INTRODUCTION.

IN the character of Robert Burns there is much to love and to honor, and much to pity and to blame. His genius was recognized even during his life, and it made the Ayrshire farmer welcome in the highest Edinburgh society. But his social disposition, and the very love in which he was held among the people, led him into all kinds of excesses and dissipations.

William Burnes,1 the father of the poet, was an honest, hardworking farmer, of an intelligence superior to the average of his class. He was a man of strong religious convictions, and was held in the highest esteem and reverence by his son, who honors his memory in that beautiful picture of ideal domestic peasant life, "The Cotter's Saturday Night."

Robert Burns was born in 1759, in a humble two-roomed cottage on the banks of the Doon, near the town of Ayr

"Auld Ayr, wham ne'er a town surpasses,

For honest men and bonie lasses."

His mother, and an old woman named Janet Wilson, fed his youthful imagination with Scotch ballads and legends and an

1 The family name was so spelled until the publication of the poet's first volume in 1786.

inexhaustible store of tales of the marvelous and supernatural, all of which fired his fancy and lingered in his memory, to furnish material in later years for many of his best poems. William Wallace was the hero of his childhood, and his story poured a tide of Scottish prejudice into his veins, which, he said, would boil there till the flood gates of life shut in eternal rest.

The boy received the most meager education, attending school for a few months, sometimes for only a week, at a time. This instruction was supplemented by the teachings of his father at home, and by the reading of whatever books he could lay hands upon. Among these his favorites were a volume of the "Spectator," a life of Hannibal and one of Wallace, Locke "On the Human Understanding," Taylor's "Doctrine of Original Sin," Mackenzie's "Man of Feeling," and the poems of Milton, Shakespeare, Pope, Young, and Thomson.

His very childhood's life was one of toil, and by the time he was fifteen years of age he did the largest portion of the work on the farm. It was about this time that his first love affair inspired his first attempt at poetical expression, and he wrote the little song beginning:

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'Oh, once I lov'd a bonie lass."

From this time on, verse-making and love-making were his constant pleasure, his relaxation from drudgery. He said of himself: "My heart was completely tinder and was eternally lighted up by some goddess or other."

The hardships of the family ever increased; the wolf was always howling at the door; the death of the father, in 1784, was followed by losses of the crops. The miseries of the unceasing struggle for mere existence had their almost inevitable effect upon

the mind of the young man. dom of thought and action.

Relief was sought in extreme freeReligion became a mockery; sobri

ety gave way to debauchery and sensuality. The genius of the poet, however, shone with most brilliant luster during this period of the man's debasement. The years 1784-1786 were the great

creative years of his life. Taine, the French critic, whose sympathies are so much with Burns that he inclines to extenuate all his shortcomings, thus explains the poet's attitude toward the world: "By night in his cold little room, by day while whistling at the plow, he invented forms and ideas. We must think of this in order to understand his miseries and his revolt. We must think that the man in whom

these great ideas were stirring, threshed the corn, cleaned his cows, went out to dig turf, waded in the muddy snow, and dreaded to come home and find the bailiffs to carry him off to prison. We must think also that, with the ideas of a thinker, he had the delicacies and reveries of a poet."

Disgusted with all things, Burns determined to leave forever an unappreciative country and seek new fortunes in Jamaica. Hoping to raise funds to pay his passage, he issued a small volume of poems. "It was a delicious idea," he wrote, "that I should be called a clever fellow, even though it should never reach my ears, -a poor negro-driver, or perhaps a victim of that inhospitable clime, and gone to the world of spirits. I was pretty confident that my poems would meet with some applause; but at the worst, the roar of the Atlantic would deaden the voice of censure."

Some copies of this little volume found their way to Edinburgh, and, with impetuous change of plans, Burns decided to try his opportunities there. His ride to the capital was one triumphal

journey. He found himself famous. Crowds gathered at the farmhouse where he spent the night, and again where he stopped for breakfast, and where he lunched; and enthusiastic admirers greeted him all along the road. He spent two years in Edinburgh, the friend of the literary, the pet of society, the inspired and witty guest at the tables of the great. True to his creed, “A man's a man for a' that," the peasant poet bore himself with simple dignity in the company of his worldly superiors, never seeming in the least conscious of the unusual in his position among them.

In 1788 Burns returned to Ayrshire, where he married Jean Armour, and took up his farm life once more, earning an additional pittance from a government position as exciseman. The duties of this office exposed him more than ever to the temptations of conviviality. His biographer, Lockhart, says: "From the castle to the cottage, every door flew open at his approach; and the old system of hospitality rendered it difficult for the most soberly inclined guest to rise from any man's board in the same trim that he sat down to it. The farmer, if Burns was seen passing, left his reapers until he could persuade the bard that the day was hot enough to demand an extra libation. If he entered an inn at midnight, after all the inmates were in bed, the news of his arrival circulated from cellar to garret, and ere ten minutes had passed the landlord and all his guests were assembled round the fireside, the largest punch bowl was produced, and 'Be ours to-night- who knows what comes to-morrow,' was the language of every eye in the circle that welcomed him.”

The first four years of his married life were probably the happiest he had ever spent. His wife loved him with an unwavering devotion; his pecuniary circumstances were better than they