Introductory Biography.

As suddenly as though he had grasped it at a single bound, Burns, less than a hundred years ago, Prometheus-like, sprang to the possession of a glory of which he can never now be deprived, that of being at once recognized, alike by peer and peasant, as the great National Poet of Scotland. His reputation, achieved upon the instant of his first appearance, and since then only confirmed and consolidated, was, and is, and always will be, distinctly that of the National Poet, as Scott's a few years afterwards became that of the Dominant Genius of Scotland: precisely as Goethe is known to all Europe as the pre-eminent Genius, but Schiller as essentially the supreme Lyrical and National Poet of Germany.

ROBERT BURNS, the eldest of seven children, was born on the 25th of January, 1759, under the thatched roof of a little cottage situated about two miles to the south of Ayr, within a very short distance from Alloway Kirk and the Auld Brig of Doon, localities both of them immortalized within less than thirty years afterwards by the then infant, in his famous poem of "Tam o' Shanter." The humble birthplace is still carefully preserved, being used, to this day, as it has long been, as a little country alehouse, and for half a century has been an object of pilgrimage for travellers, drawn thither from the extremities of both hemispheres. It is a tenement of the very lowliest description, the merest "clay biggin," consisting only, in country parlance, of a but and a ben, otherwise of a diminutive common house-room or kitchen, with an equally small inner parlour, just perhaps a shade better in its appointments. So peculiarly frail and primitive was the structure, within which the future Bard of Caledonia first drew breath, that when he was not yet ten days old, one boisterous morning in February, a portion of the gable collapsing, the child and his mother had to be conveyed through the storm to a neighbour's dwelling, where they remained for a week together, until their own dilapidated cabin was again rendered habitable. The father, who was a gardener by occupation, had been his own architect, and, as the incident just mentioned served only too plainly to show, was as little skilled in building up a hovel as he throughout unhappily proved to be unskilled when he essayed to become the architect of his own fortunes. A peasant in his origin, descended as he was from a race of small farmers, he could nevertheless trace back his progenitors during a period of nearly two centuries. The seventeenth century had hardly begun when the first of

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way, as will be seen a little later on, associated with the growth of his powers and the dawn of his reputation.

There can be hardly any doubt whatever that it was from his father that the Poet inherited his vigorous intelligence and his melancholy temperament, or that it was from his mother he derived, just as unmistakably, his joyous bursts of vivacity and his exquisite sense of the ridiculous. The father passed away before a line of Burns had been published, the mother, on the contrary, survived until her eighty-eighth year, when her famous son had been nearly a quarter of a century in his grave, having long assumed his place, by right, among the recognized classics of our literature. Agnes Burness, the mother, at the time of the Poet's boyhood, was remarkable, we are told, for a well-proportioned comely figure of the ordinary height, for the loveliest red and white complexion, for the darkest eyes and the deepest ruddy hair and eyebrows. William Burness, the father, on the other hand, was thin and sinewy, some five feet eight or nine inches in stature, slightly bent with toil, his locks prematurely scant and grizzled, his complexion swarthy and saturnine. If their eldest born may be presumed to have drawn intellectually from the father his strong manly sense, and physically, his dark swarthy complexion, while the mother may be credited with having given him his intense predilection for ballad lore and his delight in lilting lyrics, it has been admirably well said, by an apt quotation with reference to his genius, that "the light that led astray was light from heaven!" Though his birthplace was little better than a hovel, Robert's education was cared for betimes. When a little creature of six he was daily sent to school a mile off, at Alloway Mill, where a Mr. Campbell presided over the slate and hornbook as his pedagogue. It happened, however, that when he had been only a few months under the guidance of this teacher the latter was removed elsewhere. Resolutely bent upon arranging promptly in some other way for his children's tuition, the honest gardener of Alloway entered into a compact with five of his neighbours, by means of which the services of an intelligent stripling of eighteen, one John Murdoch, were secured for a certain small stipend quarterly, the teacher passing from house to house in succession and at preconcerted intervals. Heartened by this exceptional arrangement to a renewed effort to acquire betimes the rudiments of knowledge, Robert, and with him Gilbert, his junior by nearly a twelvemonth, began to study with such zest under Mr. Murdoch that they soon mastered the difficulties of reading and writing, and later on got thoroughly well grounded in English grammar.

It is whimsical now to remember that, according to the tutor's own account of his pupils, the younger one seemed to be not only the more engaging of the two, but the brighter in every way intellectually-the elder being silent for the most part, in some respects appearing decidedly stupid, and on the whole wearing a serious and sombre countenance. A threefold light has been since then thrown upon the little household. Robert, in his autobiographical epistle addressed to the author of "Zeluco," revealed it to the world's observation in the first place, as upon the disc of a camera obscura; Gilbert and Murdoch, each in turn afterwards, bringing the homely group and its surroundings more and more distinctly to view, as by the

these of whom there is any record, one Walter Campbell by name, finding himself driven by political exigencies out of his native Argyleshire, settled down in the parish of Glenbervie, in Kincardineshire, and in so settling down took by way of blind the name of Burness or Burnhouse. His son Walter, who owned the farm of Bogjoran, had four sons, the third of whom was James Burness, born in 1656, and who died in 1743, at the age of eighty-seven, tenant of the farm of Brawlinmuir. It was his third son-the third son of a third son-who was Robert Burness, the Poet's grandfather. And it was the younger of his two sons, William Burness, the gardener of Alloway, whose privilege it was to be the father of the Poet of Scotland. At nineteen William, in company with his elder brother Robert, had gone south from Glenbervie in search of employment, their father, who had been out for the Pretender in the '45, having lost his farm through troubles consequent upon the Rebellion. William, having first of all vainly endeavoured to establish himself as a gardener in Edinburgh, later on drifted westwards into Ayrshire. There, for a couple of years, he laboured, with spade and rake and hoe, on the estate of the Laird of Fairly, and afterwards, in the same way, on that of the Laird of Crawford, of Doonside. Steadily plodding on after this fashion, he at length ventured to take a lease of seven acres from Dr. Campbell, a physician of Ayr, and on the ground thus brought under his immediate control started afresh in life as a public gardener and nurseryman.

Scarcely any opportunity, however, as it happened, was afforded him of evidencing whatever skill he might have possessed in the management of a nursery, seeing that but very shortly, indeed, after he had embarked upon the enterprise, he was engaged once more as a private gardener and overseer-this time to a neighbouring landowner, one Provost Ferguson of Doonholm. Such, in fact, was his lowly occupation and his simple mode of life at the very time when, under his obscure roof-beams, the child was born to him whose possession of the incommunicable gift of genius was to render himself and his surroundings thenceforth and in perpetuity illustrious.

William Burness, the Poet's father, born at Clockenhill, in Kincardine, on the 11th of November, 1721, had, on the 15th of December, 1757, upon the morrow of the completion of his thirty-sixth year, married Agnes Brown, then in her twenty-fifth year (she having been born in the Carrick district of Ayishire on the 17th of March, 1732), the daughter of Gilbert Brown, a small farmer of Kirkoswald. The honest gardener of Alloway was not merely, according to Biddy's description of Jo in "Great Expectations," "a worthy, worthy man," he was not merely a man of sterling excellence, he was intrinsically one of the noblest and loftiest character. With his own hands he had constructed the clay tenement to which he brought home his wife on the day of their nuptials. There for nine years together they lived, though with exceeding thrift, most happily. There four of their seven children first drew breath. Robert, whose glory has reflected light upon them all, was the eldest. He had three brothers, Gilbert, William, and John, and three sisters, Agnes, Arabella, and Isabel, the eldest of his brothers and the youngest of his sisters being alone in any distinct