flowed in the veins of his red-haired mother, who made his very cradle the nursery of song; who crooned Scotland's melodies in his ears, while as yet he was an infant. If he revered noble manhood, he saw it illustrated as Carlyle himself did, in a father, of whom Scotland might well be proud if he had been her only product; who was alike at home at the plowtail and as a king and priest unto God at the family altar. If he despised cant and hypocrisy; if he ridiculed and travestied his contemporaries, who, like the sons of Eli, called themselves God's elect, and acted as though they were reprobates-desecrated sacred things; it was because the scourge of small cords had been put into the hands of his genius, by the glaring inconsistencies of church officials around him.

Nearly all of Burns' compositions have a local habitation and a name.

What is now called the land of

Burns is full of memorials of him; his name is written from one end of it to the other. Where he was born, and where he died; the farms he cultivated; the churches he attended; his convivial haunts; the Bible he gave his 'Highland Mary'; that lock of golden hair clipped on that holy Sunday of parting; Tam O'Shan

ter's drinking cup; the kirk where he saw the witches dance; the fields, where he plowed up the mouse's nest; the "wee, modest, crimson-tipped" daisy; the very farm-yard, where, on the straw, he composed "To Mary in Heaven"; these make the whole region redolent of the man; of his genius, his wild pranks, his follies, his untimely exit from life. Nature and life there furnished him all his materials. The little horizon which encircled him in Ayrshire, embraced all his heroes and heroines. He had no

kingdom for a stage, princes to act,

And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!"

It was peasants, and peasant-life, which he depicted. His ashes rest in Dumfries' Kirkyard, and the centuries move on their silent course. But, Carlyle has done a master-workman's work for him. They never can move the heart of man away from that sacred shrine. His footsteps still echo there; his singing robes still trail among the daisies. Ayr, gurgling along its pebbled bed, will always go seaward, talking to itself day and night, as the half-witted talk; daft with grief for the loss of the poet with his faculty divine, who once trod its banks. Sweet Afton will always mingle his name with its musical murmurs. The

stock-dove, the lapwing, the mavis, the laverock; he has laid imposts upon them all, that so long as they tune their voices in song, his name shall never be forgotten. The primrose shall bloom for him, the bluebell and the gowan. The sweet-scented birks, the hazels, the heather, ah! he has written his name upon them all: Robert Burns, Poet. Does the hot blood leap in men's veins, as they make their first stand for freedom, they call for

"Scots wha hae wi' Wallace bled!"

Do the oppressed and downtrodden think of mankind as God made it and would have it to be, they chant their way to deliverance with the words

"A man's a man for a' that!"

There is not a joy of man's youth, that he has not caught the tint of it and put it down in his peasant water-colors. There is not a note of life's merriment which he has not echoed. There is not a human grief of which he has not chanted the refrain. If you want a transcript of beautiful home-life; if you want to see man's nature in its loveliest guise; if you want to see a picture of filial piety, parental affection, youthful love, patient industry, and true religion all in

A

one, a tout ensemble upon which angels might pause to smile, go to the pages of Robert Burns. The Cotter's Saturday Night stands there like a monumental temple, a mausoleum erected by filial hands to the memory of a household circle, the members of which have been translated. And the Jolly Beggars, Tam O'Shanter and the Holy Fair, are transcripts of another kind of life, no less real, perhaps even more so -around him.

But, there is no outward reproduction and restoration of Shakespeare, through an interpreter, as Carlyle has given of Burns. Though we know that he was born in Stratford-on-Avon, we know not the precise day of his birth. And between the date of his baptism, April 26, 1564, and the probable date of his marriage with Anne Hathaway—who had caught him by her womanly wiles-something after November 28, 1582, when he had just passed his 18th year, there is not a single actual fact in his life that has been ascertained. That he was rashly, if not unequally, yoked in marriage; and this, after a youth as wild and rollicking, if not as disastrous, as that of Burns, is probable. That he did not live much at home; and that

his wife and his business may have united to give him a good excuse for this; that he spent his years mostly in the great London, where men make no marks that are left behind them, seethe awhile as in a whirlpool of being, and are not; did his work for a livelihood as unconsciously as though he had been a man set to binding old books, or cobbling old shoes, instead of remodeling old dramas; this seems, also, true That, without any technical education or profession, he attained a kind of proficiency in all knowledge and every manner of life, drawing all things to himself and his art, as by some instinct; at home in every character in every pursuit ; seeing men and life in their distinctive aspects, and catching their salient points, as by a kind of intuition; that being of human life, he lived in a stratum above it, as though a philosophical looker-on rather than a participant in it; this, also, we infer. Much as he honored England, and his works are a monument to her, there is very little to locate him as belonging to any country, to any latitude, to any clime. What he says of England any other poet, a poet of any other nationality, might have said: