns and other societies were handed to Lord Rosebery, who placed them on the poet’s tomb. The first wreath laid on the tomb was that of Lord Rosebery, consisting of arum lilies and eucharis. The most modest wreath, and yet, probably, the most interesting, was that from the Glasgow Mauchline Society. It consisted of holly and gowans, the latter grown on the field at Mossgiel, celebrated by Burns in his poem “To a Mountain Daisy.” The wreath was made up by the granddaughters of Burns, the daughters of Col. James Glencairn Burns.

  The farm of Mossgiel is situated in the parish of Mauchline, from the town of which name it is about a mile distant. Whatever it may have been in the poet’s time, it strikes the visitor in these days as a most desirable home…. Its walls have been considerably raised since it was Burns’s home, and the roof of thatch has given place to one of slates. When Hawthorne visited it in 1857, and forced his way inside in the absence of the family, he found it remarkable for nothing so much as its dirt and dunghill odour. There is neither dirt nor odour to-day. The good wife of the present occupant of Mossgiel, Mr. Wyllie, keeps her house spotlessly clean notwithstanding the demands made upon her time by innumerable inquisitive visitors. On the parlour table lies the copious visitors’ book, and in the same room hang the manuscript of “The Lass o’ Ballochmyle,” and the letter in which Burns asked Miss Alexander’s permission to publish the song. At the back of the house lies the field where Burns turned down the daisy, and the soil “seems to have been consecrated to daisies by the song which he bestowed on that first immortal one.” Over the hedge, there is the other field where the poet’s ploughshare tore up the mouse’s nest.

  During his own lifetime Thomson suffered keenly from the charge that he had taken an unfair advantage of Burns, in accepting so much from the poet without making him any substantial pecuniary return. The charge still hangs about Thomson’s name in a vague sort of way, for in affairs of this kind the dog who has once acquired a bad repute is likely to retain it. The unfortunate editor, as he puts it himself was assailed, “first anonymously, and afterwards, to my great surprise, by some writers who might have been expected to possess sufficient judgment to see the matter in its true light.” He defended himself, in the words of one of his calumniators, “about once every seven years;” but it is not until the appearance of Professor Wilson’s onslaught in the “Land of Burns” (1838) that his correspondence begins to show the full extent of his suffering under the lash…. The truth is that Burns declined to write deliberately for money. He would—in a patriotic undertaking of this kind at any rate—write for love, or not write at all. If his poems brought him a profit—well, they were not written with that profit directly in view; the pecuniary return was, as it were, but an accident, not affecting in any way the inception of the work. This was practically his view of the matter as expressed to Thomson. It appears that he expressed the same view also to others.

  Home life was poor in the little two-roomed cottage, and toil hard on the farm, on which the family did all the work. Robert and Gilbert, as each reached the age of thirteen, would weed the furrows and thresh the corn; at fifteen they would act as ploughman and shearers, working from daybreak till late evening, when they were ready to go weary to their chaff beds. The fare, like the home life, was mean and monotonous—sowans and kail and milk, with little variations at the meals; no meat appearing on the board except when a cow or sheep died of old age or infirmity…. While engaged on the farm, which did not pay much, and composing poems, which paid still less, he had time for his favourite wooing, which paid worst of all. His relations with the “sex” were many and migratory. He was no sooner off with the old love than he was on with the new, and even for that he often did not wait. In his tastes he was not fastidious as to the position, quality, or even looks of his entrancer. “He had always a particular jealousy of people who were richer than himself, or had more consequence,” says his brother Gilbert. “His love therefore seldom settled on persons of this description.” A buxom barn-door beauty, a servant girl was enough, although she was as devoid of romance as of stockings. He must be the superior. A “fine woman,” especially among his humble acquaintance, he could not resist; and seldom could she resist the masterful wooer, with his winning ways, his bewitching talk, his eyes that “glowed like coals of fire.”

Jean

  Poor ill-advised ungrateful Armour came home on Friday last. You have heard of all the particulars of that affair, and a black affair it is. What she thinks of her conduct now, I don’t know; one thing I do know, she has made me completely miserable. Never man loved, or rather adored, a woman, more than I did her; and to confess a truth between you and me, I do still love her to distraction after all, although I won’t tell her so if I were to see her, which I don’t want to do. My poor, dear, unfortunate Jean, how happy I have been in thy arms! It is not the losing her that made me so unhappy, but for her sake I feel most severely; I foresee she is on the road to—I am afraid—eternal ruin. May Almighty God forgive her ingratitude and perjury to me, as I from my soul forgive her; and may His grace be with her and bless her in all her future life! I can have no nearer idea of the place of eternal punishment than what I have felt in my own heart on her account. I have tried often to forget her. I have run into all kinds of dissipation and riots, mason meetings, drinking matches, and other mischief, to drive her out of my head, but all in vain. And now for a grand cure: the ship is on her way home that is to take me out to Jamaica; then farewell, dear old Scotland; and farewell, dear, ungrateful Jean, for never, never, will I see you more.

  Compared Robert Burns, with Jean Armour, his alleged spouse. They both acknowledged their irregular marriage, and their sorrow for that irregularity, and desiring that the Session will take such steps as may seem to them proper, in order to the solemn confirmation of the said marriage. The Session, taking this affair under their consideration, agree that they both be rebuked for this acknowledged irregularity, and that they be solemnly engaged to adhere faithfully to one another as man and wife all the days of their life. In regard the Session have a title in law to some fine for behoof of the poor, they agree to refer to Mr. Burns his own generosity. The above sentence was accordingly executed, and the Session absolved the said parties from any scandal on this account.

  She still survives to hear her name, her early love, and her youthful charms, warbled in the songs of her native land. He, on whom she bestowed her beauty and her maiden truth, dying, has left to her the mantle of his fame. What though she be now a grandmother? to the fancy, she can never grow old, or die. We can never bring her before our thoughts but as the lovely, graceful country girl, “lightly tripping among the wild flowers,” and warbling, “Of a’ the airs the win’ can blaw,”—and this, O women, is what genius can do for you! Wherever the adventurous spirit of her countrymen transport them, from the spicy groves of India to the wild banks of the Mississippi, the name of Bonnie Jean is heard, bringing back to the wanderer sweet visions of home, and of days of “Auld lang Syne.”

  Mrs. Burns through the liberality of her children, spent her latter years in comparative affluence, yet “never changed, nor wished to change her place.” In March 1843, at the age of sixty-eight, she closed her respectable life in the same room in which her husband had breathed his last thirty-eight years before.

  Patrick said she was “a decent, weel-doin’ lass,” full of sprightliness and fun. She was a good-looking brunette, or as Patrick’s father (a shoemaker, next door to her father’s, in the Cowgate) used to say, “Jean, you’re a ticht jaud, but a dun one!” a compliment which she always took in good part, with her usual bright laugh or smile, accompanied by a smart retort. Willie also described her as “ticht i’ the legs”—most expressive Scotch, meaning at once, handsome, sprightly, and well-knit, from the idea of being firmly bound. The poet himself uses the same word regarding her; and regarding no less a personage than the Muse, Coila, when she appeared to him in “the spence” at Mossgiel, portraying her as

“A tight outlandish hizzie braw;”

and continuing the picture thus—

	“Down flowed her robe, a tartan sheen,
	Till half a leg was scrimply seen;
	And such a leg! my bonny Jean
	Could only peer it;
	Sae straught, sae taper, tight and clean,
	Nane else cam’ near it.”

  It may be questionable whether any marriage could have tamed Burns; but it is at least certain that there was no hope for him in the marriage he contracted. He did right, but then he had done wrong before; it was, as I said, one of those relations in life which it seems equally wrong to break or to perpetuate. He neither loved nor respected his wife. “God knows,” he writes, “my choice was as random as blind man’s buff.” He consoles himself by the thought that he has acted kindly to her; that she “has the most sacred enthusiasm of attachment to him;” that she has a good figure; that she has a “wood-note wild,” “her voice rising with ease to B natural,” no less. The effect on the reader is one of unmingled pity for both parties concerned. This was not the wife who (in his own words) could “enter into his favourite studies or relish his favourite authors;” this was not even a wife, after the affair of the marriage lines, in whom a husband could joy to place his trust. Let her manage a farm with sense, let her voice rise to B natural all day long, she would still be a peasant to her lettered lord, and an object of pity rather than of equal affection. She could now be faithful, she could now be forgiving, she could now be generous even to a pathetic and touching degree; but coming from one who was unloved, and who had scarce shown herself worthy of the sentiment, these were all virtues thrown away, which could neither change her husband’s heart nor effect the inherent destiny of their relation. From the outset, it was a marriage that had no root in nature; and we find him, ere long, lyrically regretting Highland Mary, renewing correspondence with Clarinda in the warmest language, on doubtful terms with Mrs. Riddel, and on terms unfortunately beyond any question with Anne Park.

  Her condition being discovered, Burns, after some strong revulsions of feeling against—not Jean, I hope, but—the estate of marriage, gave her what he presently had every reason to call “an unlucky paper,” recognising her as his wife; and, had things been allowed to drift in the usual way, the world had lacked an unforgotten scandal and a great deal of silly writing.

Highland Mary

  He loved Mary Campbell, his “Highland Mary,” with as pure a passion as ever possessed a young poet’s heart; nor is there so sweet and sad a passage recorded in the life of any other one of all the sons of song. Many such partings there have been between us poor beings—blind at all times, and often blindest in our bliss—but all gone to oblivion. But that hour can never die—that scene will live forever. Immortal the two shadows standing there, holding together the Bible—a little rivulet flowing between—in which, as in consecrated water, they have dipt their hands, water not purer than, at that moment, their united hearts. There are few of his songs more beautiful, and none more impassioned.

	O loved by him whom Scotland loves,
	Long loved, and honoured duly
	By all who love the bard who sang
	So sweetly and so truly!
	In cultured dales his song prevails;
	Thrills o’er the eagle’s aëry—
	Has any caught that strain, nor sighed
	For Burns’s “Highland Mary?”
	I wandered on from hill to hill,
	I feared nor wind nor weather,
	For Burns beside me trode the moor,
	Beside me pressed the heather.
	I read his verse: his life—alas!
	O’er that dark shades extended:—
	With thee at last, and him in thee,
	My thoughts their wanderings ended.
	His golden hours of youth were thine;
	Those hours whose flight is fleetest.
	Of all his songs to thee he gave
	The freshest and the sweetest.
	Ere ripe the fruit one branch he brake,
	All rich with bloom and blossom;
	And shook its dews, its incense shook,
	Above thy brow and bosom.

  All the world has heard of Highland Mary—in life a maid-servant in the family of Mr. Hamilton, after death to be remembered with Dante’s Beatrice and Petrarch’s Laura. How Burns and Mary became acquainted we have little means of knowing—indeed the whole relationship is somewhat obscure—but Burns loved her as he loved no other woman, and her memory is preserved in the finest expression of his love and grief. Strangely enough, it seems to have been in the fierce rupture between himself and Jean that this white flower of love sprang up, sudden in its growth, brief in its passion and beauty. It was arranged that the lovers should become man and wife, and that Mary should return to her friends to prepare for her wedding. Before her departure there was a farewell scene. “On the second Sunday of May,” Burns writes to Mr. Thomson, after an historical fashion which has something touching in it, “in a sequestered spot on the banks of the Ayr the interview took place.” The lovers met and plighted solemn troth. According to popular statement, they stood on either side of a brook, they dipped their hands in the water, exchanged Bibles—and parted. Mary died at Greenock, and was buried in a dingy churchyard hemmed by narrow streets—beclanged now by innumerable hammers, and within a stone’s throw of passing steamers. Information of her death was brought to Burns at Mossgiel; he went to the window to read the letter, and the family noticed that on a sudden his face changed. He went out without speaking; they respected his grief and were silent. On the whole matter Burns remained singularly reticent; but years after, from a sudden geysir of impassioned song, we learn that through all that time she had never been forgotten.

  There is no stronger proof of the transcending power of the genius of Burns than is found in the fact that, by a bare half dozen of his stanzas, an humble dairy servant—else unheard of outside her parish and forgotten at her death—is immortalized as a peeress of Petrarch’s Laura and Dante’s Beatrice, and has been for a century loved and mourned of all the world…. How little is known of Highland Mary, the most famous heroine of modern song, is shown by the brief, incoherent, and often contradictory allusions to her which the biographies of the ploughman-poet contain…. She first saw the light in 1764, at Ardrossan, on the coast, fifteen miles northward from the “auld town of Ayr.” Her parentage was of the humblest, her father being a sailor before the mast, and the poor dwelling which sheltered her was in no way superior to the meanest of those we find to-day on the narrow streets of her village…. He told a lady that he first saw Mary while walking in the woods of Coilsfield, and first spoke with her at a rustic merry-making, and, “having the luck to win her regards from other suitors,” they speedily became intimate…. The bard’s niece, Miss Begg, of Bridgeside, told the writer that she often heard Burns’s mother describe Mary as she saw her at Hamilton’s: she had a bonnie face, a complexion of unusual fairness, soft blue eyes, a profusion of shining hair which fell to her knees, a petite figure which made her seem younger than her twenty summers, a bright smile, and pleasing manners, which won the old lady’s heart…. All who have written of her have noticed her beauty, her good sense, her modesty and self-respect…. Poor Mary is laid in the burial-plot of her uncle in the west kirk-yard of Greenock, near Crawford Street; our pilgrimage in Burnsland may fitly end at her grave. A pathway, beaten by the feet of many reverent visitors, leads us to the spot. It is so pathetically different from the scenes she loved in life,—the heather-clad slopes of her Highland home, the seclusion of the wooded braes where she loitered with her poet-lover. Scant foliage is about her; few birds sing above her here. She lies by the wall; narrow streets hem in the enclosure; the air is sullied by smoke from factories and from steamers passing within a stone’s-throw on the busy Clyde; the clanging of many hammers and the discordant din of machinery and traffic invade the place and sound in our ears as we muse above the ashes of the gentle lassie. For half a century her grave was unmarked and neglected; then, by subscription, a monument of marble, twelve feet in height, and of graceful proportions, was raised. It bears a sculptured medallion representing Burns and Mary, with clasped hands, plighting their troth. Beneath is the simple inscription read oft by eyes dim with tears:

	Erected over the Grave of
	HIGHLAND MARY
	1842.
	“My Mary, dear departed shade,
	Where is thy place of blissful rest?”

  There is probably no name in Scottish literature that has so affectingly touched the hearts of her fellow-countrymen as that of Mary Campbell. Though born of an obscure family, brought up in circumstances little fitted to attract attention, and credited with no achievement that invests heroism with permanent or even transient distinction, this Highland girl is now a brilliant star in the galaxy of Fame, and has become an object of unmingled and growing admiration. The lustre of Mary’s name, like that of other stars, whether fixed or planetary, borrows its fascination from a luminary brighter and greater than itself. The very obscurity of her origin and early condition sets off by contrast the halo that now encircles her memory. Moralists have noted and extolled her virtues, critics have lovingly dropped their satiric shafts when commenting on the few but romantic appearances she made on the stage of Time, and poets of several generations, and of almost all countries, have exhausted their poetical resources in their efforts to express their conceptions of her worth, but all their contributions towards the sum of her praise have taken their force and complexion from the picture which inspired genius has given of her to the world. The interest created by the association of the heroine’s career with that of the gifted lover who has procured for her the honour of poetical immortality, is not, it is pleasant to know, confined to the little country that gave her birth. In England, Ireland, America, and the Colonies, and even in countries that have less in common with Great Britain, Mary’s worth, ill-starred career, and premature death, have found admirers and mourners as cordial and sincere as any that Caledonia has produced.

  Little that is positive is known of Mary Campbell except that she once possessed a copy of the Scriptures (now very piously preserved at Ayr), and that she is a subject of a fantasy, in bronze, at Dunoon.

  By all means let us reject the Mary Campbell tradition, immolate the Bible at Ayr, melt down the “fantasy in bronze” at Dunoon, make building material of the monument at Greenock, reduce all get-at-able Highland Mary literature to pulp, and for ever more let the story stand as Burns left it.

Clarinda

  Mrs. M’Lehose originally refused Mr. Syme (who collected for Dr. Currie) permission to publish the Letters, and declined, as has been already stated, various similar applications in her latter years. But the present editor is of opinion, that the time is now come for their publication, and that an authentic edition of the Correspondence will have the effect of removing prejudice, will do honour to the memory of his respected relative, and interest the public, by giving them a new chapter in the life of our immortal poet. This interest, too, is increased by the consideration that these letters are probably the last original composition of his which will ever be made public.

  She called herself “high-spirited,” which meant “unyielding;” she mingled romance and strong Calvinistic principles, an almost incompatible mixture; she was light, vain; a “foolish woman,” listening to the rhapsodies of the Ayrshire ploughman when she ought to have been thinking of her children; and her quiet discussion of certain matters relating to her admirer shows her to have been eminently coarse. She also, as one of her family says, “cultivated the Muses.” All these elements, combined as it were in one dish, make up a doubtful sort of salad.

  It was at this time Burns met Clarinda once more. She was about to sail for the West Indies, in search of the husband who had forsaken her; the interview was a brief and hurried one, and no account of it remains, except some letters, and a few lyrics which he addressed to her. One of these is distinguished as one of the most impassioned effusions which Burns ever poured forth. It contains that one consummate stanza in which Scott, Byron, and many more, saw concentrated, “the essence of a thousand love-tales.”

	Had we never loved so kindly,
	Had we never loved so blindly;
	Never met, or never parted,
	We had ne’er been broken-hearted.

Mrs. Burns is said to have been a marvel of long-suffering and forgiveness, for the way in which she bore the wrongs her husband inflicted upon her by his unfaithfulness. There is no doubt that Burns also tasted self-reproach and

“Self-contempt, bitterer to drink than blood.”

  Poor Clarinda! Well for her peace of mind that the poet was leaving her; well for Burns, also, that he was leaving Clarinda and Edinburgh. Only one thing remained for both to do, and it had been wise, to burn their letters. Would that Clarinda had been as much alive to her own good name, and the poet’s fair fame, as Peggy Chalmers, who did not preserve her letters from Burns!

  So in the beginning of December he falls in with Mrs. M’Lehose; he instantly proposes to “cultivate her friendship with the enthusiasm of religion;” and the two are languishing in Arcady in the twinkling of a cupid’s wing. She was a handsome, womanly creature “of a somewhat voluptuous style of beauty:” a style the Bard appreciated—lively but devout, extremely sentimental yet inexorably dutiful: a grass widow with children—nine times in ten a lasting safeguard—and the strictest notions of propriety—a good enough defence for a time; but young (she was the Bard’s own age), clever, “of a poetical fabric of mind,” and all the rest…. In the prime of life, deserted, sentimental, a tangle of simple instincts and as simple pieties, she had the natural woman’s desire for a lover and the religious woman’s resolve to keep that lover’s passion within bounds…. She was plainly an excellent creature, bent on keeping herself honest and her lover straight; and it is impossible to read her letters to Sylvander without a respect, a certain admiration even, which have never been awakened yet by the study of Sylvander’s letters to her. From Sylvander’s point of view, as M’Lehose was still alive, and an open intrigue with a married woman would have been ruin, only one inference is possible: that he longed for the shepherd’s hour to strike for the chimes’ sake only; so that, when he thought of his future, as he must have done anxiously and often, he cannot ever have thought of it as Clarinda’s, even though in a moment of peculiar exaltation he swore to keep single till that wretch, the wicked husband died.

Mrs. Dunlop

  MADAM,—I have written you so often without recg. any answer, that I would not trouble you again but for the circumstances in which I am. An illness which has long hung about me in all probability will speedily send me beyond that bourne whence no traveller returns. Your friendship with which for so many years you honored me was a friendship dearest to my soul. Your conversation and especially your correspondence were at once highly entertaining and instructive. With what pleasure did I use to break up the seal! The remembrance yet adds one pulse more to my poor palpitating heart!—Farewell!!!

  The friendship of Mrs. Dunlop was of particular value to Burns. This lady, daughter and sole heiress to Sir Thomas Wallace of Craige, and lineal descendant of the illustrious Wallace, the first of Scottish warriors, possesses the qualities of mind suited to her high lineage. Preserving, in the decline of life, the generous affections of youth; her admiration of the poet was soon accompanied by a sincere friendship for the man; which pursued him in after life through good and evil report; in poverty, in sickness, and in sorrow; and which is continued to his infant family, now deprived of their parent.

  He appears from first to last to have stood somewhat in awe of this excellent lady, and to have been no less sensible of her sound judgment and strict sense of propriety, than of her steady and generous partiality.

  His letters to Mrs. Dunlop form a very large proportion of all his subsequent correspondence, and, addressed as they were to a person, whose sex, age, rank, and benevolence, inspired at once profound respect and a graceful confidence, will ever remain the most pleasing of all the materials of our poet’s biography.

  The real basis of the friendship was their common warmth and generosity of soul. Mrs. Dunlop’s interest in the poet was not purely, or even primarily, intellectual. She was not what would be called a literary lady. She was by no means a pedant. She was simply a woman of good birth and good breeding; old enough and wise enough to have drawn profit from the experiences of life; fond of books and sincerely religious; endowed with good judgment and good sense, with quick womanly sympathy and inextinguishable youthfulness of heart. Being what she was, she won the poet’s confidence and sincere affection, and drew out all his finer feelings. His letters to her are not indeed free from that artificiality which characterised the epistolary style of his day, and marred all his correspondence; but they are less disfigured by it than those addressed to some of his patrons, or to his unknown literary correspondents—to say nothing of the effusions to “Clarinda.”

  The Lochryan MSS., now published for the first time, were in all probability never seen by Currie. Manifestly none of them has ever been handled by either editor or printer. They are all in a state of beautiful preservation, and include at least as fine specimens of the poet’s handwriting as any that have seen the light in the original or reproduction…. Mrs. Dunlop kept the Lochryan MSS. at Dunlop till her death, when she left the estate of Lochryan and the MSS. to her grandson, General Sir John Wallace, from whom the documents descended to his son and heir, the next possessor of Lochryan, who left them by will to his youngest brother the present Colonel F. J. Wallace, from whom they were recently acquired by Mr. Adam. They have thus been continuously in the hands of the Dunlop-Wallace family during the past century. Colonel Wallace states to the best of his knowledge that they have been kept in a box in the safe-room at Lochryan for the last fifty years. The interweaving of this new material with the old makes the Correspondence of Burns and Mrs. Dunlop almost unique in its completeness. A careful search after possible lacunae has discovered no more than four places where it can be definitely stated that the letter of Burns is missing, and of the gross sum of Mrs. Dunlop’s it appears that Burns had lost or destroyed only nine—a circumstance which must have wiped out the memory of the many proofs the lady had received that he did not always read her communications with the most respectful care, and at the same time must have deepened the remorse she felt for her neglect of the poet during the last eighteen months of his life.

  A curious figure, this Mrs. Dunlop, of Dunlop, and most out of line with one’s notion of a Scotch gentlewoman! To be a lady of sensibility was her ideal. To go to posterity as the social and, forsooth, the literary mentor of her gifted neighbor was her ambition. Her religion was of the Genevan type—not Jean Calvin’s, but Jean Jacques Rousseau’s. The religion of the heart, she called it, and had she not been a Sexagenarian and forever occupied with the births of grandchildren, there is no telling where it would have landed her. In comparison with her solicitude for Burns, the cares of a patriarchal household sat light upon her, and with pen in hand she could say, “as to forming schemes, it is a kind of castle-building that I cannot resign, as it pleases myself and does little harm to anything else.” Scolding, questioning, teasing, advising, and spoiling Burns like a grandmother, she is yet irrepressibly youthful. With all her intellectual fire, and with all her provincial awkwardness, it is impossible not to admire her buoyancy, freshness, and hero-worship. She comes near possessing charm, and is almost a romantic figure.

The Holy Fair

  In Burns’s time this poem was much relished by the moderate clergy, and Dr. Blair condescended to suggest the change of a word in order to render its satire more pointed. In these days of better taste, a regret will be generally felt that Burns should have been tempted or provoked into such subjects. This is, however, a general belief in Ayrshire that the “Holy Fair” was attended with a good effect, for since its appearance, the custom of resorting to the “occasion” in neighbouring parishes for the sake of holiday making has been much abated, and a great increase of decorous observance has taken place.

  As a matter of fact, in the history of Scottish literature and religion, this caricature of the Holiest, as some might be inclined to call it, did no harm, but rather good; for the caricature lay undoubtedly to no small extent in the real facts of the case, not in the mere treatment of the poet. Harm to Burns it certainly did do; for it tended to raise a wall of partition between him and the reverential sentiment of the country, which stands in the way of his acceptance with not a few of the most worthy of his countrymen even at the present hour. Harm to the people it could not do; for so far as it was overcharged, the roots of the popular piety had stuck too deep to be shaken by a rude hand; and so far as it was true, the reproof has been so effective that not a shadow of the abuse remains. Had it not been for the polemical relation in which he found himself to the zealous party in the Church, and for the glaring nature of the abuse of sacred ceremonies that forced itself on his observation, I feel certain that Burns was the last man in the world to have wantonly held so sacred a rite up to public ridicule.

  Of all the series of satires, however, “The Holy Fair” is the most remarkable. It is in a sense a summing up of all the others that preceded it. The picture it gives of the mixed and motley multitude fairing in the church-yard at Mauchline, with a relay of ministerial mountebanks catering for their excitement, is true to the life. It is begging the question to deplore that Burns was provoked to such an attack. The scene was provocation sufficient to any right-thinking man who associated the name of religion with all that was good and beautiful and true. Such a state of things demanded reformation. The church-yard—that holy ground on which the church was built and sanctified by the dust of pious and saintly men—cried aloud against the desecration to which it was subjected, and Burns, who alone had the power to purify it from such profanities, would have been untrue to himself and a traitor to the religion of his country had he merely shrugged his shoulders and allowed things to go on as they were going.

  The “Holy Fair,” that “joyful solemnity” in which the scandals attending the open-air communions are painted with vivid power and merciless veracity. In these satires there is not saeva indignatio at evils he hated, but wild humour over scandals he laughed at. In them he was merely voicing the feelings of the educated classes, and echoing the teaching of the moderate clergy in two-thirds of the Lowland pulpits of Scotland. To say that Burns, by his drastic lines, broke down the despotism of the Church, overthrew the spirit of Puritanism, and dispelled religious gloom in the country, is to speak in ignorance of the real part he played. That work had been begun effectively by others before him, and was to be carried on by others who never felt his influence.

Cotter’s Saturday Night

  I intended writing you last night, but happening to lift the “Cotter’s Saturday Night,” it was impossible for me to close the book without reading it, tho’ for the five hundred time. Do, I beg you, try if you can make anything now like it. I’m sure no one else I have ever seen can; but I’ll say no more of it, or I could speak of nothing else.

  “The Cotter’s Saturday Night” is tender and moral, it is solemn and devotional, and rises at length into a strain of grandeur and sublimity, which modern poetry has not surpassed. The noble sentiments of patriotism with which it concludes, correspond with the rest of the poem. In no age or country have the pastoral muses breathed such elevated accents, if the Messiah of Pope be excepted, which is indeed a pastoral in form only.

  A noble and pathetic picture of human manners, mingled with a fine religious awe.

  The “Cottar’s Saturday Night” is, perhaps, of all Burns’s pieces, the one whose exclusion from the collection, were such things possible now-a-days, would be the most injurious, if not to the genius, at least to the character, of the man. In spite of many feeble lines, and some heavy stanzas, it appears to me, that even his genius would suffer more in estimation, by being contemplated in the absence of this poem, than of any other single performance he has left us. Loftier flights he certainly had made, but in these he remained but a short while on the wing, and effort is too often perceptible; here the motion is easy, gentle, placidly undulating. There is more of the conscious security of power, than in any other of his serious pieces of considerable length; the whole has an appearance of coming in a full stream from the fountain of the heart—a stream that soothes the ear, and has no glare on the surface.

  In “the Cottar’s Saturday Night,” the poet has so varied his dialect that there are scarcely two consecutive stanzas written according to the same model. An hour of winter evening music on the Æolian harp, when all the winds are on the wing, would hardly be more wild, and sweet, and stern, and changeable than the series. Some of the strains are as purely English as the author could reach; others so racily Scottish as often to require a glossary; while in a third class the two are so enchantingly combined, that no poetic diction can excel the pathos and sublimity, blended with beauty and homeliness, that equally mark them.

  There are a few more perfect poems. It is the utterance of a heart whose cords were all tuned to gratitude, “making sweet melody” to the Giver, on a night not less sacred in His eye than His own appointed Sabbath.

  There is an artless beauty and solemnity in the picture of the humble devotions of the farmer and his household which shows that the poet himself felt the influence of such scenes, and inclines us the more to look with pity and leniency on the excesses which ruined the man, and which these stanzas show that he himself, in his better moments, must have both lamented and condemned.

  This is true, but the piece as a whole is formed on English models. It is the most artificial and the most imitative of Burns’s works. Not only is the influence of Gray’s “Elegy” conspicuous, but also there are echoes of Pope, Thomson, Goldsmith, and even Milton; while the stanza, which was taken, not from Spenser, whom Burns had not then read, but from Beattie and Shenstone, is so purely English as to lie outside the range of Burns’s experience and accomplishment.

  No nobler tribute to the sturdy virtues of the poor has ever been penned. It is not marred by ranting; in a pure, simple, homely way, it pictures the sweetness of life in honest poverty.

Tam o’Shanter, 1793

  The humor, the grandeur, and the fancy of that poem will never be equaled.

  It is not so much a poem as a piece of sparkling rhetoric; the heart and body of the story still lies hard and dead. He has not gone back, much less carried us back, into that dark, earnest, wondering age, when the tradition was believed, and when it took its rise; he does not attempt, by any new modelling of his supernatural ware, to strike anew that deep mysterious chord of human nature, which once responded to such things, and which lives in us too, and will forever live, though silent, or vibrating with far other notes, and to far different issues. Our German readers will understand us when we say that he is not the Tieck but the Musäus of this tale. Externally it is all green and living; yet look closer, it is no firm growth, but only ivy on a rock. The piece does not properly cohere; the strange chasm which yawns in our incredulous imagination between the Ayr public-house and gate of Tophet is nowhere bridged over; nay, the idea of such a bridge is laughed at; and thus the tragedy of the adventure becomes a mere drunken phantasmagoria painted on ale-vapors, and the farce alone has any reality. We do not say that Burns should have made much more of this tradition; we rather think that, for strictly poetical purposes, not much was to be made of it. Neither are we blind to the deep, varied, genial power displayed in what he has actually accomplished; but we find far more “Shakespearean” qualities, as these of “Tam o’ Shanter” have been fondly named, in many of his other pieces; nay, we incline to believe that this latter might have been written, all but quite as well, by a man who, in place of genius, had only possessed talent.

  He himself regarded it as his masterpiece of all his poems, and posterity has not, I believe, reversed the judgment.

  Ay, the very house in which Tam and Souter Johnny prolonged their market-night meetings, the foaming ale growing better with each successive draught, Souter telling his queerest stories, Tam and the landlady growing gracious—a house not less famous than the old Boar’s Head in Eastcheap, or the Bell at Edmonton, named in these latter days after that drouthiest of “drouthy neebors,” the incorrigible Tam, who elbows Rip Van Winkle, Bailie Nichol Jarvie, and Conn in our vagabond affiliations. It is a plain, plastered, thatched little tavern, tinted yellow, in contrast to the surrounding houses, which are white. Over the door is a signboard with a creditable painting of Tam leaving the house,

“Weel mounted on his gray mare Meg,”

and the Souter grasping his hand with maudlin affection before he plunges through the storm toward Alloway. The landlord holds the history of the tavern precious, and on another sign-board he specifies its associations, with the additional announcement that “a chair and caup are in the house.” The “caup” is the identical one drained by Tam, the chair the one he sat in, and it would be a teetotaler of less than usual flexibility who could pass without ordering some mild beverage as an excuse for viewing the interior. The landlord’s name is A. Glass, and he is not only a most devoted admirer of Burns, but also a poet in a very small way himself.

  “Tam O’ Shanter” is not so marvellous a creation as “The Dance of the Sevin Deidly Synnis,” though we may find it easier to appreciate the modern poem, in which the tipsy hilarity of the hero gives a familiar aspect to the devilry of the witches, and robs it of the weirdness and horror that should mark the spectacle of a supernatural world. Burns’s humour plays most freely round the incidents of human life, though none can deny the boldness with which it now and again makes a sweep into the realms of superstition.

  Scarcely excelled in powers of imagination by Shakespeare himself is Burns’s weird description of the orgies of the witches, and the infernal scenery in which they are exhibited…. The only fault found in this poem is that at the conclusion it falls off in interest. This is said to be owing to Burns having stuck to the popular tale of this hero; for Tam was not a creation of fancy, but a real person…. Burns considered “Tam O’Shanter” his masterpiece, and many critics have regarded it in the same light; yet it does not perhaps embody what is brightest and best in his poetry. His address to a mouse on turning up her nest with a plough in November is richer in true poetic light and color. Its companion is that to a daisy. In these and in the “Cotter’s Saturday Night” it has been happily remarked that “the poet is seen in his happiest inspiration, his brightest sunshine, and his tenderest tears.” The latter poem is familiar to all, and in true and touching description is almost unrivalled.

The Jolly Beggars

  Perhaps we may venture to say that the most strictly poetical of all his “poems” is one which does not appear in Currie’s edition, but has been often printed before and since under the humble title of “The Jolly Beggars.” The subject truly is among the lowest in nature; but it only the more shows our poet’s gift in raising it into the domain of art. To our minds this piece seems thoroughly compacted; melted together, refined; and poured forth in one flood of true liquid harmony. It is light, airy, and soft of movement, yet sharp and precise in its details; every face is a portrait: that raucle carlin, that wee Apollo, that Son of Mars are Scottish, yet ideal; the scene is at once a dream, and the very Rag-castle of “Poosie-Nansie.” Further, it seems in a considerable degree complete, a real self-supporting whole, which is the highest merit in a poem.

  In the world of the “Jolly Beggars” there is more than hideousness and squalor, there is bestiality; yet the piece is a superb poetic success. It has a breadth, truth, and power which make the famous scene in Auerbach’s Cellar, of Goethe’s “Faust,” seem artificial and tame beside it, and which are only matched by Shakespeare and Aristophanes.

  That incomparable opera in which critical genius of the highest order has discovered the highest flight of his poetical genius.

  In Burns’s “Jolly Beggars,” it seems to me that Burns touched nearly the highest point of his creative genius, though nothing, except the large licence of the roving vagabond’s life, is concentrated into it, and rendered with an almost passionate wealth of vigour and sympathy.

  For riotous luxuriance, “The Jolly Beggars” overtops all that Burns ever wrote. Probably no poem more graphic exists in literature. It describes what the writer had actually seen, and not otherwise would its extreme vividness seem to be attainable.

  Is an immortal masterpiece of melody and observation. The squalor of the piece is glorified by a style so little rustic that every word and every rhythm is fitted to its purpose. It is the literature of the street, maybe, but the literature of the street made classic for all time.

Holy Willie’s Prayer

  “Holy Willie’s Prayer” is a satirical crucifixion—slow, lingering inexorable. He hated Hypocrisy, he tore its holy robe, and for the outrage Hypocrisy did not forgive him while he lived, nor has it yet learned to forgive him.

  The unfortunate man, William Fisher, known as “Holy Willie,” both Patrick and his wife were little inclined to speak of. When they did so, it was only as a man “neither very bad nor very guid, to ootward appearance.” Mrs. Patrick said he must have drawn attention to himself, in his earlier days, as at least a good professor, “to be made an elder o’.” Seeing that I knew that the satires of Burns were only too well founded, for he was subsequently dismissed the eldership and died in a ditch after a debauch, they admitted that “he was blaim’d for takin’ the kirk bawbees. When standin’ at the plate on Sabbath, fowk said, he would boo doon to pat his boots richt, as it were, and slip in a bawbee or so!” Poor man, his punishment has been greater than Burns, with all his indignation against his character, I am sure, meant it to be; for the poet had little anticipation that his fiery words would reach so far and wide when he wrote them, and be so long remembered against their luckless object. Happily, however, in such world-wide pages, the man himself becomes a myth, a mere ideal representative of certain thoughts and actions, which alone remain as the theme of the poem.

  This amazing achievement in satire, this matchless parody of Calvinistic intercession—so nice, so exquisite in detail, so overwhelming in effect.

Letters

  The prose works of Burns consist almost entirely of his letters. They bear, as well as his poetry, the seal and the impress of his genius; but they contain much more bad taste, and are written with far more apparent labour. His poetry was almost all written primarily from feeling, and only secondarily from ambition. His letters seem to have been nearly all composed as exercises, and for display. There are few of them written with simplicity or plainness; and though natural enough as to the sentiment, they are generally very strained and elaborate in the expression. A very great proportion of them, too, relate neither to facts nor feelings peculiarly connected with the author or his correspondent—but are made up of general declamation, moral reflections, and vague discussions—all evidently composed for the sake of effect, and frequently introduced with long complaints of having nothing to say, and of the necessity and difficulty of letter-writing.

  Allen (Lord Holland’s Allen—the best informed and one of the ablest men I know—a perfect Magliabecchi—a devourer, a Helluo of books, and an observer of men), has lent me a quantity of Burns’s unpublished and never-to-be published, Letters. They are full of oaths and obscene songs. What an antithetical mind!—tenderness, roughness—delicacy, coarseness—sentiment, sensuality—soaring and grovelling, dirt and deity—all mixed up in that one compound of inspired clay!

  His prose-letters are sometimes tinctured with affectation. They seem written by a man who has been admired for his wit, and is expected on all occasions to shine. Those in which he expresses his ideas of natural beauty in reference to Alison’s “Essay on Taste,” and advocates the keeping up the remembrances of old customs and seasons, are the most powerfully written.

  Lord Byron’s correspondence exhibits some of the finest specimens of epistolary composition in the language; but the monotony of selfish complaint without cause, petulant aspersion of his fellow-creatures, inexcusable accumulation of oaths, and occasional use of slang, which disfigures it, are faults that must offend the most partial reader. Page after page of sneering, of wilful swearing, or of petty scandal, with scarcely the relief of a single tear, or the sunshine of a single smile, is overwhelming at once to taste and patience. In variety of topic there is nothing in him at all like Burns, and in appropriate diversity of style—on this, or on that theme, as it occurs—there is but little approach to him. In Burns we have sometimes an oath, and sometimes indecorum; but sympathy and sincerity always, and slang never.

  The letters are of unequal value, and have been variously estimated. They show indeed that, like almost all poets, he might, if choice and fate had united, have become a very considerable prose-writer, and they have immense autobiographic value. But they are sometimes, and perhaps often, written as much in falsetto as the division of verse just ruled out; their artificiality does not take very good models; and their literary attraction is altogether second-rate.

General

  Unacquainted with the necessary requisites for commencing Poet by rule, he sings the sentiments and manners he felt and saw in himself and his rustic compeers around him, in his and their native language. Though a Rhymer from his earliest years, at least from the earliest impulses of the softer passions, it was not till very lately that the applause, perhaps the partiality, of Friendship, wakened his vanity so far as to make him think anything of his was worth showing; and none of the following works were ever composed with a view to the press. To amuse himself with the little creations of his own fancy, amid the toil and fatigues of a laborious life; to transcribe the various feelings, the loves, the griefs, the hopes, the fears, in his own breast; to find some kind of counterpoise to the struggles of a world, always an alien scene, a task uncouth to the poetical mind; these were his motives for courting the Muses, and in these he found Poetry to be its own reward…. To his Subscribers the Author returns his most sincere thanks. Not the mercenary bow over a counter, but the heart-throbbing gratitude of the Bard, conscious how much he is indebted to Benevolence and Friendship for gratifying him, if he deserves it, in that dearest wish of every poetic bosom—to be distinguished. He begs his readers, particularly the Learned and the Polite, who may honour him with a perusal, that they will make every allowance for Education and Circumstances of Life: but if, after a fair, candid, and impartial criticism, he shall stand convicted of Dulness and Nonsense, let him be done by, as he would in that case do by others—let him be condemned without mercy, to contempt and oblivion.

  I hope I shall not be thought to assume too much, if I endeavour to place him in a higher point of view, to call for a verdict of his country on the merit of his works, and to claim for him those honours which their excellence appears to deserve. In mentioning the circumstance of his humble station, I mean not to rest his pretensions solely on that title, or to urge the merits of his poetry, when considered in relation to the lowness of his birth, and the little opportunity of improvement which his education could afford. These particulars, indeed, might excite our wonder at his productions; but his poetry, considered abstractedly, and without the apologies arising from his situation, seems to me fully entitled to command our feelings, and to obtain our applause.

  Many instances have I seen of Nature’s force and beneficence exerted under numerous and formidable disadvantages; but none equal to that with which you have been kind enough to present me. There is a pathos and delicacy in his serious poems, a vein of wit and humour in those of a more festive turn, which cannot be too much admired, nor too warmly approved; and I think I shall never open the book without feeling my astonishment renewed and increased. It was my wish to have expressed my approbation in verse; but whether from declining life, or a temporary depression of spirits, it is at present out of my power to accomplish that agreeable intention. Mr. Stewart, Professor of Morals in this University, had formerly read me three of the poems, and I had desired him to get my name inserted among the subscribers: but whether this was done, or not, I never could learn. I have little intercourse with Dr. Blair, but will take care to have the poems communicated to him by the intervention of some mutual friend. It has been told me by a gentleman, to whom I shewed the performances, and who sought a copy with diligence and ardour, that the whole impression is already exhausted. It were, therefore, much to be wished, for the sake of the young man, that a second edition, more numerous than the former, could immediately be printed: as it appears certain that its intrinsic merit, and the exertion of the author’s friends, might give it a more universal circulation than any thing of the kind which has been published within my memory.

  Some of the poems you have added in this last edition are very beautiful, particularly the “Winter Night,” the “Address to Edinburgh,” “Green Grow the Rashes,” and the two songs immediately following, the latter of which is exquisite. By the way, I imagine you have a peculiar talent for such compositions, which you ought to indulge. No kind of poetry demands more delicacy or higher polishing. Horace is more admired on account of his Odes than all his other writings. But nothing now added is equal to your “Vision” and “Cotter’s Saturday Night.” In these are united fine imagery, natural and pathetic description, with sublimity of language and thought. It is evident that you already possess a great variety of expression and command of the English language; you ought, therefore, to deal more sparingly for the future in the provincial dialect; why should you, by using that, limit the number of your admirers to those who understand the Scottish, when you can extend it to all persons of taste who understand the English language? In my opinion, you should plan some larger work than any you have as yet attempted. I mean, reflect upon some proper subject, and arrange the plan in your mind, without beginning to execute any part of it till you have studied most of the best English poets, and read a little more of history.

  I have been much pleased with the poems of the Scottish ploughman, of which you have had specimens in the Review. His “Cotter’s Saturday Night,” has much of the same kind of merit as the “School-mistress;” and the “Daisy,” and the “Mouse,” which I believe you have had in the papers, I think are charming. The endearing diminutives, and the Doric rusticity of the dialect, suit such subjects extremely.

  Read Burns’s poems, and have read them twice: and though they be written in a language that is new to me, and many of them on subjects much inferior to the author’s ability, I think them, on the whole, a very extraordinary production. He is, I believe, the only poet these kingdoms have produced in the lower rank of life since Shakspeare, I should rather say since Prior, who need not be indebted for any part of his praise as a charitable consideration of his origin, and the disadvantages under which he has laboured. It will be pity if he should not hereafter divest himself of barbarism, and content himself with writing pure English, in which he appears perfectly qualified to excel…. Poor Burns loses much of his deserved praise in this country, through our ignorance of his language. I despair of meeting with any Englishman who will take the pains that I have taken to understand him. His candle is bright, but shut up in a dark lantern. I lent him to a very sensible neighbour of mine, but his uncouth dialect spoiled all, and before he had half read him through, he was quite ramfeezled.

  Robert Burns, a natural poet of the first eminence, does not, perhaps appear to his usual advantage in song—non omnia possumus. The political “fragment,” as he calls it, inserted in the second volume of the present collection, has, however, much merit in some of the satirical stanzas, and could it have been concluded with the spirit with which it is commenced, would indisputably have been entitled to great praise; but the character of his favourite minister seems to have operated like the touch of a torpedo; and after vainly attempting something like a panegyric, he seems under the necessity of relinquishing the task. Possibly the bard will one day see occasion to complete his performance as a uniform satire.

	Rustick Burns,
	And all his artless wood-notes Scotland mourns.

  Old and young, high and low, grave and gay, learned or ignorant, all were alike delighted, agitated, transported. I was at that time resident in Galloway, contiguous to Ayrshire: and I can well remember, how that even the plough-boys and maid-servants would have gladly bestowed the wages which they earned and most hardly, and which they wanted to purchase necessary clothing, if they might but secure the works of Burns.

  It was not, indeed, until the appearance of the rustic Burns, that Bard of Nature and of Love, that we could boast of a writer of eminent genius, who had paid due attention to this department of Lyric poetry, and had brought forward numerous specimens of undoubted excellence.

  Now I have to satisfy you as to my favourite poem of Burns. Doubtless the “Daisy” is the most finished and excels in simple elegance; “The De’il himsel” in humour—exquisite, peculiar humour. I confess, if decorous people could be reconciled to blackguardism, John Hornbook is the very Emperor of blackguards. Only think of that despotic power over the fancy, which can unite, what the creative Shakspeare himself never united, the terrible and ludicrous. Yet, where Death is personified meeting the bard, I am sure you would laugh, if you were not afraid. The same power reappears in “Tam O’Shanter,” which I allow to possess superior excellence, though not the very sort of excellence most to my taste. But if you talk of my very own taste, I find myself quite at home in “The Epistle to Davy,” and “The Cottar’s Saturday Night.”

	I mourned with thousands, but as one
	More deeply grieved, for He was gone
	Whose light I hailed when first it shone,
	And showed my youth
	How Verse may build a princely throne
	On humble truth.

  Much as I admire the exquisite tenderness and moral delicacy of Cowper’s temperament, I confess I am still more delighted with the boldness and vehemence of the bard of Caledonia. “His generous affections, his ardent eloquence, his brilliant and daring imagination” make him my idol. His proper regard to the dignity of his own powers, his stern and indignant elevation of manners, and due jealousy and repression of the insolence of rank and wealth, are worthy of inexpressible applause…. The genius of Burns was more sublime than that of Cowper. Both excelled in the familiar: but yet the latter was by nature as well as education more gentle, more easy, and delicate: he had also more of tenuity, while Burns was more concise, more bold, and energetic. They both also abounded in humour, which possessed the same characteristics in each; one mild, serene, and smiling; the other daring and powerful, full of fire and imagery. The poems of one fill the heart and the fancy with the soft pleasures of domestic privacy, with the calm and innocent occupations of rural solitude, the pensive musings of the moralist, and the chastised indignation of pure and simple virtue: the poems of the other breathe by turns Grief, Love, Joy, Melancholy, Despair and Terror; plunge us in the vortex of passion, and hurry us away on the wings of unrestrained and undirected fancy.

	Yes, Burns, “thou dear departed shade!”
	When rolling centuries have fled,
	Thy name shall still survive the wreck of time,
	Shall rouse the genius of thy native clime;
	Bards yet unborn, and patriots shall come,
	And catch fresh ardour at thy hallow’d tomb!
	There’s not a cairn-built cottage on our hills,
	Nor rural hamlet on our fertile plains,
	But echoes to the magic of thy strains,
	While every heart with highest transport thrills.
	Our country’s melodies shall perish never,
	For, Burns, thy songs shall live for ever.

  An earnest wish to possess a scrap of the hand-writing of Burns, originally led to the discovery of most of the papers that compose this volume. In the manner of laying them before the public I honestly declare that I have done my best; and I trust I may fairly presume to hope that the man who has contributed to extend the bounds of literature by adding another genuine volume to the writings of Robert Burns, has some claim on the gratitude of his countrymen. On this occasion, I certainly feel something of that sublime and heart-swelling gratification, which he experiences, who cast another stone on the Cairn of a great and lamented chief.

  The illustrious soul that has left amongst us the name of Burns, has often been lowered down to a comparison with me; but the comparison exists more in circumstances than in essentials. That man stood up with the stamp of superior intellect on his brow; a visible greatness: and great and patriotic subjects would only have called into action the powers of his mind, which lay inactive while he played calmly and exquisitely the pastoral pipe. The letters to which I have alluded in my preface to the “Rural Tales,” were friendly warnings, pointed with immediate reference to the fate of that extraordinary man. “Remember Burns,” has been the watchword of my friends. I do remember Burns; but I am not Burns! I have neither his fire to fan, or to quench; nor his passions to control! Where then is my merit, if I make a peaceful voyage on a smooth sea, and with no mutiny on board.

  Burns is certainly by far the greatest of our poetical prodigies—from Stephen Duck down to Thomas Dermody. They are forgotten already; or only remembered for derision. But the name of Burns, if we are not mistaken, has not yet “gathered all its fame;” and will endure long after those circumstances are forgotten which contributed to its first notoriety. So much indeed are we impressed with a sense of his merits, that we cannot help thinking it a derogation from them to consider him as a prodigy at all; and are convinced that he will never be rightly estimated as a poet, till that vulgar wonder be entirely repressed which was raised on his having been a ploughman. It is true, no doubt, that he was born in an humble station; and that much of his early life was devoted to severe labour, and to the society of his fellow-labourers. But he was not himself either uneducated or illiterate; and was placed in a situation more favourable, perhaps, to the development of great poetical talents, than any other which could have been assigned him.

  The sweetest, the sublimest, the most tricksy poet who has blest this nether world since the days of Shakespeare!

  Whether engaged, or roaming at liberty, Wither never seems to have abated a jot of that free spirit, which sets its mark upon his writings, as much as a predominant feature of independence impresses every page of our late glorious Burns; but the elder poet wraps his proof-armour closer about him, the other wears his too much outwards; he is thinking too much of annoying the foe, to be quite easy within.

  It is a remark too trite perhaps to require repetition, that the writings of Robert Burns are, in Scotland, the most popular of any works of fancy, ancient or modern,—that there is scarcely a home in the kingdom which does not contain a copy of his poems—and that there are few individuals elevated above the clods of valley, who are not familiar with the productions of his muse. The tendency of works so widely circulated, and so highly esteemed, is evidently a matter of no trivial moment.

  Neither the subjects of his poems, nor his manner of handling them, allow us long to forget their author. On the basis of his human character he has reared a poetic one, which with more or less distinctness presents itself to view in almost every part of his earlier, and in my estimation, his most valuable verses. This poetic fabric, dug out of the quarry of genuine humanity, is airy and spiritual:—and though the materials, in some parts, are coarse, and the disposition is often fantastic and irregular, yet the whole is agreeable and strikingly attractive…. It is probable that he would have proved a still greater poet if, by strength of reason, he could have controlled the propensities which his sensibility engendered; but he would have been a poet of a different class; and certain it is, had that desirable restraint been early established, many peculiar beauties which enrich his verses could never have existed, and many accessary influences, which contribute greatly to their effect, would have been wanting.

  Burns has given an elixir of life to his native dialect. The Scottish “Tam O’Shanter” will be read as long as any English production of the same century. The impression of his genius is deep and universal; and, viewing him merely as a poet, there is scarcely any other regret connected with his name, than that his productions, with all their merit, fall short of the talents which he possessed…. He meets us, in his compositions, undisguisedly as a peasant. At the same time, his observations go extensively into life, like those of a man who felt the proper dignity of human nature in the character of a peasant. The writer of some of the severest strictures that ever have been passed upon his poetry conceives that his beauties are considerably defaced by a portion of false taste and vulgar sentiment, which adhere to him from his low education. That Burns’s education, or rather the want of it, excluded him from much knowledge, which might have fostered his inventive ingenuity, seems to be clear; but his circumstances cannot be admitted to have communicated vulgarity to the tone of his sentiments. They have not the sordid taste of low condition. It is objected to him, that he boasts too much of his own independence; but, in reality, this boast is neither frequent nor obtrusive; and it is in itself the expression of a manly and laudable feeling. So far from calling up disagreeable recollections of rusticity, his sentiments triumph, by their natural energy, over those false and fastidious distinctions which the mind is but too apt to form in allotting its sympathies to the sensibilities of the rich and poor. He carries us into the humble scenes of life, not to make us dole out our tribute of charitable compassion to paupers and cottagers, but to make us feel with them on equals terms, to make us enter into their passions and interests, and share our hearts with them as with brothers and sisters of the human species.

	What bird, in beauty, flight, or song,
	Can with the Bard compare,
	Who sang as sweet, and soar’d as strong,
	As ever child of air?
	His plume, his note, his form, could Burns
	For whim or pleasure change;
	He was not one, but all by turns,
	With transmigration strange.
	*        *        *        *        *
	Peace to the dead—In Scotia’s choir
	Of Minstrels great and small,
	He sprang from his spontaneous fire,
	The Phœnix of them all.

	There have been loftier themes than his,
	And longer scrolls, and louder lyres,
	And lays lit up with Poesy’s
	Purer and holier fires:
	Yet read the names that know not death;
	Few nobler ones than Burns are there;
	And few have won a greener wreath
	Than that which binds his hair.
	His is that language of the heart,
	In which the answering heart would speak,
	Thought, word, that bids the warm tear start,
	Or the smile light the cheek;
	And his that music, to whose tone
	The common pulse of man keeps time,
	In cot or castle’s mirth or moan,
	In cold or sunny clime.
	And who hath heard his song, nor knelt
	Before its spell with willing knee,
	And listened, and believed, and felt
	The Poet’s mastery
	O’er the mind’s sea, in calm and storm,
	O’er the heart’s sunshine and its showers.
	O’er Passion’s moments, bright and warm,
	O’er Reason’s dark cold hours.
	*        *        *        *        *
	Praise to the bard! his words are driven,
	Like flower-seeds by the far winds sown,
	Where’er, beneath the sky of heaven,
	The birds of fame have flown.

  “Mr. John Home, the celebrated author of Douglas,” says an evening paper of 6th Nov. 1789, “was lately asked his opinion of the poems of Robert Burns. His answer was, ‘The encouragement that fellow has met with is a perfect disgrace to the nation.’ This anecdote is genuine, and the majority is satisfied the remark is just. His reputation is vastly faded!”

  The great Master of lyrical composition, in its purest and most intelligible sense. His ballads, on the simplest, sweetest, and most powerful subjects, are beyond all competition; and the strains of love, friendship, and patriotism, by turn take possession of the heart.

	His native strains each bard may try,
	But who has got his fire?
	Why, none—for Nature saw him die,
	Then took away his lyre.
	And for that lyre the learned youth
	May search the world in vain;
	She vowed she ne’er would lend it more
	To sound on earth again;
	But called on Fame to hang it by—
	She took it with a tear,
	Broke all the strings to bind the wreath
	That Burns shall ever wear.

  Lyrical poetry admits of less variety than any other species: and Burns, from this circumstance, as well as from the flexibility of his talents, may be considered as the representative of his whole nation. Indeed, his universal genius seems to have concentrated within itself the rays which were scattered among his predecessors: the simple tenderness of Crawford, the fidelity of Ramsay, and careless humour of Ferguson. The Doric dialect of his country was an instrument peculiarly fitted for the expression of his manly and unsophisticated sentiments. But no one is more indebted to the national music than Burns: embalmed in the sacred melody, his songs are familiar to us from childhood, and, as we read them, the silver sounds with which they have been united seem to linger in our memory, heightening and prolonging the emotions which the sentiments have excited.

  If, in spite of Burns, and all his successors, the boundary lines of society are observed with increasing strictness among us—if the various orders of men still, day by day, feel the chord of sympathy relaxing, let us lament over symptoms of a disease in the body politic, which, if it goes on, must find sooner or later a fatal ending: but let us not undervalue the antidote which has all along been checking this strong poison. Who can doubt, that at this moment thousands of “the first-born of Egypt” look upon the smoke of a cottager’s chimney with feelings which would never have been developed within their being, had there been no Burns?

  A certain rugged sterling worth pervades whatever Burns has written: a virtue, as of green fields and mountain breezes, dwells in his poetry; it is redolent of natural life, and hardy natural men. There is a decisive strength in him, and yet a sweet native gracefulness: he is tender, and he is vehement, yet without constraint or too visible effort; he melts the heart, or inflames it, with a power which seems habitual and familiar to him. We see in him the gentleness, the trembling pity of a woman, with the deep earnestness, the force, and passionate ardour of a hero. Tears lie in him, and consuming fire, as lightning lurks in the drops of a summer cloud. He has a resonance in his bosom for every note of human feeling: the high and the low, the sad and the ludicrous, the joyful, are welcome in their turns to his “lightly-moved and all-conceiving spirit.”… No poet of any age or nation is more graphic than Burns: the characteristic features disclose themselves to him at a glance; three lines from his hand, and we have a likeness. And in that rough dialect, in that rude, often awkward meter, so clear and definite a likeness! It seems a draughtsman working with a burnt stick; and yet the burin of a Retzsch is not more expressive or exact…. No one, at all events, is ignorant that in the poetry of Burns keenness of insight keeps pace with keenness of feeling; that his light is not more pervading than his warmth. He is a man of the most impassioned temper; with passions not strong only, but noble, and of the sort in which great virtues and great poems take their rise. It is reverence, it is love toward all Nature that inspires him, that opens his eyes to its beauty, and makes heart and voice eloquent in its praise…. Burns, indeed, lives in sympathy; his soul rushes forth into all realms of being; nothing that has existence can be indifferent to him. The very Devil he cannot hate with right orthodoxy!

  Porson.—What an admirable Spanish scholar must Mr. Wordsworth be! How completely has he transfused into his own compositions all the spirit of those verses! Nevertheless, it is much to be regretted that, in resolving on simplicity, he did not place himself under the tuition of Burns; which quality Burns could have taught him in perfection; but others he never could have imparted to such an auditor. He would have sung in vain to him

“Scots wha hae wi’ Wallace bled.”

A song more animating than ever Tyrtæus sang to the fife before the Spartans. But simplicity in Burns is never stale and unprofitable. In Burns there is no waste of words out of an ill-shouldered sack; no troublesome running backward and forward of little, idle, ragged ideas; no ostentation of sentiment in the surtout of selfishness.

  Burns, whose lofty soul spread its own pathos and dignity over the “short and simple annals of the poor.”

  When we consider the genius of Burns, we see it manifestly moulded and coloured by his agricultural life. It was thus that nothing seemed worthy to engross his attention but the feelings and the passions of the heart of man.

  It is not easy to conceive any two men more unlike each other, than Cowper and Burns were; and yet, in their genius, there is much similarity. Burns, perhaps, was twice as much a man as Cowper, and the tenth part of the tithe as much a poet as Shakspeare or Scott: he was a giant, nevertheless. His Muse was manliness: he was honest and fearless. The Muse of Cowper was conscious; he was honest but not fearless; he trembled, and a shadow overthrew him but it was a shadow darker than the shadow of death. He would have been a far greater poet than he was, if disease had not made him a coward. Not that he was insincere: oh no! and yet he dared not whisper to his poor heart that God is merciful. Nor was his despair unpoetical; but the hope of Burns is more poetical than Cowper’s despair; and Burns had this further advantage, that he neither despaired of a man as he is, nor of his ultimate destiny. How much more respectable human nature appears in our eyes after reading Burns, than after reading Byron!

  Read Burns: no one ever compressed so much meaning into so few words. Their beautiful rhythm seems their least beauty.

  The divine qualities of Burns would have been lost had he been more lettered…. What plant is more frail or delicate than genius, and what a combination of circumstances is necessary for its growth? It is not enough this time to have a passionate heart and an ardent imagination. It was necessary that adversity should flourish and hatch the seed, that ignorance should screen the flower of it. And can we help being astonished that this fruit divine should be so rare, and that, like the marvellous tree in Eastern stories, genius should only flourish once in a hundred years!… Burns is of that family of writers whose power reaches the heart: Pectus est quod facit disertos. With him there is no literary preoccupation, none of the beauties of the room; he lives in the pure air amid nature. He is not one of those pastoral muses who only visits the country on fine days to recoup themselves after all their luxuriant winter dissipations; courtly muses who only sing of nature in her pleasant garb, whose forests like those of Virgil, are dignified as a consul; who transfer their armours from the city to bring them back to the shams of a gravelled walk and an artificial river. The muse of Burns is entirely rustic; she dwells in a cottage; rises with the sun; harnesses herself with the cattle; soaks the furrows with her sweat; lives on oatmeal; willingly frequenting the village hostel; speaking more of poppies than of lillies; of pools than of lakes; of wild ducks than of swans; and only taking her loves in the village—perhaps it is for this reason that she is so constant. With such a guide we are far away from the boudoirs of the warm greenhouses, as we inspire the noble air, as we are animated, interested, impassioned in speaking to the heart, as we are conscious of the intimate harmony with those we love, and in whom we live.

  Burns is by far the greatest poet that ever sprung from the bosom of the people, and lived and died in an humble condition. Indeed, no country in the world but Scotland could have produced such a man; and he will be for ever regarded as the glorious representative of the genius of his country. He was born a poet, if ever man was, and to his native genius alone is owing the perpetuity of his fame. For he manifestly had never very deeply studied poetry as an art, nor reasoned much about its principles, nor looked abroad with the wide ken of intellect for objects and subjects on which to pour out his inspiration…. The strings of his lyre sometimes yield their finest music to the sighs of remorse or repentance. Whatever, therefore, be the faults or defects of the poetry of Burns—and no doubt it has many—it has, beyond all that was ever written, this greatest of all merits, intense, life-pervading, and life-breathing truth…. No poet ever lived more constantly and more intimately in the hearts of a people…. Of all men that ever lived, Burns was the least of a sentimentalist; he was your true Man of Feeling. He did not preach to Christian people the duty of humanity to animals; he spoke of them in winning words warm from a manliest breast, as his fellow-creatures, and made us feel what we owe.

	And Burns, with pungent passionings
	Set in his eyes: deep lyric springs
	Are of the fire-mount’s issuings.

	On, exulting in his magic,
	Swept the gifted peasant on—
	Though his feet were on the greensward,
	Light from Heaven around him shone;
	At his conjuration, demons
	Issued from their darkness drear;
	Hovering round on silver pinions,
	Angels stoop’d his songs to hear;
	Bow’d the Passions to his bidding,
	Terror gaunt, and Pity calm;
	Like the organ pour’d his thunder,
	Like the lute his fairy psalm.
	Lo! when clover-swathes lay round him,
	Or his feet the furrow press’d,
	He could mourn the sever’d daisy,
	Or the mouse’s ruined nest;
	Woven of gloom and glory, visions
	Haunting throng’d his twilight hour;
	Birds enthrall’d him with sweet music,
	Tempests with their tones of power;
	Eagle-wing’d, his mounting spirit
	Custom’s rusty fetters spurn’d;
	Tasso-like, for Jean he melted,
	Wallace-like, for Scotland burn’d!

  In these poems and letters of Burns, we apprehend, is to be found a truer history than any anecdote can supply, of the things which happened to himself, and moreover of the most notable things which went on in Scotland between 1759 and 1796…. Consider the terrible contradiction between faith and practice which must have met the eyes of the man, before he could write with the same pen—and one as honestly as the other—“The Cottar’s Saturday Night,” and “Holy Willie’s Prayer.”… The field in which Burns’s influence has been, as was to be expected, most important and most widely felt, is in the poems of working men. He first proved that it was possible to become a poet and a cultivated man, without deserting his class, either in station or in sympathies; nay, that the healthiest and noblest elements of a lowly born poet’s mind might be, perhaps certainly must be, the very feelings and thoughts which he brought up with him from below, not those which he received from above, in the course of his artificial culture. From the example of Burns, therefore, many a working man, who would otherwise have “died and given no sign,” has taken courage, and spoken out the thought within him, in verse or prose, not always wisely and well, but in all cases, as it seems to us, in the belief that he had a sort of divine right to speak and be heard, since Burns had broken down the artificial ice-wall of centuries, and asserted, by act as well as song, that “a man’s a man for a’ that.”

  Burns wrote in this class of poetry at no such length as Ramsay; but he was pastoral poetry itself, in the shape of an actual, glorious peasant, vigorous as if Homer had written him, and tender as generous strength, or as memories of the grave. Ramsay and he have helped Scotland for ever to take pride in its heather, and its braes, and its bonny rivers, and be ashamed of no beauty or honest truth, in high estate or in low;—an incalculable blessing. Ramsay, to be sure, with all his genius, and though he wrote an entire and excellent dramatic pastoral, in five legitimate acts, is but a small part of Burns;—is but a field in a corner compared with the whole Scots pastoral region. He has none of Burns’s pathos; none of his grandeur; none of his burning energy; none of his craving after universal good. How universal is Burns! What mirth in his cups! What softness in his tears! What sympathy in his very satire! What manhood in everything! If Theocritus, the inventor of a loving and affecting Polyphemus, could have forseen the verses on the “Mouse” and the “Daisy” turned with plough, the “Tam o’ Shanter,” “O Willie brew’d a peck o’ maut,” “Ye banks and braes o’ bonnie Doon,” &c., (not to mention a hundred others, which have less to do with our subject), tears of admiration would have rushed into his eyes.

  Burns’ Songs are better than Bulwer’s Epics.

  I have passed the morning in writing to James Stephen, and reading about fifty of Burns’s songs, to the merit of which I remain insensible. A happy verse there may be here and there, and even a few good songs; but I have read nothing to-day which seems worthy to live for twenty years. I have often in the course of my life taken up Burns to see if I would change my mind about him, but my mind won’t be changed. He was a man of highly poetic temperament, and some other attributes of genius, but for one reason or another 99 per cent. of what he wrote was worthless, and I think nothing that he wrote was of such excellence as to found a poet’s fame. Perhaps if he had written nothing but his best pieces I should think more highly of him, and with less liability to error; but no man’s best lies buried under more of worse, worser, and worsest.

	He rose and sang, and Scotland heard;
	The round world echoed with his song,
	And hearts in every land were stirred
	With love, and joy, and scorn of wrong.
	Some their cold lips disdainful curled,
	Yet the sweet lays would many learn;
	But he went singing through the world,
	In most melodious unconcern.

  We must listen, too, while in homely Scots vernacular we are told by an Ayrshire ploughman authentic tidings of living instincts, of spontaneous belief, which not all the philosophy in the brain of the intellectual can banish from the breast of the human being.

  There was one writer of the last century, one who wrote satire but who has done higher things,—who has left a name written upon the earth’s surface in flowers; one, in all ways, of the greatest men that the literature of Great Britain boasts,—I mean Robert Burns. Burns wrote satire, as the greatest men do, when that was the natural attitude for him…. Burns wrote satirical verses, ballads, squibs, and epigrams, as he wrote everything else,—from his heart. He loved, and hated, and prayed, and drank, in obedience to the instincts of a most vivid and genuine nature, and more absolutely than any writer poured out himself. He is as real as a summer afternoon: and his very faults were as natural as poppies among the corn; and because they glare and are staring in color, you must not forget how few and how light they are, compared in bulk and weight with the masses of most beautiful and nutritious grain in the crop…. His satire is a piece of himself; and whether he produced nettles or roses, they were both fresh…. I must leave “Holy Willie’s Prayer” to anybody’s private perusal, who wishes to see irony as exquisite as Swift’s,—bitter and brilliant ridicule; and the “Address to the unco Guid” also, full of humor and of heart. I think the best satire he has written, without doubt, to be the “Holy Fair,” which has so much comic painting, besides its cutting wit.

	Through all his tuneful art, how strong
	The human feeling gushes!
	The very moonlight of his song
	Is warm with smiles and blushes!
	Give lettered pomp to teeth of Time,
	So “Bonnie Doon” but tarry;
	Blot out the Epic’s stately rhyme,
	But spare his “Highland Mary!”

	If scant his service at the kirk,
	He paters heard and aves
	From choirs that lurk in hedge and birk,
	From blackbird and from mavis;
	The cowering mouse, poor unroofed thing,
	In him found Mercy’s angel;
	The daisy’s ring brought every spring
	To him Love’s fresh evangel!

  Not Latimer, not Luther struck more telling blows against false theology than did this brave singer. The Confession of Augsburg, the Declaration of Independence, the French Rights of Man, and the Marseillaise, are not more weighty documents in the history of freedom than the songs of Burns. His satire has lost none of its edge. His musical arrows yet sing through the air. He is so substantially a reformer that I find his grand plain sense in close chain with the greatest masters—Rabelais, Shakespeare in comedy, Cervantes, Butler and Burns…. Yet how true a poet is he! and the poet, too, of poor men, of gray hodden and the guernsey coat, and the blouse. He has given voice to all the experiences of common life; he has endeared the farm-house and cottage, patches and poverty, beans and barley; ale, the poor man’s wine; hardship; the fear of debt; the dear society of weans and wife, of brothers and sisters, proud of each other, knowing so few, and finding amends for want and obscurity in books and thoughts…. As he was thus the poet of the poor, anxious, cheerful, working humanity, so had he the language of low life. He grew up in a rural district, speaking a patois unintelligible to all but natives, and he has made the Lowland Scotch a Doric dialect of fame. It is the only example in history of a language made classic by the genius of a single man.

	We love him, not for sweetest song,
	Though never tone so tender;
	We love him, even in his wrong,—
	His wasteful self-surrender.
	We praise him, not for gifts divine,—
	His Muse was born of woman,—
	His manhood breathes in every line,—
	Was ever heart more human?
	We love him, praise him, just for this:
	In every form and feature,
	Through wealth and want, through woe and bliss,
	He saw his fellow-creature!…
	The waning suns, the wasting globe,
	Shall spare the minstrel’s story,—
	The centuries weave his purple robe,
	The mountain-mist of glory!

	All hail! immortal Robin, hail!
	Thy natal day again returns,
	And here the gather’d clans are met
	To crown their Poet—Burns!
	A crowded century has pass’d,
	Auld Scotia, a repentant dame,
	Kneels at her ploughboy’s feet and gives
	A hundred years of fame.
	How dear to her his memory now—
	See to his grave how pilgrims wend;
	Dear are his haunts, the fields he ploughed
	And every line he penn’d.
	Rare bards have borne across the deep
	The wild rose pluck’d from Alloway’s aisle,
	Sprays from the birks of Ellisland
	And braes o’ Ballochmyle.

	… He learned the touch that speeds
	Right to the natural heart of things;
	Struck rootage down to where Life feeds
	At the eternal Springs:…
	He caught them, Witch and Warlock, ere
	They vanished; all the revelry
	Of wizard wonder, we must wear
	The mask of Sleep to see!
	Droll Humours came for him to paint
	Their pictures; straight his merry eye
	Had taken them, so queer, so quaint,
	We laugh until we cry….
	He knew the Sorrows of poor folk,
	He felt for all their patient pain;
	And from his clouded soul he shook
	Lark-like the music-rain….
	Auld Scotland’s Music waited long,
	And wandered wailing through the land,
	Divinely yearning in her wrong,
	And sorrowfully grand;
	And many touched responsive chords,
	But could not tell what She would say;
	Till Robin wed her with his words,
	And they were One for aye….
	… now we recognize in him,
	One of the high and shining race;
	All gone the mortal mists that dim
	The fair immortal face.

	To nature’s feast,—
	Who knew the noblest guest
	And entertained him best,—
	Kingly he came. Her chambers of the east
	She draped with crimson and with gold,
	And poured her pure joy-wines
	For him the poet-souled.
	For him her anthem rolled,
	From the storm-wind among the winter pines,
	Down to the slenderest note
	Of a love-warble from the linnet’s throat.

  The most serious and profound Scotchmen of later days have hailed the appearance of the Ayrshire ploughman poet as an element of wholesome human reality brought into the midst of an atmosphere thick and heavy with notions and book lore. They say that his songs brought back to them the belief in green fields and hills, as well as the fact of their belonging to a land on which their fathers had dwelt and suffered before them; and that his life showed them there is need, in the heart of every peasant, of a hope to raise him and protect him against himself, as well as against his rich patrons, which neither the divinity nor the philosophy of Scotland at that time afforded; which was not offered by old light formalism or new light experiences; which was not found necessary by the polite circles that Hume frequented, and which only glimmered faintly through the consciousness and common sense of Reid; but of which Burns could see the pledge and the promise in the domestic life of his sires, and in the testimony they bore to a Father whose righteousness the earthly father was feebly to exhibit in his own.

  In his own day the Ballad singer on the street, chanting the last new Ballad, sought for guerdon and applause by announcing it as a new song by Rabbie Burns; and when the grave had closed over his remains, every scrap written in his noble, manly hand-writing, however unworthy,—and many a Poem and Song, because expressed in the rough quaint Doric, were claimed as his, and forthwith thrown from the press.

  Many of those who sit at this table have doubtless heard the report of a cannon discharged among the Highlands that overlook the Hudson, our own “exulting and abounding river.” The sound has scarcely left the cannon’s mouth before it is re-echoed by one of the majestic mountains—Dunderberg, perhaps—on whose summit the clouds rest and the lightnings are born. Crow Nest rolls it back from his dark precipices and ancient forests. Then some headland more remote receives it, and from its cliffs flings it back to the listener. The sound travels swiftly on, and a response comes from height after height, until it passes away among the hills and shores which lie beyond the sight…. So the reverberation is likely to go on from generation to generation, an involuntary tribute of admiration from the world of letters to the genius of Burns.

  Of all the poets, larger and less, not one has been so true to his own thought; so faithful to the sight of his eye, to the sound in his ear, to the emotion of his heart! “A touch of nature makes the whole world kin”—and so it is that Burns is the accredited oracle of the human soul, not only where the Scottish dialect—that beautiful modern Doric—is spoken and best appreciated, but in all lands where men employ our capable English tongue. The memory of Burns! Ah! the poetry of Burns has taken care of that, for all time to come! It beams like an aureole over every hallowed spot where he suffered and sung; it breathes on the “Banks and Braes of Bonny Doon;” it is renewed with each returning Spring in his own “Mountain Daisy;” it lives in the immortal life of “Mary in Heaven!” So long as love is precious, and bereavement sacred, and hypocrisy hateful, and pretension ridiculous, and labor honorable, and true manhood noble—so long as poetry, simple, natural, eloquent, is the delight of mankind, alike in the halls of the opulent and by “wee bit ingle bluikies’ family,” so long shall the memory of Burns endure!

  Burns cries out in favour of instinct and joy, so as to seem epicurean. He has genuine gaiety, comic energy; laughter commends itself to him; he praises it and the good suppers of good comrades, where the wine flows, pleasantry abounds, ideas pour forth, poetry sparkles, and causes a carnival of beautiful figures and good-humoured people to move about in the human brain…. That, indeed, was natural poetry; not forced in a hothouse, but born of the soil between the furrows, side by side with music, amidst the gloom and beauty of the climate, like the violet gorse of the hillside and woods. We can understand that it gave vigour to his tongue: for the first time this man spoke as men speak, or rather as they think, without premeditation, with a mixture of all styles, familiar and terrible, hiding an emotion under a joke, tender and jeering in the same place, apt to combine taproom trivialities with the high language of poetry, so indifferent was he to rules, content to exhibit his feeling as it came to him, and as he felt it. At last, after so many years, we escape from the measured declamation, we hear a man’s voice! much better, we forget the voice in the emotion which it expresses, we feel this motion reflected in ourselves, we enter into relations with a soul. Then form seems to fade away and disappear: I will say that this is the great future of modern poetry; Burns has reached it seven or eight times.

	O Burns! where bide? where bide ye now?
	Where are you in this night’s full noon,
	Great master of the pen and plough?
	Might you not on yon slanting beam
	Of moonlight, kneeling to the Doon,
	Descend once to this hallow’d stream?
	Sure yon stars yield enough of light
	For heaven to spare your face one night.
	O Burns! another name for song,
	Another name for passion—pride;
	For love and poesy allied;
	For strangely blended right and wrong.
	I picture you as one who kneel’d
	A stranger at his own hearthstone;
	One knowing all, yet all unknown,
	One seeing all, yet all conceal’d;
	The fitful years you linger’d here,
	A lease of peril and of pain;
	And I am thankful yet again
	The gods did love you, ploughman! peer!

  About the time you were writing to me about Burns and Béranger, I was thinking of them “which was the Greater Genius?”—I can’t say; but, with all my Admiration for about a Score of the Frenchman’s almost perfect Songs, I would give all of them up for a Score of Burns’ Couplets, Stanzas, or single Lines scattered among those quite imperfect Lyrics of his. Béranger, no doubt, was The Artist; which still is not the highest Genius—witness Shakespeare, Dante, Æschylus, Calderon, to the contrary. Burns assuredly had more Passion than the Frenchman; which is not Genius either, but a great Part of the Lyric Poet still. What Béranger might have been, if born and bred among Banks, Braes, and Mountains, I cannot tell: Burns had that advantage over him. And then the Highland Mary to love, amid the heather, as compared to Lise the Grisette in a Parisian Suburb! Some of the old French Virelays and Vaudevires come much nearer the Wild Notes of Burns, and go to one’s heart like his; Béranger never gets so far as that I think.

  Neither Pope with his smooth verses, nor Lord Bolingbroke with his sceptical wit, nor Dr. Johnson amid his worshippers, gave forth the first truly original note which announced a new phase in the poetry of Great Britain: from the banks of the Doon, out of a cottage in Scotland, rose the wood-lark who uttered it.

  In Part II. are social and drinking songs, with which latter Scotland is abundantly supplied. In this province, too, Burns has lavishly poured out his splendid genius, with a strange fatality, singing the praises of the Syren that lured him to his own ruin.

  As a lyric poet Burns deserves the name of great. In the most essential qualities of this form of verse; in fire, tenderness and naturalness, none have surpassed him…. Though Burns stands at the entrance of the new period, none of the great poets that followed surpassed him in individuality of faculties, a freedom which yet left him in full mastery of a varied and most melodious verse.

  In a company of German critics who were weighing the claims and estimating the rank of the poets, their contemporaries, the leader of their chorus, the genial humorist, Jean Paul Kichter, is said to have hushed his audience when the name of Goethe was introduced, exclaiming—“We are not to sit in judgment on that sacred head.” Scotsmen are apt to attach the same half superstitious reverence to the name which is, more than any other, that of Scotland condensed in a personality, the representative of what is noblest and also of much that is erring in their race…. The affectations of his style are insignificant and rare. His prevailing characteristic is an absolute sincerity. A love for the lower forms of social life was his besetting sin; Nature was his healing power. Burns compares himself to an Æolian harp, strung to every wind of heaven. His genius flows over all living and lifeless things with a sympathy that finds nothing mean or insignificant.

  Three things may be noted as to the influence of Burns on men’s feeling for Nature. First, he was a more entirely open-air poet than any first-rate singer who had yet lived, and as such he dealt with Nature in a more free, close, intimate way than any English poet since the old ballad-singers. He did more to bring the hearts of men close to the outer world, and the outer world to the heart, than any former poet. His keen eye looked directly, with no intervening medium, on the face alike of Nature and of man, and embraced all creation in one large sympathy. With familiar tenderness he dwelt on the lower creatures, felt for their sufferings, as if they had been his own, and opened men’s hearts to feel how much the groans of creation are needlessly increased by the indifference or cruelty of man. In Burns, as in Cowper, and in him perhaps more than in Cowper, there was a large going forth of tenderness to the lower creatures, and in their poetry this first found utterance, and in no poet since their time, so fully as in these two. Secondly, his feeling in Nature’s presence was not, as in the English poets of his time, a quiet contemplative pleasure. It was nothing short of rapture. Other more modern poets may have been thrilled with the same delight, he alone of all in last century expressed the thrill. In this, as in other things, he is the truest herald of that strain of rejoicing in Nature, even to ecstasy, which has formed one of the finest tones in the poetry of this century. Thirdly, he does not philosophize on Nature or her relation to man; he feels it, alike in his joyful moods and in his sorrowful. It is to him part of what he calls “the universal plan,” but he nowhere reasons about the life of Nature as he often does so trenchantly about that of man.

  The vigorous and beautiful poetry which Burns thus produced gave men a new standard of criticism. The decasyllabic metre, which Pope had made fashionable, was at once discarded, and most of the great writers of the period adopted either original or other styles.

  Burns, like Chaucer, comes short of a high seriousness of the great classics, and the virtue of matter and manner which goes with that high seriousness is wanting to his work…. We arrive best at the real estimate of Burns, I think, by conceiving his work as having truth of matter and truth of manner, but not the accent or the poetic virtue of the highest masters…. The freedom of Chaucer is heightened, in Burns, by a fiery, reckless energy; the benignity of Chaucer deepens, in Burns, into an overwhelming sense of the pathos of things;—of the pathos of human nature, the pathos, also, of non-human nature. Instead of the fluidity of Chaucer’s manner, the manner of Burns has spring, bounding swiftness. Burns is by far the greater force, though he has perhaps less charm. The world of Chaucer is fairer, richer, more significant than that of Burns; but when the largeness and freedom of Burns get full sweep, as in “Tam o’ Shanter,” or still more in that puissant and splendid production, “The Jolly Beggars,” his world may be what it will, his poetic genius triumphs over it.

	Touched by his hand, the wayside weed
	Becomes a flower; the lowliest reed
	Beside the stream
	Is clothed with beauty; gorse and grass
	And heather, where his footsteps pass,
	The brighter seem.
	He sings of love, whose flame illumes
	The darkness of lone cottage rooms;
	He feels the force,
	The treacherous undertow and stress,
	Of wayward passions, and no less
	The keen remorse.
	At moments, wrestling with his fate,
	His voice is harsh, but not with hate;
	The brush-wood, hung
	Above the tavern door, lets fall
	Its bitter leaf, its drop of gall,
	Upon his tongue.
	But still the music of his song
	Rises o’er all, elate and strong;
	Its master-chords
	Are Manhood, Freedom, Brotherhood,
	Its discords but an interlude
	Between the words.

  Burns’ poetry shares with all poetry of the first order of excellence the life and movement not of one age but of all ages, that which belongs to what Wordsworth calls “the essential passions” of human nature. It is the voice of nature which we hear in his poetry, and it is of that nature one touch of which makes the whole world kin. It is doubtful whether any poet, ancient or modern, has evoked as much personal attachment of a fervid and perfervid quality as Burns has been able to draw to himself. It is an attachment the amount and the quality of which are not to be explained by anything in the history of the man, anything apart from the exercise of his genius as a poet. His misfortunes, though they were great, do not account for it—these are cancelled by his faults, from which his misfortunes are not easily separated. What renders it at all intelligible is that human nature, in its most ordinary shapes, is more poetical than it looks, and that exactly at those moments of its consciousness in which it is most truly because most vividly and powerfully and poetically itself, Burns has a voice to give to it.

  In no respect do the poems of Wordsworth more strongly contrast with those of Burns than in what I would call, with strict meaning, historical value. The first book of Homer’s “Iliad” makes the life of old heroic Greece visible to us. We see it and know it in a sense in which no mere statistical information could place it before us. In this sense Burns is the Scottish historian of his day and generation. His Tam o’ Shanter, his Duncan Gray, his Doctor Hornbrook, his lads and lasses frolicking at Halloween, his peasant opening the Bible and reverently reading it to his household in the evening, are as true to the Ayrshire of his time as the weeping Achilles and his divine mother, the mourning Priam and his dead Hector, are to that old Homeric world; and the same ring and shout of human laughter makes ancient and modern kin, when the preternatural potent of Halloween turns out to be “grumphy, asteer that night,” and when Ajax, clearing from mouth and nostril the mud into which he had flopped, complains that he had been tripped up in the race by Pallas, and the surrounding Achaians “laugh sweetly” at the notion. Now Wordsworth’s poems, as compared with those of Keats and Shelley, are racy of the soil. There is a good deal of Cumberland in them. But, compared with those of Burns, they are outside Cumberland life.

  His humour comes from him in a stream so deep and easy that I will venture to call him the best of humourous poets.

	We praised the “Lass o’ Ballochmyle,”
	We talked of Mary, loved and lost,
	Until our spirits touched and crossed,
	And melted into tears, the while;
	We drank to “Nell,” and “Bonnie Jean,”
	To “Chloris,” and the “Banks o’ Cree,”—
	Blest hour!—I keep its mem’ry green,
	The night you quoted Burns to me.

  He was the final product of a long-continued tendency in one direction, and not a miraculous phenomenon.

  He found his idea, not in the remote and conventional, but in the familiar and near-at-hand; and, without rant or trick, with genuine feeling, gave it articulate voice—a voice not from the university, but from the heart of Nature. Thus we may understand why no poetry was ever more instantaneously and more widely popular; why in the rural circle he was a delight and an admiration, and in cultured Edinburgh a phenomenon…. A playmate to Nature and to Man.

	We saw again the plowman lad,
	As by the banks of Ayr he wandered,
	With burning eyes and eager heart,
	And first on Song and Scotland pondered;
	We saw him, as from Nature’s soul
	His own drew draughts of joy o’erflowing:
	The plower’s voice, the brier-rose,
	The tiny harebell lightly growing,
	The wounded hare that passed him by,
	The timorous mousie’s ruined dwelling,
	The cattle cowering from the blast,
	The dying sheep her sorrows telling,—
	All touched the heart that kept so strong
	Its sympathy with humbler being,
	And saw in simplest things of life
	The poetry that waits the seeing!

  Criticism of Burns is only permitted to Scotchmen of pure blood. Admirable appreciations may be found in the essays of Carlyle and Nichol. Yet it may be said that, if there are more elegant and subtle song-writers in the language, no one even approaches Burns in masculine strength or concentrated utterance of passion. Though all his writings are occasional, he reflects every mood of the national character, its tenderness, its sensuous vigour, and its patriotic fervour. Like Byron, he always wrote at a white heat, but, unlike Byron, he had the highest lyrical power, and, if he sometimes fails, he does not fail by excessive dilution. He is only insipid when he tries to adopt the conventional English of his time, in obedience to foolish advice from Dr. Moore and others.

  A quiet life of song, fallentis semita vitæ, was not to be yours. Fate otherwise decreed it. The touch of a lettered society, the strife with the Kirk, discontent with the State, poverty and pride, neglect and success, were needed to make your Genius what it was, and to endow the world with “Tam o’ Shanter,” the “Jolly Beggars,” and “Holy Willie’s Prayer.” Who can praise them too highly—who admire in them too much the humour, the scorn, the wisdom, the unsurpassed energy and courage?

  Dear Rob! Manly, witty, fond, friendly, full of weak spots as well as strong ones—essential type of so many thousands—perhaps the average, as just said, of the decent-born young men and the early mid-aged, not only of the British Isles, but America, too, North and South, just the same. I think, indeed, one best part of Burns is the unquestionable proof he presents of the perennial existence among the laboring classes, especially farmers, of the finest latent poetic elements in their blood. (How clear it is to me that the common soil has always been, and is now, thickly strewn with just such gems.) He is well called the Ploughman…. There is something about Burns peculiarly acceptable to the concrete, human points of view. He poetizes work-a-day agricultural labor and life (whose spirit and sympathies, as well as practicalities, are much the same everywhere), and treats fresh, often coarse, natural occurrences, loves, persons, not like many new and some old poets in a genteel style of gilt and china, or at second or third removes, but in their own born atmosphere, laughter, sweat, unction. Perhaps no one ever sang “lads and lassies”—that universal race, mainly the same, too, all ages, all lands—down on their own plane, as he has. He exhibits no philosophy worth mentioning; his morality is hardly more than parrot-talk—not bad or deficient, but cheap, shopworn, the platitudes of old aunts and uncles to the youngsters (be good boys and keep your noses clean.) Only when he gets at Poosie Nansie’s, celebrating the “barley bree,” or among tramps, or democratic bouts and drinking generally,

(“Freedom and whiskey gang thegither,”)

we have, in his own unmistakable color and warmth, those interiors of rake-helly life and tavern fun—the cantabile of jolly beggars in highest jinks—lights and groupings of rank glee and brawny amorousness, outvying the best painted pictures of the Dutch school, or any school…. Never indeed was there truer utterance in a certain range of idiosyncrasy than by this poet. Hardly a piece of his, large or small, but has “snap” and raciness…. Finally, in any summing-up of Burns, though so much is to be said in the way of fault-finding, drawing black marks, and doubtless severe literary criticism—(in the present outpouring I have “kept myself in,” rather than allow’d any free flow)—after full retrospect of his work and life, the aforesaid “odd-kind chiel” remains to my heart and brain as almost the tenderest, manliest, and (even if contradictory) dearest flesh-and-blood figure in all the streams and clusters of by-gone poets.

  The books that have most influenced me are inaccessible to the general reader, Horace, Pindar, and Dante, for instance; but these following are good for everybody:—Scott’s “Lady of the Lake” and “Marmion” (the “Lady” first for me, though not for Scott). Pope’s “Homer’s Iliad.” Byron, all, but most “Corsair,” “Bride of Abydos,” and the “Two Foscari.” Coleridge and Keats, in my youth. Burns, as I grew older and wiser.

  It has always been a mystery to me why Walter Scott stands so low in the estimation of the present race of Scotsmen all over the world, and why Robert Burns, a greatly inferior genius, stands so high. Is it because the majority of the Scotch people are so ultra-democratic that they cannot forgive Scott for being an aristocrat; and that they almost worship Burns because he was born and nurtured and died in poverty, because he was an ultra-plebeian, earning his scanty and precarious bread by the sweat of his brow? Or do the multitude, in all countries, love their heroes all the more because of their conspicuous human frailties, and have nothing but cold respect for the great men who are only virtuous and respectable?

	But more than all fond memory turns
	And rests on Ayr, the home of Burns.
	For there the “Daisy” was uptorn,
	To blossom on a wider field;
	And there the “Mousie,” kindred born,
	Was first to poesie revealed.
	The land of “Auld Lang Syne” is there,
	The cotter’s home, the evening prayer:
	To these, in truth, the memory turns—
	To these, which make the Land of Burns.
	*        *        *        *        *
	It seemed his mission to bestow
	On humble things the highest worth;
	The streams that by his “shieling” flow
	Ripple in song o’er all the earth.
	The little Kirk of Alloway
	Shines forth immortal in his lay,
	And, filled with witches, takes its stand,
	The ruin of his storied land.
	*        *        *        *        *
	His “Scots wha hae” rings out more clear
	Than any song in field or camp;
	And others rise more true and dear—
	“The rank is but the guinea-stamp.”
	For there are grander fields to fight,
	Where man proclaims his brother’s right;
	And Burns of poets leads the van
	In simple truth—that man is man.

  It is not chiefly the romantic side of the Scotch character which was represented to Burns—its imagination, its patriotism, its zealous affectionateness, its love of the legendary, the marvelous and the ancient, that part, in fact, which belongs most to the highlands; he was more amply furnished with the stronger lowland qualities, sense, independence, courageous perseverance, shrewdness, and humour, a retentive heart, and a mind truthful alike when fully expressed or when partially reserved. These qualities were united in his abundant nature; and his poetic temperament freed them from the limitations which belonged to every character formed upon a local type. The consequence is that his songs are sung at the hearth and on the mountain-side; his pathos is felt and his humour applauded by the village circle; his sharp descriptions and shrewd questions on grave matters are treated as indulgently by ministers of the “National Assembly,” the “Free Kirk,” and “orthodox dissenters,” as Boccaccio’s stories once were by the Italian clergy; and for the lonely traveller from the South the one small volume which contains his works is the best of guide-books, not indeed to noted spots, legendary or famed for beauty,—but to the manners, the moral soul, and the heart of the Scotch people. Burns is emphatically the most national of poets.

  Those who hold that poetry should move in a realm apart from the actual world find little to enchant or interest them in Burns, for it was with the actual world alone that he sought to deal. The sphere of his observation was narrow in comparison with that of most great poets. The only class he knew thoroughly were the Scottish peasantry, a class born to a life of labour and anxiety, with few excitements to break the monotony of their toil. Burns had no wish to transform them into idyllic figures; he was content to take them as they were, and in their simple lives he found all the experiences which, when touched by imagination, move mankind to laughter or to tears.

	The Voice of a wondrous Seer!
	The voice of a soul that is strong!
	As true as Love, and as swift as Fear
	In the mazes of marvellous song.
	Far over the mountains bare,
	Red heather, and ridges of sea,
	It flows in the pulse of the living air,
	And throbs in the veins of the free.
	It whispers in Summer’s breath,
	It lisps on the creamy shore,
	It sings in the lips that smile at death,
	In the storm and cataract’s roar.
	It murmurs in brae and birk,
	It pleads in the daisy’s eye,
	Where hands are toughened by honest work,
	And bairns in their cradles lie;
	In cottage, in kirk, and bower,
	In hall, in court, and in mart,
	In the chirp of the mavis, and hawthorn flower,
	And the maiden’s simple heart.
	It croons in the blaze of the inn,
	Where the droughty neighbors bide,
	It shrieks in the ghastly glare and din,
	Where the witches dance and ride.
	Its mirth is a tempest of glee,
	Its grief is the smart of fire,
	Its solemn strain is the trump of the sea,
	Its chorus the world’s desire!
	I listen, and brooklet and wold,
	Wild bird and the darkling wood
	And breathing secrets before untold
	Of the perfect and passionless Good.

  The one immortal bard of humanity.

	To-night amid Canadian snows,
	In lordly hall and cottage home,
	Where’er the blood of Scotsmen flows,
	Where’er the feet of Scotsmen roam;
	One name upon the lips grows sweet,
	More rich than wine from purple urns,
	With thrill electric flashing fleet,
	The name of ROBERT BURNS.

  The love poetry of Burns affords an abundant exemplification of nearly all the known devices peculiar to the theme. Consisting of short effusions, mainly songs, it almost entirely excludes plot-interest; occasionally there is a slight use of narrative, as in “The Soldier’s Return” and “There was a lass and she was fair.” In regard to description of the object of love, Burns usually depends on a few unsystematic touches, expressive of the emotion excited. Sometimes, however, he does enter on a regular enumeration of the qualities that charm; but his method even then is rather to elevate the object by comparisons, both figurative and literal, than to give any distinct impression of the personal appearance.

  In respect of genius, I think it is now universally admitted that our Ayrshire bard has gained for himself, by the number, the variety, and the brilliancy of his productions, a place in the first rank of the great singers of the intellectual world,—Pindar, Chaucer, Horace, Hafiz, Goethe, Béranger, Moore, and if there be any others who enjoy an equally wide recognition…. If ever there was a song-writer who could say with the most catholic comprehensiveness in the words of the old comedian, “I am a man, and all things human are kin to me,” it was Robert Burns. In this respect he is the Shakespeare of lyric poetry…. If inferior to Coleridge in ideal speculation, to Wordsworth in harmonious contemplation, and to Southey in book-learning, in all that concerns living men and human life and human society he was extremely sharp-sighted and not only wise in penetrating to the inmost springs of human thought and sentiment, but in the judgment of conduct eminently shrewd and sagacious; gifted, in the highest degree, with that fundamental virtue of all sound Scotsmen, common-sense, without which great genius in full career is apt to lead a man astray from his surroundings, and make him most a stranger to that with which in common life he ought to be most familiar.

	[Song] drooped and fell, and one ’neath northern skies,
	With southern heart, who tilled his father’s field,
	Found Poesy a-dying, bade her rise
	And touch quick nature’s hem and go forth healed.
	On life’s broad plain the ploughman’s conquering share
	Upturned the fallow lands of truth anew,
	And o’er the formal garden’s trim parterre
	The peasant’s team a ruthless furrow drew.

  To Burns the very air was charged with poetry, and his heart responded to every appeal made to his imagination. He saw Nature with a clear and penetrating vision; his emotions and experiences were blended with the world about him, and in a single line a whole landscape flashes into view. Burns spoke of Nature without a touch of self-consciousness and with the intimacy of one born to the soil: he loved with infinite tenderness every living thing that made its home in the fields. His early familiarity with field and sky, the solitude that came with that intercourse, the sensitiveness of his imagination, and the passion of his nature gave his poetry a thrill and rapture born only of the deepest emotion. The commonest wild-flower, in the verse of this passionate singer, has its roots beside the fountain of tears, and not a leaf stirs or falls but its image is caught in the tumultuous sweep and current of life.

  It is for his service to Scotland in the matter of songs that we specially delight to honour him. It was he, more than all else put together, who made Scottish song the glorious thing that it is. Prior to Burns’s appearance on the stage of human existence what was the condition, Sir, of our national minstrelsy? We had a popular song-book polluted on every page. Such of the popular songs of the time—if you except a dozen or so, “The Flower o’ the Forest,” “Auld Robin Gray,” “Nae luck about the hoose,” “Logie o’ Buchan,” “Johnnie Cope,” “Maggie Lauder,” and “Down the burn, Davie,” and one or two more—such of them, I say, with these few exceptions, as were not tainted with vulgarity and vile innuendo, were the most puerile and feckless doggerel. Burns set himself to purify these old songs, and gave us a song-book which is like a human psalter by comparison. It is when we take up Ramsay’s “Evergreen” and the “Tea-Table Miscellany,” or Herd’s collection of old songs and ballads, and look at the original of “Dainty Davie,” “She rose and loot me in,” and “John Anderson my jo,” and some more that we discover the noble—the God’s work—which he performed. It is for the purification of these old songs, and for the hundred and more original gems which he added to our song-book, that we regard Robert Burns as a gift from the gods. It is for this that we can overlook so many of his faults and failings. It is for this that we delight to honour his memory—for this we are “a’ sae prood o’ Robin.”

  And the natural greatness of mind that prompted this ambition was not without special influences to keep the flame alive. Had Burns been educated as other local rhymers were, he might have remained, like them, content with local fame, ignorant of the great world outside, hungering for no applause beyond his own small circle, because he was unaware of anything more to be desired. But the education of Burns was different from that of other local rhymers, and had carried him to spiritual altitudes, the views from which were bounded by a much wider horizon. In common with all the other young men of the time, rich and poor, Burns had the advantage for a poet of living in a poetical atmosphere; but he had the further special advantage of coming under personal influences that helped powerfully to give his work the quality of greatness.

  The collective poems of Robert Burns have been reprinted on a great number of occasions, and in every variety of form. It is calculated that by the end of 1816 no less than 22 editions had appeared in London, 19 in Edinburgh, 16 in the United States, 4 in Dublin, 4 in Belfast, 3 in Glasgow, 2 in Berwick-upon-Tweed, 1 at Kilmarnock, 1 at Paisley, and 9 in other towns scattered about England and Scotland. The original edition appeared at Kilmarnock in 1786, and for eighty-four years from that date, say up to 1870, only two years are recorded (1791 and 1795), in which at least one edition of Burns’ works was not published. This record of continuous publication is only surpassed in the case of three other books, viz., the Bible, the works of Shakespeare, and the “De Imitatione Christi.”… The most extensive collection of Burnsiana in existence is probably that in the museum at Kay Park, Kilmarnock. It consists of nearly 1000 volumes, a large proportion of which comprise various editions of the poet’s works published in the United Kingdom, and the remainder of books touching on his life or writing or the scenes with which he was associated…. In March, 1888, at the sale of the second portion of the extensive library of the late Mr. Gibson-Craig, a good copy of the Kilmarnock edition of “Poems chiefly in the Scottish Dialect,” sold for £111, and on another occasion a rebound copy brought £86.

	Not his the light of Shakespeare’s line,
	Nor Milton’s massive splendour;
	But Scotland rich in Auld Langsyne
	Needs naething mair to mend her.
	And while a “Daisy” decks the soil,
	And while a wrang needs rightin’,
	The rough, strong-hearted sons of toil,
	Shall still his songs delight in.

  It has been the common responsibility of his biographers to point out how differently he might have lived, how much more wisely he might have ordered his days. More wisely, perhaps, but not so well. There is a diviner economy in these things than we have come to allow.

  There is perhaps only one poet of real power who ever has been in modern times popular,—Robert Burns.

	John Barleycorn
	Prepared his sweetest rose and sharpest thorn;
	The witches set their heads and hoofs to work,
	To hunt O’Shanter from the ancient kirk;
	The hills began to put themselves in tune
	To voice the care that lurked in “Bonnie Doon”;
	The world would soon a world of love enshrine
	Within the golden bars of “Auld Lang Syne”;
	The cotter’s home produced its greatest grief,
	But fame and glory, far beyond belief—
	When Burns was born!

  All the same, this disability weighs me down with a sense of hopeless obtuseness when I consider the deportment of the average intelligent Scot at a Burns banquet, or a Burns conversazione, or a Burns festival, or the unveiling of a Burns statue, or the putting up of a pillar on some spot made famous by Burns. All over the world—and all under it, too, when their time comes—Scotsmen are preparing after-dinner speeches about Burns. The great globe swings round out of the sun into the dark; there is always midnight somewhere; and always in this shifting region the eye of imagination sees orators gesticulating over Burns; companies of heated exiles with crossed arms shouting “Auld Lang Syne;” lesser groups—if haply they be lesser—reposing under tables, still in honour of Burns. And as the vast continents sweep “eastering out of the high shadow which reaches beyond the moon,” and as new nations, with their cities and villages, their mountains and seashores, rise up on the morning-side, lo! fresh troops, and still fresh troops, and yet again fresh troops, wend or are carried out of action with the dawn. None but a churl would wish this enthusiasm abated. But why is it all lavished on Burns? That is what gravels the Southron. Why Burns? Why not Sir Walter? Had I the honor to be a fellow-countryman of Scott, and had I command of the racial tom-tom, it seems to me that I would tune upon it in honor of that great man until I dropped.

  A man of Burns’s temperament, born in the middle of that (the 18th) century, was almost bound to combine rationalism in theology with a genuine religious sentiment. It is unnecessary to search very particularly in his actual theological environment for the origins of his religion. He had the same bias in reasoning—towards materialism, empiricism, “common-sense,”—as most of the leading intellect of the age…. It would be a mistake to try to trace any very close connection between the thought of Burns, so far it was dogmatic, and the doctrines held by the New Light ministers who took the young farmer by the hand, and eulogised the satires which he wrote for their side. The doctrine spread by Auld, Russell and their kind disgusted him; but his polemic against them was purely negative and destructive…. The consciousness of the living presence of God in nature was always stronger in him than any theory of redemption. An intellectual sceptic, he was not really interested in theological dogma, though moral and emotional causes preserved in him certain relics of more or less inter-dependant doctrines.

  Rare as was the poetic gift of Burns, and unique in their quality of pure elemental passion as were his bursts of song, the poet himself has no place in what is mainly a history of influences and tendencies. Writing as he did—so long at least as he wrote poetry and not somewhat inferior verse—in the Lowland Scottish vernacular, he naturally could not contribute anything directly to the development of English poetic literature. Nor does it even appear that he directly influenced those who were the main contributors to this work.

  His ideas are—to use the rough old Lockian division—ideas of sensation, not of reflection; and when he goes beyond them he is sensible, healthy, respectable, but not deep or high. In his own range there are few depths or heights to which he has not soared or plunged…. In the expression of the triumph and despair of love, not sicklied over with any thought as inmost modern poets, only Catullus and Sappho can touch Burns.

  Always a poet, he was more, much more than a poet. He was a student of man,—of all sorts of men; caring much, as a student, for the baser sort which reveled in Poosie Nansie’s dram-shop, and which he celebrated in “The Jolly Beggars;” but caring more as a man, for the better sort which languished in huts where poor men lodged, and which he was the voice of lamentation in “Man was Made to Mourn.” He was a student of manners, which he painted with a sure hand, his masterpiece being that reverential reproduction of the family life at Lochlea “The Cotter’s Saturday Night.” He was a student of nature,—his love of which was conspicuous in his poetry, flushing his words with picturesque phrases and flooding his lines with the feeling of outdoor life. He was a student of animal life,—a lover of horses and dogs, observant of their habits and careful of their comfort. He felt for the little mouse which his plowshare turned out of its nest, and he pitied the poor hare which the unskillful fowler could only wound. The commoners of the earth and air were dear to him; and the flower besides his path, the gowan wet with dew, was precious in his eyes. His heart was large, his mind was comprehensive, and his temper singularly sweet and sunny.

  Burns is one of the Immortals. What a fortunate thing for us that he was not educated, let us say at Eton and Balliol! There are many of Burns’s poems (humorous and pathetic) which are superb.

  Other poets may be the favourites of a class or a clique; Burns is the favorite of the whole world. The secret of this universal favor is to be found in the fact that he was born in a lowly condition of life, close to our mother earth, and gave utterance to the rudimentary sentiments, the abiding sorrows, and the constant yearnings of human nature.

  In his love songs we hear again, even more simply, more directly the same natural music which in the age of Elizabeth enchanted the world…. It was the strength of his passions and the weakness of his moral will which made his poetry and spoilt his life.

  I come here as a loyal burgess of Dumfries to do honour to the greatest burgess of Dumfries…. Mankind owes him a general debt. But the debt of Scotland is special. For Burns exalted our race, he hallowed Scotland and the Scottish tongue. Before his time we had for a long period been scarcely recognised, we had been falling out of the recollection of the world. From the time of the union of the Crowns, and still more from the time of the legislative union, Scotland has lapsed into obscurity. Except for an occasional riot or a Jacobite rising, her existence was almost forgotten. She had, indeed, her Robertsons and her Humes writing history to general admiration, but no trace of Scottish authorship was discoverable in their works; indeed, every flavour of national idiom was carefully excluded. The Scottish dialect, as Burns called it, was in danger of perishing. Burns seemed at this juncture to start to his feet and re-assert Scotland’s claim to national existence; his Scottish notes rang through the world, and he thus preserved the Scottish language forever; for mankind will never allow to die that idiom in which his songs and poems are enshrined. That is a part of Scotland’s debt to Burns.

  No poet, probably, excepting Shakespeare, ever owed more than Burns to the suggestions of predecessors in his art. Hardly, indeed, is there anything in his work, down even to details, for which the example is not to be found in the pages of some earlier Scottish poet—Dunbar, Lyndsay, Semple, Ramsay, Fergusson, and countless unnamed song and ballad writers. With the works of all these he was closely familiar. At the same time no poet, excepting Shakespeare, ever proved himself so capable of transmuting the rude ore of earlier suggestion into the fine gold of immortal song. It is difficult at the present day, when all its effects are a common possession, to appreciate the native strength and originality of Burns’s work. This, however, may be ventured, that what the Revolution at that time did for France at a cost of untold horror and streams of blood, the poetry of Burns did for Scotland. Who will reckon the clearing of the air that has been made, the shams and affectations and cruel tyrannies that have been killed, and the courage and stamina which have been built into the nation’s character by a single poem like “Scots wha ha’e” or “A man’s a man for a’ that”?

	The daisy by his ploughshare cleft,
	The lips of women loved and left,
	The griefs and joys that weave the weft
	Of human time,
	With craftsman’s cunning, keen and deft,
	He carved in rhyme.
	*        *        *        *        *
	But never, since bright earth was born
	In rapture of the enkindling morn,
	Might godlike wrath and sunlike scorn
	That was and is
	And shall be while false weeds are worn
	Find word like his.
	Above the rude and radiant earth
	That heaves and glows from firth to firth
	In vale and mountain, bright in dearth
	And warm in wealth,
	Which gave his fiery glory birth
	By chance and stealth,
	Above the storms of praise and blame
	That blur with mist his lustrous name,
	His thunderous laughter went and came,
	And lives and flies;
	The roar that follows on the flame
	When lightning dies.
	Earth, and the snow-dimmed heights of air,
	And water winding soft and fair
	Through still sweet places, bright and bare,
	By bent and byre,
	Taught him what hearts within them were:
	But his was fire.

  By virtue of his ardent and undisciplined temperament, by his peasant origin and his experience of the sufferings of the poor, by that pride of manhood and of genius which made him feel himself an equal of prince or peer, by the zeal of his humanitarian sympathies, by his sentimental Jacobitism and his imaginative enthusiasm for the traditions of Scottish independence, by the fact that he belonged to the democratic Presbyterian Church and sympathized with the party of spiritual revolt, Burns was fitted to be a spokesman of the passions of the time.

  Not only does he take whatever the Vernacular School can give in such matters as tone, sentiment, method, diction phrase; but also, he is content to run in debt to it for suggestions as regards ideas and for models in style…. It was fortunate for him and for his book, as it was fortunate for the world at large—as, too, it was afterwards to be fortunate for Scots song—that he was thus imitative in kind and thus traditional in practice. He had the sole ear of the Vernacular Muse; there was not a tool in her budget of which he was not master; and he took his place, the moment he moved for it, not so much, perhaps, by reason of his uncommon capacity as, because he discovered himself to his public in the very terms—of diction form, style, sentiment even—with which that public was familiar from of old, and in which it was waiting and longing to be addressed.

  Burns rides the ways of literature hedged by a numerous and terrible guard of devoted Scots, and if any hat is not doffed as he passes the irreverent offender is a marked man. Who dares lay hands on a poet guarded by a nation?… Burns, like Homer, is not merely a poet, but a literature. He has succeeded in fulfilling the old savage ideal—he has eaten up all his predecessors, and become possessed of their united powers. It is useless to haggle over much about what he borrowed: one can only envy the gigantic luck of his chance. Such vamps as the one I have analysed from Mr. Henley’s notes can only be credited to him as brilliant luck brilliantly used. But the pieces I enumerated of the third class proved that he could write charming songs without such luck; though I think, on the whole, they prove that he wrote still better when he borrowed…. Taking him, borrowings and all, the merit of his songs lies in the partly dramatic kind; they display, vividly and pictorially, the life of a whole peasantry, as it has not been displayed in English literature.

  No poet, not even Shakespeare, has been so minutely, lovingly studied as Burns.

  A stranger freak of burgess criticism is every-day fare in the odd world peopled by the biographers of Robert Burns. The nature of Burns, one would think, was simplicity itself; it could hardly puzzle a ploughman, and two sailors out of three would call him brother. But he lit up the whole of that nature by his marvellous genius for expression, and grave personages have been occupied ever since in discussing the dualism of his character, and professing to find some dark mystery in the existence of this, that, or the other trait—a love of pleasure, a hatred of shams, a deep sense of religion. It is common human nature, after all, that is the mystery, but they seem never to have met with it, and treat it as if it were the poet’s eccentricity. They are all agog to worship him, and when they have made an image of him in their own likeness, and given it a tin-pot head that exactly hits their taste, they break into noisy lamentation over the discovery that the original was human, and had feet of clay. They deem “Mary in Heaven” so admirable that they could find it in their hearts to regret that she was ever on earth.

  It is of importance that we recognize the fact that in Burns the two literary estates, English and Scottish, were united. Until his time there was a sharp distinction between Scottish and English literature; but after him the literature of the two countries became one, both in nature and in name. This was but natural, when we consider that something of the original impulse which moved Burns’s genius was English. When the riches of this noble Scottish house, and of that sister house of Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton, awaited union in a royal heir, there came a peasant lad from the “auld clay biggin’” in Ayrshire, who, with the simple and graceful dignity of one of nature’s noblemen, claimed his own, and there was added a new hereditary peer to the House of Fame.

  Burns.—The most amazing price ever realised for a modern book was that of £572 for “Poems chiefly in the Scottish dialect. By Robert Burns. Kilmarnock, 1786.” The original price of this octavo volume was three shillings. The history of the very fine copy sold in Edinburgh in February 1898 is traced back about eighty years by a writer in Literature. In 1870 it was sold for six guineas to G. B. Simpson, of Dundee, who sold it in 1879, with some other books, to A. C. Lamb for £124. The price of the Kilmarnock Burns has steadily advanced from £3, 10s. in 1858 to £111 in 1888, and then it made the immense leap to £572.

  In his relation to Nature there was this great difference between Burns and his literary contemporaries and immediate predecessors, that whereas even the best of them wrote rather as pleased spectators of the country, with all its infinite variety of form and colour, of life and sound, of calm and storm, he sang as one into whose very inmost heart the power of these things had entered. For the first time in English literature the burning ardour of a passionate soul went out in tumultuous joy towards Nature. The hills and woods, the streams and dells were to Burns not merely enjoyable scenes to be visited and described. They became part of his very being. In their changeful aspects he found the counterpart of his own variable moods; they ministered to his joys, they soothed his sorrows. They yielded him a companionship that never palled, a sympathy that never failed. They kindled his poetic ardour, and became themselves the subjects of his song. He loved them with all the overpowering intensity of his affectionate nature, and his feelings found vent in an exuberance of appreciation which had never before been heard in verse.

  I venture to assume that I have advanced enough to vindicate my postulate, that throughout Fergusson’s poems saturated the mind, heart, imagination, affection, and memory, and imposed subjects and forms and elect words on Robert Burns. That, when all is said, Robert Burns still stands by head and shoulders above Robert Fergusson and beyond all possible comparison Scotland’s supremest singer; that his was the larger, stronger soul, the richer imagination, the more inspired utterance, the more seeing eyes, the broader intellect, does not alter the fact of wide, deep, and pervasive obligations to his precursor. Mentally as physically he was stalwart where Fergusson was fragile; he was dowered with immeasurable resources where Fergusson was soon exhausted; he was master of all moods and passions where Fergusson was only their victim; he was possessor of Elisha’s wished-for “double portion” of poetic inspiration where Fergusson was at best fitfully and briefly fired and inspired. But with every limitation of genius and range, it abides that it was a happy day for Robert Burns, and a still happier day for the immortal in Scottish poetry, whereon he fell in with Robert Fergusson’s volume of 1773–79.

  When the tom-tit patronises the eagle, one realises how small the little bird is. But though Burns is gone, his immortal poems live and burn themselves into our heart of hearts. When we feel disgusted with the little peddling thoughts of little people; when we feel sick to the soul of the conventional cant of the time, of the false gods in art and literature and music; we should turn for inspiration to the glowing rapture, the blazing patriotism, the all-conquering humour, and the biting wit and overwhelming irony of Robert Burns. The glorious fire of that mighty genius will warm the coldest heart.

  The very high rank of Burns depends, in great part, on the fact that he could command a wider range of emotion than most lyrists; humour in almost all its varieties save the cynical, pathos in several forms, love when young and passionate, personal independence and the competence of the individual, patriotism—Burns has sung them all.

  The genius of Burns was breathing into the Scottish Muse a fire and a vigour that were to be the harbingers of new feelings and new impulses far beyond her borders.