After Mrs. Carlyle's death, which followed the Edinburgh address, Carlyle lived with slowly declining strength until 1881. On his eightieth birthday the literary men of Germany, under the leadership of Ranke, sent him a telegram of congratulation; Bismarck added his word of praise; and a group of British admirers presented a medallion portrait by Boehm. To the library of Harvard College, Carlyle bequeathed all the books he had used in preparation for Cromwell and Frederick. His personality was as rugged and unique as his style. Intensely loyal to his family, he knew no pleasure so satisfying as to sit with his mother by the fireside of her cottage, each of them smoking a pipe, in quiet talk. He was laid to rest, not in Westminster, where the nation would have wished, but with his own people at Ecclefechan. In later years he was much entertained by people of rank and position, and counted among his friends and callers at Cheyne Row practically every distinguished man of letters or public affairs in London. But he retained to the last the simplicity of his early trainings, and a raciness and vigor which gave flavor to his least utterance. His conversation was caustic, dogmatic, and when he was roused, devastating as a blast from a hot furnace; a torrent of eloquence and invective, with flashes of primitive great-hearted humor. Literary taste has moved somewhat away from Carlyle in recent years, but for those who are awakening to the significance of life, he will ever have an invigorating message.

IN a little clay-built cottage on the banks of the Doon in Ayrshire, Robert Burns first saw the light on January 25, 1759. The cottage, built by his father, consisting of two rooms, still stands by the roadside. Tumult attended his entrance into the world, for a wild storm, a few days after his birth, blew down the gable of the cottage and drove mother and child to a neighbor's for shelter. As he says later:

"A blast o' Janwar win'
Blew hansel in on Robin."

His father, of good farmer stock, had at this time a small nursery garden from which he supported his family. Robert was the eldest of seven children. With the innate Scotch love of education, the father taught the lad when

the day's work was done, and later joined with four other families to engage John Murdock to be schoolmaster to their children, a post he held two and a half years. Burns's education in school was thus brief and fragmentary, but as thorough as it could be made by this excellent teacher. His father, as the children worked on the farm by his side, or as they sat about the fire on long winter evenings, continued unremittingly the task of instruction. He was a stern, religious man, of good natural parts, who bore so unequal a struggle with poverty that body and spirit were prematurely crushed. At thirteen, Robert Burns was threshing his father's grain; at fifteen, he was his father's chief laborer in the field. From his mother, he learned much of the old ballads and legends, and from an old woman in the family, the largest collections of tales and songs concerning "the devil, ghosts, fairies, brownies, witches, .. enchanted towers, dragons, and other trumpery." From the few books available, he widened his outlook as much as possible, devoting himself especially to the two poets, Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson (whose verse was then coming out in Ruddiman's Weekly Magazine), and to a collection of old songs. "This (the book of songs), was my vade-mecum. I pored over them driving my cart, or walking to labor, song by song, verse by verse.'

In 1766, the family moved to another farm, Mount Oliphant, "a ruinous bargain," where the struggle for existence became even sharper and more dispiriting. When successive crops began to fail through bad seasons, and the land was proving itself thin and unfruitful, letters from the landlord's agent would throw the whole family into bitter sorrow. These years of early toil were hard on the lad, using up nervous strength he needed for manhood, making him stoop-shouldered, acquainting him too early with the tragedy his father was living, the tragedy

of an industrious, frugal man going to the wall in spite of every human effort. But such a life had its compensations, too, in strong family affection, in the homely piety which the father shed over the little group-so faithfully portrayed in The Cotter's Saturday Night, and the exhilarating contact with nature, which was storing the young poet's mind with sights and sounds and images. It was at Mt. Oliphant that Burns made his first song, of a country lass, who like himself labored in the field,-Handsome Nell. "You know," says Burns, "our country custom of coupling a man and woman together as partners in the labors of the harvest. In my fifteenth summer my partner was a bewitching creature, a year younger than myself. . . . It was her favorite reel to which I attempted giving an embodied vehicle in rime. I was not so presumptuous as to imagine I could make verses like printed ones, composed by men who read Greek and Latin; but my girl sang a song which was said to be composed by a county 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 rime as well as he; for, excepting that he could shear sheep, and cast peats, his father living in the Moorlands, he had no more scholarcraft than myself. Thus with me began love and poetry."

The impulse to sing continued to stir in Burns, and from his eighteenth year, when the family moved to another farm at Tarbolton, to his twenty-fifth, it ripened slowly into fuller and fuller expression. Some outlet was necessary for a youth of high vitality, of witty and pithy speech, of great personal magnetism; and such an outlet from the grinding toil and monotony of the farm came to him in affairs of the heart. The simple rustic life with its ease of meeting between lad and lass afforded nothing else but this love gallantry. It was, indeed, the one resource of the country side. The original of Mary Morison, a servant

in a family at Cessnock Water, called forth in Burns an ardent affection which he embodied later in the song addressed to her. It was not until after his father's death (1784), when the family had moved to Mossgiel farm, that Burns's genius for poetry distinctly and unmistakably declared itself. At Tarbolton he had written The Death and Dying Words of Poor Mailie, My Nannie O, The Lass of Cessnock Banks, Bonny Peggy Alison, and Mary Morison. But now, at Mossgiel, there was a spendid burst of song, perhaps the richest short period that we know of. Most of the songs mentioned by Carlyle are the fruit of this time.

The outer fortunes of the Burns family went from bad to worse with rapidity. In 1781 Burns started for Irvine to learn flax dressing, with the hope of utilizing to better advantage the flax grown on their own farm. At Irvine, Burns fell in with loose companions, whose influence was undermining; Carlyle fittingly refers to it as "the mudbath." What little money he had he lost there; his flaxdressing shop was burned while he was off on a New Year's carousing; and he returned home to find his father dying of consumption. In March, 1784, Burns and his brother brought their widowed mother and the younger children to Mossgiel. Although Burns applied himself to the problem of farming with the utmost industry, the experiment was revealing itself a hopeless failure. Yet it was just at this time, 1784-86, when life seemed defeating him at every turn and poverty overwhelming his slender resources, that poetry welled up most abundantly in his heart and gave him solace for the wreck of his material fortune.

Burns finally decided in despair to throw up the farm and go to the West Indies to be agent on a plantation there. To get passage-money he published by subscription (July, 1786), in the neighboring town of Kilmarnock, a