Nae mair the rainbow can impart Whase pencil wrought its freaks at will Nae mair through straths in simmer dight And fool the tints that Nature chose 'Mang men, wae's heart! we aften find In vain thro' woods you sair may ban 9 In window hung, how aft we see Like Tantalus they hing you here Ah, Liberty thou bonny dame, And herd lowns 2 louping o'er the grass, 4 Than paughty damsels bred at courts, Wha thraw their mou's and take the dorts"; 6 But, reft of thee, fient flee we care For a' that life ahint can spare. 7 The gowdspink, that sae lang has kend For now we tyne9 its wonted lay, To wyle us far frae liberty: 11 Then tent 10 her syren smiles wha list, ROBERT BURNS. [ROBERT BURNS was born 25th January, 1759, 'the hindmost year but ane' of George the Second's reign, in a cottage built by his father, two miles south of Ayr, and close to Alloway Kirk, that relic of nondescript architecture to which his genius has lent almost as worldwide an interest as that which makes Vaucluse a place of pilgrimage to all nations. Eldest son of William Burness, of a Kincardineshire family of small farmers, market gardener and overseer of a small estate in the neighbourhood of Ayr, and afterwards tenant of Lochlie and Mount Oliphant, small Ayrshire farms, Burns received an education which ultimately included a sound acquaintance with English grammar, a little mathematics, mensuration, French, and a smattering of Latin. At work on his father's farm from an early age till he was twenty-three, he tried then to establish himself in business as a flax-dresser in Irvine, but returned in a short time to his father's house with empty pockets and with a character hitherto blameless deteriorated by some new companionships. After the death of his father, a specimen of industry and integrity never rewarded in this life, his brother Gilbert and he took the farm of Mossgiel near Mauchline (1784), which also turned out to be a bad bargain. To escape troubles in which his youthful and characteristic follies involved him, especially with the father of his future partner in life, 'Bonnie Jean,' he accepted an appointment to a clerkship in Jamaica; but on the point of starting on the voyage he had his footsteps turned towards Edinburgh by the success of his volume of poems (Kilmarnock, 1786), and by the patronage, literary and aristocratic, which it immediately secured for him. With the proceeds of a second edition of the volume (Edinburgh, 1787), amounting to £500 or £600, he established himself on the farm of Ellisland near Dumfries. Unsuccessful once more in this tenancy he became an exciseman to eke out his income, and finally in that capacity, unfortunately both for his health and for his reputation, removed to Dumfries, where he died in 1796.] That admiration of Burns' poetry as the work of a ploughman, which Jeffrey in his time had occasion to deprecate, in which he could see no more sense than 'in admiring it as if it had been written with his toes,' has not survived Jeffrey's ridicule. Burns, like Joseph in Egypt, was destined to 'forget his toil and his father's house.' His right to a place among the greater poets of Europe being no longer in dispute, to speak of him still as 'the Ayrshire bard' is almost as dull an affectation as to follow his own example and call him Rob or Robin. A great poet not only in the sense that his affinities are with the greatest of the great poets that were before him or have been since, rather than with the multitude of inferior writers who have struggled into fame in verse, but great also in the sense that he gave a new impulse and a new direction to poetry, helped to overturn in that splendid realm the dynasty of Pope, and to found that to which Wordsworth and Shelley and Byron belong, Burns is only once a peasant and clownish in the course of nearly a century during which his name has been illustrious. It is not in 1786, in the circles of rank and fashion in Edinburgh, in which he appears fresh from the plough— here his courtliness astonishes Dugald Stewart and delights the Duchess of Gordon-it is now, when coming from Olympus, he is introduced to us as from Ayrshire. Though nothing could be more natural than his first appearance in the character of rustic bard, he has so long played a different part that his resumption of it is felt to border upon the grotesque and to be akin to fustian. The task which criticism has to perform in regard to him is indicated in this transformation of the natural man into something of a histrionic figure. It is a task of difficulty under any conditions, and not to be attempted with success in a very limited space. It is to explain how the publication of a small volume of poems 'chiefly in the Scottish dialect,' the natural destiny of which would have seemed to be fulfilled in making the Ayrshire bard known in Ayrshire, or at the most in Scotland, should have turned out to be an occasion, in literature and in history, of worldwide significance. This explanation, be it ever so partial, must include, and perhaps ought to begin with, the admission, fatal to his character as a prodigy, that the influences under which Burns was tutored into song were as eminently European in fact as they were singularly provincial in appearance. The Revolution, at any rate in action, had not returned from America to France, when his poems were published. But the intellectual activity and turmoil which led to the Revolution was a phenomenon to which he was no more of a stranger in his humble and straitened sphere of life, than to summer's heat or winter's cold, or the west wind or 'man's inhumanity to man.' His father's cottage, in which, like the rest of the family (they were all readers), he sat at meals 'with a book in one hand and a spoon in the other,' was, as far as intelligence of most kinds was concerned, in open communication with Europe VOL. III. LI and America, and the presiding spirit in it was an old peasant, whose sagacity and whose virtues would have adorned the rank to which Glencairn or Athole belonged. Whatever limitations were imposed upon the growth of his intellect, whatever obstacles were thrown in the way of his attaining literary distinction by a life of slavish toil such as he was condemned to live, there was nothing in his case in such a life to exclude, there was everything to beget and to intensify, sympathy with an age which had grown sick of conventionality, classicality, and unreality in life and literature, and which yearned passionately after a return to nature and to truth. This yearning might be less general and less eager among the peasants of Ayrshire than among some other classes in other parts of Europe, but then he belonged, by the discipline as well as by the force of his mind, rather to Europe than to Ayrshire. His education at school, though, even for a Scotch peasant's son, irregular and scanty, was sufficient to fit him for becoming a citizen of the world; and a citizen of the world he did become by the study of the best English authors in prose and verse and by critical familiarity with the songs and ballads of his country. In virtue of this citizenship, the spirit of Revolution being abroad in Europe, he was as certain to encounter it as was Tam O'Shanter on his way home from Ayr and from the company of Souter Johnny to see Kirk Alloway in a 'bleeze.' 'He sings,' as he himself says, 'the sentiments and manners he felt and saw in himself and his rustic compeers around him'; but it is after the manner of one who is accustomed to live and move in a larger world than that in which he and they had 'leave to toil.' While he has never yet set foot beyond his native county, his mind has travelled; he is familiar with the continental resorts of persons of quality, with hunters of Ponotaxi (who have to rhyme with orthodoxy), with scenes, events, characters in Eastern lands, and in the literature and history of antiquity. His ideas, sentiments, aspirations, hopes, fears, range easily and naturally beyond parochial and provincial limits into national affairs and the struggling life of civilised mankind. If he is ever more truly himself than in Bruce's Address to his troops at Bannockburn, a patriotic ode, it is in anticipating that golden age of the poet and the philanthropist when man to man the world o'er Shall brothers be for a' that.' His countrymen are a pushing and adventurous race. Wherever |