interspersing it with such specimens of his genius as will enable the reader both to know the man, and judge for himself of his merits as an author. Those who are already masters of his poems will not be unwilling to read short selections from them again. Those to whom they are new, will assuredly be grateful for the opportunity of making their acquaintance.

Many years ago, in the good old days of fast coaches and dusty roads, I was fortunate enough to sit on the box, next the well-known and highly respected Mr. Fawlkner, the driver of the "Rocket" from Portsmouth to London. When we were fairly in a trot, he began the conversation by telling us that "he and about forty others had been celebrating Bobby's birthday the night before." I inquired who "Bobby" was; and he said, "Burns, sir; Robert Burns the poet." And all the way through Petersfield, and all the way to Guildford, and all the way to Hatchett's, in Piccadilly, Mr. Fawlkner and I spoke, quoted, criticised, and admired Robert Burns. Now this is real fame. Here was an English coachman (who, by the by, never travelled without an edition of his favourite poet in the pocket of the coach) engaged with forty tradesmen, shipowners, and other gentlemen, in the far south, in the busy port of Portsmouth, doing honour to the memory of the most tho

roughly national of all Scotch poets, nearly fifty years after his death, and not a Scotchman (for I asked the question) among them all. The natives of Scotland, he said, resident or visiting at Portsmouth, celebrated the event in a different hotel. I know nothing like this, except in the universal appreciation of Shakspeare; but perhaps that name will help us to the cause of this extra-national, this unlimited sympathy with Burns. Though he wrote in a provincial dialect, he appealed, like Shakspeare, to the universal heart. He described nature-the field, the flower, the river; enriching them with the emotions they excited in a warm and impulsive disposition; and who could be provincial in spirit, however local his language might be, when he struck upon the great chords that vibrate in every human bosom, telling of love, and hope, and youth, the sanctities of a quiet, religious home, as in the "Cotter's Saturday Night," the softening uses of adversity, as in his address to the mouse turned up by the plough? But the charm of Burns is different from that of Shakspeare in this respect, that while Shakspeare is so myriad-minded and so many-formed that he almost ceases to be an individual, there never was so true, so total, so entire a man as Burns. Never was a human being so strong in individual existence, giving us glimpses into a

real mind, and standing before us as clear, personal, and unmistakeable as the most intimate of our friends.

One day it was the 25th of January, 1759 -there raged a great storm over the valley of the Doon, in Ayrshire, and, among other evidences of its power, blew down the gable end of a rough, mud-walled cottage near the river, and put the inhabitants into great alarm. No wonder; for a baby had been born that day, and when the wall fell in, the mother and child had to be carried to the nearest hut, and there Robert Burns spent his first night. His father had been a gardener in one of the northern counties, and a year or two before this time had settled in the west, building the cottage with his own hands, and, renting a small piece of ground, had turned it into a nursery garden, and fought his way as well as he could. A venerable man, though working for his daily bread; a stern disciplinarian, and deep in all the mysteries of the theology of his persuasion, but softened and ennobled by a conscientiousness and affection which endeared him to his children, even when he held them most strictly under his authority. In addition to Robert of the stormy birth, his family soon consisted of two sons and three daughters; and the tenderer disposition of his wife worked its usual effect, and influenced

the family character far more powerfully than the stern and strong-minded father. From her and the nurse who helped her they heard endless songs and anecdotes; the ballads of the haunted neighbourhood where they lived, and the wild traditions of the past. A haunted neighbourhood it was, for ghosts and goblins were nearly as common as geese. There were "brownies" to help the maids to clean up the parlour and keep alive the kitchen fire, and weird women and warlocks to promise power and fortune to their favourites; but there were also "kelpies," that lured the benighted traveller to the swollen ford, and drowned him in the flood, and witches, casting an evil eye on an enemy, till he pined, and sickened, and refused his food, and died without any apparent disease. Then there were ill-conditioned elves, that turned the milk sour, and got the dairymaid scolded or sent away; and hideously ill-natured imps, who mislaid everything, so that the housewife never could find her keys when she wanted them; who put everything in its wrong place-the farmer's hat in the stable, the mistress's stocking on the roof of the byre, and on one occasion ventured so far as to steal the minister's sermon and supply its place with a pack of cards, so that when the worthy man mounted his pulpit to give out the text, he turned over the knave of clubs.

All these stories were repeated, and in the ductile heart of childhood implicitly received. So Robert grew up, surrounded by the superearthly and uncanny. He saw lights in the darkest nights in the ruined windows of Alloway Kirk, hereafter to be immortalized and seen by many thousand eyes in the poem of "Tam o' Shanter." He heard voices in churchyards, which he afterwards recorded in a "Dialogue between Death and Dr. Hornbook." Nor, when he approached manhood, were other influences wanting. There were witches who worked with him in harvest time in cutting down the corn; but it was remarked that the witches on these occasions were generally very good-looking, and to ordinary eyes appeared country lasses about seventeen or eighteen years old. But witches or not, the days of gramarie were soon to end. After helping his father in the work of the small farm he held still " on the banks and braes o' bonnie Doon," and feeding his mind with a miscellaneous feast of all the books he could collect or borrow, he was sent to the neighbouring town of Irvine, to learn the trade of a flaxdresser, or, as he calls it, a "heckler." This was in 1781, and Robert was twenty-two years old. You would think perhaps that the son of parents so poor, condemned to such rustic and unintellectual employment, would write a poorish sort of