features are rounded, rich, and tender, and yet the bones show through, massively and manfully, everywhere; the eyes laugh out upon you with boundless good-humor and sweetness, with simple, eager, gentle surprise a gleam as of the morning star looking forth upon the wonder of a new-born world."

Robert Burns, whom Principal Shairp, professor of poetry in the University of Oxford, calls "the greatest song-writer that Scotland, perhaps the world, has known," was born January 25, 1759, about two miles from Ayr, Scotland.

The home was a clay cottage built by the father, William Burns, an honest, hard-working, God-fearing farmer.

The house consisted of a kitchen in one end, with a concealed bed in it, and a room in the other end with a fireplace; a small home, indeed, to shelter a wife and several children. The mother, formerly Agnes Brown, the daughter of a farmer, was a bright, happy-tempered woman, whose memory was stored with old songs and ballads, which she sang to her little flock.

When Robert was seven years old, the family moved to Mount Oliphant and leased a farm. He and his brother Gilbert were soon obliged to do work far beyond their years, which caused stooping shoulders and nervous strain. "For several years," says Gilbert, "butcher's meat was a stranger in the house." But there was affection in the home, and comfort in the evenings when the kind father gathered his children around him and taught them, not only from schoolbooks, but read to them from the "Spectator," odd plays of Shakespeare, Pope's "Homer," "Locke on the Human Understanding," and "Taylor's Scripture Doctrine of Original Sin."

There was also in the house a collection of songs, of which Robert says: "I pored over them driving my cart or walking to labor, song by song, verse by verse, carefully noting the true, tender, or sublime, from affectation and fustian."

Poverty and seven children, with consequent toil and privation, which Robert described years afterwards as "the cheerless gloom of a hermit, with the unceasing moil of a galley slave," finally did what they have done over and over again in the history of the world-broke the health of the true-hearted Scotchman, William Burns, and laid him in his grave.

The family had moved to a larger farm, where, says Robert, in his brief autobiography, "for four years we lived comfortably; but a difference commencing between him and his landlord as to terms, after three years' tossing and whirling in the vortex of litigation, my father was just saved from the horrors of a jail by a consumption which, after two years' promises, kindly stepped in and carried him away to 'where the wicked cease from troubling, and where the weary are at rest.'"

In these early years of poverty, two books made a particularly deep impression upon Robert: "The two first 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;' [loaned him by a blacksmith]. 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 floodgates of life shut in eternal rest."

The boy used to shed tears as he read of Wallace, and as he explored every den and dell where the hero was said to have lodged, his "heart glowed with a wish to be able to make a song on him in some measure equal to his merits." That he realized his youthful desire, who can deny who has read that soul-stirring song, "Bruce's Address to his troops before the Battle of Bannockburn: "

"Scots wha hae wi' Wallace bled!

Scots, wham Bruce has aften led!
Welcome to your gory bed,
Or to victorie!

Lay the proud usurpers low,
Tyrants fall in every foe,

Liberty's in every blow,

Let us do or die!"

The ambitious ploughboy wrote his first poem at fifteen, "Handsome Nell:

"Oh, once I loved a bonnie lass,

Ay, and I love her still,

And whilst that virtue warms my breast

I'll love my handsome Nell.

She dresses aye sae clean and neat,
Baith decent and genteel,

And then there's something in her gait
Gars ony dress look weel.

A gaudy dress and gentle air
May slightly touch the heart,
But it's innocence and modesty
That polishes the dart.

'Tis this in Nelly pleases me,
'Tis this enchants my soul;

For absolutely in my breast
She reigns without control."

Robert and a girl of fourteen were working in the harvest-field together. "She was," he says, "a bonnie, sweet, sonsie lass. In short, she altogether, unwittingly to herself, initiated me in that delicious passion, which, in spite of acid disappointment, ginhorse prudence, and bookworm philosophy, I hold to be the first of human joys here below! How she caught the contagion I cannot tell. . . . Indeed I did not know myself why I liked so much to loiter behind with her when returning in the evening from our labors; why the tones of her voice made my heart-strings thrill like an Æolian harp, and, especially, why my pulse beat such a furious ratan when I looked and fingered over her little hand to pick out the cruel nettle-stings and thistles.

"Among her love-inspiring qualities, she sung 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 read 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 scholar-craft than myself. Thus with me began love and poetry. . . . I composed it in a wild enthusiasm of passion, and to this hour I never recollect it but my heart melts, my blood sallies at the remembrance."

At nineteen, Robert went to Kirkoswald, on the Carrick coast, to learn mensuration and surveying, but a charming girl next door to the school "overset his trigonometry." He could not study, and went home to think of her and write: :

"Now westlin' winds, and slaughtering guns,
Bring autumn's pleasant weather;
The muir-cock springs on whirring wings,
Amang the blooming heather.

Now waving grain, wide o'er the plain,
Delights the weary farmer;

And the moon shines bright, when I rove a' night

To muse upon my charmer."

When Burns was twenty-three a serious disappointment came to him. He had fallen in love with Ellison Begbie, daughter of a small farmer, about two miles from their home. To her are addressed "On Cessnock Banks there lives a lass," "Peggy Alison," and "Mary Morison."

"But it's not her air, her form, her face,

Tho' matching beauty's fabled queen,
But the mind that shines in ev'ry grace,
An' chiefly in her sparklin' e'en."

These lines showed her a girl whose intelligence would have been a power over Burns, could he have won her. He said long afterwards that she was the one most likely to have made a pleasant partner for life, but for some reason she refused to marry him.

"Oh, Mary, canst thou wreck his peace,

Wha for thy sake wad gladly die;
Or canst thou break that heart of his,

Whase only faut is loving thee?

If love for love thou wilt na gie,

At least be pity to me shown;

A thought ungentle canna be

The thought o' Mary Morison."

Burns became disheartened and depressed. He was about starting for Irvine to learn the trade of flax-dressing, when this disappointment came. At Irvine his shop burned, his partner in trade robbed him, and, worst