I could lie down in the dirt and cry and grovel there, I think, for a century to save such a soul as Burns's from the suffering, and the contamination, and the degradation which these same arrangements imposed upon him; and fancy if I could but have known him (in my present state of wealth and influence) I might have saved and reclaimed and preserved him even to the present day."

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Though it was the golden age of poets' salaries, the nobility giving away a lot of money for a dedication, nobody thought of Burns. He might weigh clouts and bones; moreover, you do not help a republican! They were noble men. Just let him sink down. And he sankever deeper, until he at last gained solid ground in the grave. Then he was thirty-seven years old. It is told that he, after a carousal, fell down in the street and lay there till morning; it was a cold night in January. It resulted in a rheumatic fever that shattered his poor limbs. His family would call a doctor, but Burns answered : Why should a doctor cast away his skill on me. I am a poor man, it is not worth the while to fleece me." Like his father, he was not allowed to die in peace. With shivering hand he writes to a friend : "A rascal of a haberdasher, to whom I owe a considerable bill, taking it into his head that I am dying, has commenced a process against me and will infallibly put my emaciated body into jail. Will you be so good as to accommodate me, and that by return of post, with ten pounds? O James! did you know the pride of my heart, you would feel doubly for me! Alas! I am not used to beg!

He died a few days later on July 26th, 1796. wife was with child-their fifth one.

His

A few years afterwards, when his greatness was recognised by everybody, the rich people contended for possession of even the poorest things which belonged to Robert Burns. A goblet, out of which Burns had drank, was bought for £300. For that sum of money Burns could have lived for years.

One of his biographers-Thomas Carlyle-who was a

characterisation

Richter says, in the

Scotsman himself, finishes his Burns with the following bitter remark: island of Sumatra there is a kind of light-chafers' (large fire-flies) which people stick upon spits, and illuminate the ways with at night. Persons of condition can thus travel with a pleasant radiance, which they much admire. Great honour to the fire-flies! But--!

Thirty-seven years! Burns was not older when he broke down, like a tree from which all shelter has been taken a tree whose crown was too heavy, and whose root was too weak! But at that young age he already had done a man's work that for centuries will be the pride and the joy of the nation. I do not think I have been in any town in Scotland where there was not a monument to Burns, statues, high towers, museums, libraries, whole buildings-to say nothing of that endless number of clubs, associations, and societies that are called by his name.

Burns has written a poem, "The Twa Brigs "—namely, those two crossing the river Ayr at the town of the same name. In the year in which I was in Scotland the older of these bridges was in danger of collapsing; but Lord Rosebery called people to a meeting at Ayr, told the assemblage that it would not do to let a bridge fall in pieces which Burns had immortalised in a famous poem ; and before they parted £3500 had been subscribed for the rebuilding of the bridge, a sum which swelled to over £10,000 very soon after. So idolised is Burns nowadays. He is as intimately connected with Scotland as the candle with its flame.

Though the whole of his life was a tragedy until the breaking down in the fifth act, yet his poetry tinkles with health and manliness, with moral courage, with the most genuine human feelings and joy of nature, Even on his death-bed he lay composing merry songs of love and blowing kisses to the fleeing life.

Besides, he was a master of almost any key-from the merriest scale of laughter to the cry of terror of a soul sinking into darkness. His song can swell like a bell in

the autumn, prove a sermon, a grand proclaimer of moral and national values--as in " The Cottar's Saturday Night "; but it can also lower to a soft whisper about two old folks' life-long love and faithfulness that only was allowed to express itself by a hand-shake before death will sever them -as in "John Anderson." He can make poetry about an old mare, or a wee mouse whose dwelling has been destroyed by his plough during the ploughing of autumn, so that tears come into our eyes; and he can make an undertaker roar with laughter by telling him about the merry chap Tam o' Shanter, or about the quack Dr Hornbook, or about Old Harry who ran off with the Exciseman, so very much hated by the smugglers.

Most widely known yet are his dewy, fresh songs composed for old Scotch airs-lyrics about the longing of youth, about young love, about healthy, innocent joy of life, struggling for young people's right of loving and embracing, full of yearning and full of sunshine though neither grief nor disappointment nor gentle sorrow are strangers to them. He wrote more than 300 songs; the most glorious treasure of songs ever given by a poet to his native land.

Criticism has not left him much honour; it has hereas everywhere—been busy with finding out his sources. He is no dainty to people seeking for originality-those smart hunters of literature. O, for a fool to reproach us for not inventing the fire whenever we need a match! Have I not an inborn right-as a man and as a poetto light my candle at the candles of other men? Criticism most frequently has shown very little interest for the singing of the birds; it was taken up with the motley feathers the bird wore in her tail.

The spring of Robert Burns's poetry was no jet d'eau moulded in cement, but it was a Nature's fountain that joyfully made its way among flowers and rushes. He sang about that which lay hushed and hesitating in the bosom of the common people; he sang about it so that they, with tears of joy, bore it out into the sunshine and

saw their own emotions, rarely expressed before, their sorrow and joy set forth in it. He, whom the world had tortured, was elected to be the most glorious interpreter and singer of the joy of life.

The importance of Burns originates in his connection with the peasantry of Scotland. The peasant is, and must for ever be, the stock of all progressive nations of the world. It is the roughly cultivated peasantry who have kept the navel-string with the soil unbroken, and that connection is the best thing I could wish for my own people and every people on the face of the globe.

The peasantry is still, in all countries, no more than raw material, an unshaped mass, a turbulent sea of wonderful possibilities. Only once in literature these divine possibilities have piled up themselves into a colossal shape -a whole nation, with her fields and meadows, her hills and lochs, her moors and braes, making the basis; and the colossus is that peasant Poet-the "ploughman from Ayrshire," Robert Burns.

JEPPE AAKJÄR.

BURNS AS A SONG-MENDER.

"Old Scots songs are, you know, a favourite study and pursuit of mine."-(Letter to Mrs Dunlop in 1790).

CAR

ARLYLE very often is quoted as a competent authority on Burns, and certainly he has made a good number of observations which have been of importance to the later Burns biographers. Especially one quotation is very often met with: "We may almost say, that with his own hand he (Burns) had to construct the tools for fashioning it (his poetry). For he found himself in deepest obscurity, without instruction, without model; or with models only of the meanest sort. This is erroneous-at any rate as far as the songs of Burns are considered. The later investigations have proved that he wrote very few original songs. He was the mastermender of old Scotch poetry, the great coiner of gold from old mines, and the last and finest flower of an evolution rooted far back in the ballad literature and

"the gude and godlie bailates of the Reformation age.

It is very strange that the study of the sources of Burns is of quite a recent date. Everybody reading the Thomson letters must feel that here we are treading a ground very little examined, relatively speaking. The private life of Burns-even in smallest detail--has been told a thousand times, and, if it were possible, some new biographer would be highly pleased to tell us what the Bard got for his dinner this day or that. But a large field of Burns study was left almost untouched-Burns as a Song-mender. The first attempt at this is in Allan Cunningham's edition--certainly a bad beginning; but it was not till Henley-Henderson's standard Centenary