ROBERT BURNS.

OBERT BURNS was born on the 25th of January, 1759, in an humble cottage on the banks of the Doon, about two miles to the south of the town of Ayr. There was something romantic in an accident which befell him before he had concluded his first week's experience in the world. The frail abode in which he first saw the light, and which had been erected by the hands of his father, gave way at midnight, and the infant and his mother had to be conveyed through a storm to the shelter of a neighboring cottage.

The father of the poet, William Burness,-such was the original spelling of the name-was the son of a farmer in Kincardineshire, whence he removed at the age of nineteen, in consequence of the poverty of his family.

When the poet was a little over six years old, his father removed to the farm of Mount Oliphant, in the parish of Ayr, on which he was placed by the kindness of a Mr. Ferguson, to whom he had acted as gardener. The change, however, was not for the better. Mr. Ferguson died, and his affairs fell into the hands of a factor who treated Burness with great harshness.

On being driven from Mount Oliphant, Burness went with his family, about 1772, to Lochlea, in the parish of Tarbolton, and for a time succeeded better in the world. His sons were placed under the care of a teacher called Murdoch, who was engaged to instruct the children of the farmers at Lochlea. Murdoch has given a very interesting account of Robert Burns and his brother about this time. "Gilbert," he says, "always appeared to me to possess a more lively imagination, and to be far more 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. Robert's countenance was generally grave, and expressive, 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 boys, had been asked which of them was the most likely to court the Muses, he would never have guessed that Robert had a propensity of that kind."

Of himself at this period, Burns says: "I was by no means a favorite with anybody. I was a good deal noted for a retentive memory, a stubborn, sturdy something in my disposition, and an enthusiastic idiot piety. I say idiot piety, because I was then but a child. Though it cost the schoolmaster some thrashings, I made an excellent English scholar; and by the time I was ten or eleven years of age I was a critic in substantives, verbs, and participles.

"In my infant and boyish days, too, I owed much to an old woman who resided in the family, remarkable for her ignorance, credulity, and superstition. She had, I suppose, the largest collection in the country of tales and songs concerning devils, ghosts, fairies, brownies, witches, warlocks, spunkies, kelpies, elf-candles, dead-lights, wraiths, apparitions, cantraips, giants, enchanted towers, dragons, and other trumpery. This cultivated the latent seeds of poetry; but had so strong an effect on my imagination, that to this hour, in my nocturnal rambles, I sometimes keep a sharp look-out in suspicious places; and though nobody can be more skeptical than I am in such matters, yet it takes an effort of philosophy to shake off these idle terrors.

The earliest composition that I recollect taking pleasure in was The Vision of Mirsah, and a hymn of Addison's, beginning, How are Thy servants blest, O Lord! I particularly remember one half-stanza which was music to my boyish ears

For though on dreadful whirls we hung.

High on the broken wave--'

I met with these pieces in Mason's English Collection, one of my school-books.

"The first two books I ever read in private, and which gave me more pleasure than any two books I ever read since, were The Life of Hannibal, and The History of Sir William Wallace. Hannibal gave my young ideas such a turn, that I used to strut in raptures up and down after the recruiting drum and bagpipe, and wish myself tall enough to be a soldier; while the story of Wallace poured a Scottish prejudice into my veins, which will boil along there till the flood-gates of life shut in eternal rest."

Burns made his first attempt at verse-writing before he had reached his sixteenth year. It was inspired by his partner in the labors of the harvest, a bewitching creature a year younger than himself, "a bonnie, sweet, sonsie lass," whose charms he celebrated in the little ballad, "O once I loved a bonnie lass."

"Among her other love-inspiring qualities," says Burns, for we must give the incident in his own words, "she sang sweetly; and it was her favorite 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 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 shear sheep and cast peats, his father living in the moorlands, he had no more scholarcraft than myself. Thus with me began love and poetry."

In his seventeenth year he began to attend a country dancing school, and his doing so was in direct opposition to the wishes of his father, "My father," says Burns, "was subject to strong passions; from this instance of disobedience he took a sort of dislike to me, which I believe was one cause of the dissipation which marked my succeeding years. I say dissipation, comparatively with the strictness and sobriety and

regularity of Presbyterian country life; for though the will-o'the-wisp meteors of thoughtless whim were almost the sole lights of my path, yet early ingrained piety and virtue kept me for several years afterward within the line of innocence.

"The great misfortune of my life," he continues, “was to want an aim. I had felt early some stirrings of ambition, but they were the blind gropings of Homer's Cyclops round the walls of his cave. I saw my father's situation entailed on me perpetual labor. The only two openings by which I could enter the temple of Fortune was the gate of niggardly economy, or the path of little chicanery bargain-making. The first is so contracted an aperture, I could never squeeze myself into it; the last I always hated-there was contamination in the very entrance! Thus abandoned of aim or view in life, with a strong appetite for sociability, as well from native hilarity as from a pride of observation and remark; a constitutional melancholy or hypochondriasm that made me fly solitude; add to these incentives to social life my reputation for bookish knowledge, a certain wild logical talent, and a strength of thought something like the rudiments of good sense; and it will not seem surprising that I was generally a welcome guest where I visited, or any great wonder that, always where two or three met together, there was I among them. But far beyond all other impulses of my heart, was un penchant à l'adorable moitié du genre humain.

"My heart was completely tinder, and was eternally lighted up by some goddess or other; and as in every other warfare in this world, my fortune was various. Sometimes I was received with favor, and sometimes I was mortified with a repulse. At the plough, scythe, or reap hook, I feared no competitor, and thus I set absolute want at defiance; and as I never cared further for my labors than while I was in actual exercise, I spent the evenings in the way after my own heart.

"A country lad seldom carries on a love adventure without an assisting confidant. I possessed a curiosity, zeal and intrepid dexterity that recommended me as a proper second on these occasions; and I dare say I felt as much pleasure in being in