The rough burr-thistle spreading wide
Amang the bearded bear,

I turned the weeder clips aside

And spared the symbol dear.

Burns has been called "the voice of Scotland's patriotism," even, "the restorer of her nationality." When he appeared, we are told, the spirit of Scotland was at a low ebb. Representative Scotchmen seemed ashamed of themselves and of their country. But Burns uncovered the spring of long forgotten emotions and brought back on the hearts of his countrymen a tide of patriotic feeling to which they had long been strangers. No one could be deaf to such reproaches as, Farewell to a' our Scottish Fame, and his Ode:

Thee, Caledonia, thy wild heaths among;
Thee, famed for martial deed and sacred song,
To thee I turn with swimming eyes;
Where is that soul of freedom fled?

Immingled with the mighty dead
Beneath the hallowed turf where
Wallace lies!"

Burns, however, true Scotchman that he was, belongs not to Scotland only but to Humanity. We are not all Scottish, yet, to us all and to every man and woman who knows the poetry of the Scotch ploughman, his music comes, only to find a welcome. He sang for all; out of the needs of all; with warning comfort, joy, and hope for all. There is no mood of the soul for which he did not have a voice. He was enabled to give clear and full interpretation to the deepest experiences of life; he became a revealer of the human heart to itself.

I now leave our theme. If I have but in some measure disclosed the genius of Robert Burns, and shown the memorable work he did, I shall be happy to have spent this hour with you. Yet, as I close, let us remember, for a moment more, the man himself. I draw no moral from his life, pitiable failure though it was. Of himself he once said

Yes, his genius was "light from heaven" as it shone in his verse. Why it became a blasting fire in his own life let us, in auswer to his own heart-broken appeal, not attempt to judge. Let us rather leave our study listening to Wordsworth speaking,

Of those moments bright

When to the consciousness of right
His course was true.

When Wisdom prospered in his sight
And Virtue grew :

and glad to remember that now,

and that

Through busiest street and loneliest glen,
Are felt the flashes of his pen :

Deep in the general heart of men
His power survives.

NOTE-Address before the Yokohama Literary Society at the Burns' Memorial Meeting, Jan. 27th, 1893.

II.

CHARLES DICKENS: AN APPRECIATION.

One hundred years ago Charles Dickens was born. Forty years ago he died. In the fifty-eight years of his life, he passed through one of the most notable of the careers of the noteworthy men of the last century. Dickens's arena was the field of letters. Literary fame speedily followed the exercise of his marvellous abilities. The scope of his work was man's life, especially as found in the manifold experiences,-joyous, grievous and tragic, of the middle and lower masses of English society. His aim, if we ignore an insistent ambition to become personally distinguished and prosperous, was primarily popular entertainment. Early in his career, it is true, Dickens girded himself as an aggressive critic and mentor of the faults of the society of his time, and attempted the reform of much deplorable social wrong; but, to begin with, he

was more than anything else just an entertainer for the reading public. The life-story of Dickens need not be told at length, here. It was not one of exceptional eventfulness. Nor was it one of any special misfortune, or of doubtful success, after the few years of privation that have been named his "poverty-stricken childhood." Some leading biographical items, however, may be recalled.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH.

Charles Dickens was born in England, on the island of Portsea, the 7th of February, 1812. He was born into a family so well advanced socially, that the father, John Dickens, held a Government clerical position which must have required of its occupant considerable education and some refinement of personal culture. But, because of a characteristic lack of business ability in the father, the increasing family was seriously straitened in money matters, and in time became poor; so poor, that the boy, Charles, in his later childhood had to endure, what he graphically styled, "abject poverty." In Chatham, where the family lived from the boy's fifth to his eleventh year, he went to school and was a quick learner. It was in his eleventh year, the family having moved to London, that there came a short but unpleasant episode. Dickens was a precocious boy, and, by nature, the victim of excessive sensitiveness. He was also eagerly ambitious for personal distinction. Consequently, to be put into service in the shop of a relative where blacking-paste was manufactured, and to be compelled to label the paste jars, was to him "menial labor under the most uncongenial conditions." The reflections made upon that unhappy year and a half can be excused, because they were made by Charles Dickens, and were natural to the personality which gave him much of his power in his maturer years; but let us not think of the episode as having been, in itself, one of exceptional distress.

The misery of the little boy in his cousin's blacking warehouse was soon over with; more congenial days were entered. He was sent to a school in the suburbs of London. I came across, lately, a newspaper note which

gives some memories of those school days. "My recollection of Dickens," writes a classmate "is of a rather short, stout, jolly-looking youth, very fresh colored, and full of fun and given to laugh immoderately without any apparently sufficient reason. He was not particularly studious, nor did he show any special signs of ability, although as a boy he would at times indite short tales. As for education, he really received hardly any. Wellington House School, where Dickens was a day scholar and I a boarder, certainly absorbed almost all the respectable youth of that then sparsely inhabited neighborhood, but the state of proficiency was not very high. Dickens (then about twelve years old) took the first place, where we could not dislodge him. As a slight trait of character I may cite his appropriation of an old joke. He had on a very much used pair of inexpressibles, and one of us remarking, 'Dickens, those trousers are well worn: it is about time you gave them a rest,' he replied good-humoredly‘Ah, yes! You are right; it is a long time since they had a nap.' Referring to the more especially excellent delineations of characters in low life that we find in his writings, I remember being at a juvenile party in Johnson street, and, he, quite a boy, singing the then popular song of 'The Cat's Meat Man,' which he delivered with great energy and action, his tone and manner displaying the full zest with which he appreciated and entered into all the vulgarity of the composition."

At fifteen years of age Dickens became an office boy for some London attorneys. Desirous of following his father in a new venture, he qualified as a reporter in two law courts in London. When nineteen years old he secured an appointment for newspaper work in the reporter's gallery of the House of Commons. Two years later, he had begun his career as an author with the first of the stories which afterwards were gathered into the volume named, "Sketches by Boz." And at the age of twentyfour he had fully launched his life for a literary career, by beginning, as a serial, the ever-memorable "Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club."

During the next thirty and more years, with no serious

falling away at any time of an increasing popularity, Dickens was one of the most prolific and well rewarded, and, altogether, the most widely read, most admired and most applauded of the authors in the realm of English literature. Besides, in the last twelve years of his life he was not only before the public as its most popular writer of books, but as a public reader of his writings. Around him, throughout England and in America, gathered crowds of enthusiastic auditors.

In the year 1870, Charles Dickens died. He passed away at the very summit of his career, without having had to endure any previous disabling illness. His body. was buried in the Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey, the ancient Memorial of British Worthies in Civics, Church, Science, Art and Letters." Carlyle, at Dickens's death, voiced a wide-spread esteem, in speaking of him, as, "the good, the gentle, high-gifted, ever friendly, noble Dickens, -every inch of him an Honest Man." And now, in the Centennial Year of the birth of this "high-gifted" man, many hundreds of memorial meetings, in many lands, are being held to celebrate him and his work:-and more than twenty-five millions of sets of his books, it is estimated, are to be found in the libraries and homes of the world's reading peoples.

This evening our Society takes part in this world-wide celebration.

We have not the time now, nor have I the comprehensive and intimate knowledge necessary, for an adequate estimate of Dickens, the man; or to assign him his due value in the realm of letters; or to recount satisfactorily what he has done to help human welfare onward. At most I can only draft an appreciation of him with large strokes, and fill in with partial and probably not the most satisfactory, or significant, detail.

PERSONAL ESTIMATE

At the outset, however, I must ask your indulgence in recalling the fact that for most of my life I have been rather indifferent, it not antipathetic, to Dickens, the man.

In childhood I was ecstatic over the fun I found in