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and to Cunningham in the spring of 1794, Burns could not truthfully describe it in the postscript of a letter, supposed by Dr. Wallace to have been written in May of that year, as "a new Scots song," and honestly offer it as such for publication in The Morning Chronicle.

Looked at in any view, and set in any light, it is well nigh impossible to hold Dr. Wallace's version of the Cromek letter to Captain Miller as one undivided original. Whatever else it may be must remain a matter of speculation until more is known of Dr. Wallace's finding of the manuscript from which he prints. That his addition belongs to the Cromek stem is, for the reasons stated, almost unthinkable, and wholly opposed both to the results of analysis and one's sense of congruity.

What remains to be said rests upon questions of construction lying apart from that of the unity of Dr. Wallace's version. If the ode were "Scots wha hae," why should Burns be so cautious about its being published as if Perry had found it by accident and were printing it without the knowledge of its composer. It could have been no difficult matter for the Government to have traced the authorship of both "Scots wha hae" and "Wilt thou be my dearie ?" since their author had repeatedly given out that they were his. When Perry published "Scots wha hae" in May, 1794, he was not over-careful. "We know," said he, "but of one living poet to whom to ascribe it "—a remarkable deliverance considering that for eight months the said living poet had been giving away copies of the ode right and left with his name attached. Whether Perry knew this or not matters little. What is noteworthy is that his reference to a living poet as the possible author of the ode does not suggest anxiety upon the score of concealing its authorship. For Burns even to hint at concealment, after having time and again acknowledged paternity, is absurd. Finally, there is nothing in "Scots wha hae" that the most cautious servant of the State could have wished to hide from considerations of prudence. Can any one imagine the most suspicious Government rebuking a gauger for writing "Scots wha hae?" There is in it not a sentiment, not a syllable, which could have compromised its author's loyalty, or drawn upon him the censure of the most censorious Board of Excise.

There is, on the other hand, a great deal in the Washington

Ode to account for the most extreme caution on the part of both the exciseman poet and the publisher. It is easy to understand why, if he got the Washington Ode, Perry did not publish it. He would have been a bold poet-servant of the Crown, and he would have been an equally bold editor, who gave to the world an ode in which the severed connection with the United States is described as a broken chain and King George as a despot and tyrant.

"See gathering thousands, while I sing,

A broken chain, exulting, bring,
And dash it in a tyrant's face,
And dare him to his very beard,

And tell him he no more is feared

No more the Despot of Columbia's race."

The poet afterwards calls upon Alfred, "No more thy England own!" England shouts "The tyrant's cause is mine!", and so linked her name with 'damned deeds of everlasting shame!" It needed courage of the foolhardy order to publish all this in a London newspaper at a time when Great Britain was at war with France. Hence Burns's caution, and hence also Perry's non-publication of the Washington Ode.

To recapitulate-we do not know when Miller got the two songs, but he probably kept them for a time and then passed them together to Perry, who published them in May. Thereafter, recognising their merit, Perry may have authorised Miller to make the offer which Burns refused. Miller in all likelihood laid the matter before Burns in the autumn, in time to get his declinature in November. Meantime, Burns had in June written Mrs. Dunlop with the last section of the Washington Ode. His attention having been recalled to it during Josiah Walker's visit, he may have finished it, and sent it to Miller in November. It, and it alone, justifies the terms of the Cromek letter and Perry's action. Credit Cromek with ever so little punctiliousness in the matter of inventing a date, and he certainly hit upon one that most happily opens a way out of a perplexing dilemma. That the ode was sent with a view to publication, and withheld as dangerous to both poet and publisher is the only way of accounting for its disappearance for nearly eighty years. Upon any other hypothesis the phrasing of the Cromek letter becomes forced and ridiculous.

That it refers to the Washington Ode, and that, laid aside by Perry for fear of consequences, the ode remained in the hands of his representatives until in 1872 it found its way to a London auction room and thence to America seems the most reasonable way of meeting the many difficulties of the subject-difficulties due in part to Burns, but chiefly to the several editors of his works.

EDWARD PINNINGTON.

SONNET.

TO ROBERT BURNS.

Fair Muse, whose task it is to guard the urns
Of thy high mount's elect ones; they whose head
By thine own jewelled hands is garlanded :
O guide me where the memory of BURNS
Is storied in thy temple, and instead
Of lamentations, I would sing by turns
His purest songs which Caledonia learns
To lighten labour, sweeten daily bread;
And those love-lyrics which, with tendril coil,
Entwined the heart of his own bonny Jean-
His meed enough who makes his native soil
More genial to contented husbandmen :
Who turns the discords of their anxious toil
To songs which sanctify the field again.

Alfred Davies, Wolverhampton.

ROBERT BURNS.

BY THE HONOURABLE GEORGE FRISBIE HOAR.

An Address delivered before the Burns Memorial Association at Boston, U.S.A., 28th March, 1901.

[SENATOR HOAR, whose eloquent oration is here printed in full, belongs to an old New England family, and has long held a distinguished place in the public life of America. "The Burns Memorial Association of Boston" has been formed with the object of erecting a monument to the Poet in that city.]

You

would not have bidden me here to-night, at anyrate you would not have done well to bid me here to-night, if you had thought I should try to say much that is original. Robert Burns is perhaps the best known character in history or literature. If we do not say, as Emerson did, that the pigeons on the eaves of King's Chapel know something about him, yet certainly there is no man, woman, or child where the Scotch or the English tongue is spoken, the round world over, to whom the tones of Burns do not seem familiar as his mother's voice. When Scotsmen meet on his birthday they meet as children meet at a thanksgiving table, only to recall old memories, to think again old thoughts, and to utter common words. If I have no title to speak of Burns as a Scotsman to Scotsmen, I have at least a touch of that nature which, whenever men are thinking of him, makes the whole world kin.

There is no doubt that Robert Burns is the hero of Scotland. Whereever on the face of the earth there is a Scotsman-and they are everywhere on the face of the earth—that name will quicken his pulse as no other will, even if it be the Bruce or Wallace or Walter Scott.

Now, surely it is no slight thing to be the hero of the Scotsman's heart. The Scottish is one of the great races. I do not know that it has or ever has had a superior. Wherever you find a Scotsman, whether on land or sea, whether in peace or in battle, whether in business or on the farm, in public life or in family life, on the frontier or in the crowded city, whether governing subject races in the East or a freeman among freemen in republican liberty, whether governing empires or managing great business institutions, sometimes harder to govern than empires, thinking or acting, discoursing of metaphysics or theology or law or science, writing prose or writing poetry, there you may hope to find a born leader of men sitting on the foremost seat and, whatever may be the undertaking, conducting it to

success.

We lay claim also to the a born New Englander,

We Yankees do not undervalue ourselves. quality I have just described. I think that I, esteem the New England character even more highly than do most New Englanders. I like to believe that these two peoples resemble each other in mental quality, as their rocky mountains and their rocky shores are like each other, and as, in general, they have had in common the same stern Calvinistic faith. I never feel more at home than when I am reading the novels of the great magician or the collections of Scotch humour by Dean Ramsay. Dominie Sampson must have been the grandfather of Parson Wilbur. Bailie Nicol Jarvie was surely born in old Concord. The Scotch elder and the New England deacon are twin brothers. Both are good men, Godward, and if sometimes "a little twistical manward," it is much more rarely than is commonly supposed. If either of them love to get money, he knows how to give it away. If the Scotchmen, like their Yankee cousins, think it a shame to live poor if they can honestly help it, they have at least given one noble example of a man who thinks it a disgrace to die rich. What a great English writer says of the Scotch would answer for the New England Puritan and Revolutionary Fathers. 'Every Scotsman," says Charles Reade, "is an iceberg with a volcano underneath. Scotch ice and you will come to the Scotch fire "

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So Robert Burns, sprung of a great race, will always have at least two great races for his loving audience.

He was fortunate also in a fit parentage for a great manhood and a great poet. His mother knew by heart the ancient lyrics, many of them never written or printed, of the mountain and the moor. They were the cradle hymns of the child. His father was a Scotch Puritan. Upon the plain grey stone in the churchyard at Ayr the Poet carved the underlying lines :

"O ye whose cheek the tear of pity stains,

Draw near with pious rev'rence, and attend :
Here lies the loving husband's dear remains,
The tender father, and the generous friend.

"The pitying heart that felt for human woe;

The dauntless heart that feared no human pride;
The friend of man-to vice alone a foe;

For even his failings leaned to virtue's side."

This epitaph has one fault. The Poet has borrowed for it one of the best lines of one of the greatest English poets. Surely no other man ever lived of whom it could be said in criticism that instead of taking a line from Goldsmith, he might have given us a better one of his own.

Now what was this man whose fame circles the earth like a parallel of latitude, whose words are known by heart to countless millions of men, and are to be known by heart, as we believe, to countless generations? He was the child of two peasants, native of a bleak northern clime. He was born in a clay cottage roofed with straw, which his father had built with his own hands. Just after he was born, part of the dwelling gave way in a storm, and mother and child were carried at midnight to a neigh

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