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monument, is reported to have said, with a poignancy too deep for tears-" Och, ay!" said she, "Och, ay! he axed for bread and they gave him a stone!"

Now, all that I have said does not account for Burns's genius and reputation. But then language never will account for him; it being of the essence of genius to defy analysis or explanation. If genius could be explained or laid out by rule and line, why, we would then print it all in a schoolbook, to be learnt by rote, and make every schoolboy, every ploughboy, into a genuis and a Burns! But this is not yet just quite possible!

The evil that men do is buried with their bones, as Shakspere knew, when he made Mark Antony say the opposite in sarcasm. The good alone survives; for it is the good alone that mankind can quote and cling to, and will not willingly let die; and there is a strangely purifying power in the world that tends to raise it up and keep it sweet and clean. De mortuis nil nisi bonum—of the dead speak nothing but good. So it has been with Burns. "His frail body, with its dross, has passed away, that the pure eternal spirit might soar up and encircle the entire earth." He was sown in dishonour; he is raised in glory. His faults and errors were felt and punished in his lifetime, and no one need ever be led astray by him. Burns paid too high a price; he paid the penalty that custom and conventionality invariably inflict on those who brave their laws. But posterity is not malicious, and usually takes the martyr's side, and his sufferings go to enhance his later fame-the bright picture stands out the fairer for its dark background.

Genius, it seems, is such a tender flower that it seldom comes to full fruition here; our earth and atmosphere seem too cankerous and cold for its complete unfolding; or how else happens it, that so many of the world's greatest names have met early, violent, or untimely ends? Socrates, Cicero, Alexander, Hannibal, Napoleon, Lincoln, Raphael, Mozart, Heine, Shakspere, Schiller, Shelley, Keats, and Burns, and many, many more.

But

though they seem to cease before the day is done, their work is not unfinished. It is, perhaps, characteristic of all works of genius that each part is complete and artistic in itself. Nature leaves no useless frag

ments, no rubbish in the void, nothing is ever lost; a thousand shoots and suckers spring from the young tree, nipped by untimely storms. "The individual withers, but the race is more and more." "Most

wretched men are cradled into wrong, they learn in suffering what they teach in song." And Burns was certainly one of that great army who learnt in suffering much that he has taught in song.

For his own ease and peace of mind Burns lived either too early or too late. Had he lived earlier, when all society was as impulsive and uncalculating as himself, when printing was yet unkown, then he would have been the bard, the chieftain, and the lawgiver of his clan, like the Druid bards of ancient Wales, and his songs of love and war would have been handed on from generation to generation, concentrating into cycles and traditions in his native valleys, like the fatherless ballads of Spain or of the Scottish border, or like the earliest songs of Greece before Pelides' death or Homer's birth. Had Burns lived later, when poets were independent of patrons, had he even lived to 73 instead of dying at 37, or had he lived to-day, then Robert Burns could have commanded now all the wealth and dignity and honours or the British Empire and the world.

All communications regarding this Pamphlet will reach the Author if

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DR. W. CLARKE ROBINSON, GLENARM, Co. ANTRIM, IRELAND

Sold by OLLEY & CO., 8 Royal Avenue, Belfast.
Price 1/-. (Copyright 1899.)

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W. CLARKE ROBINSON, B.Sc., M.A., PH.D., University Extension Lecturer; sometime Lecturer in the University of Durham, England.

RESPECTFULLY DEDICATED TO

MATTHEW SWINBURNE, ESQ., J.P., NORTH TOOLBURRA, DARLING DOWNS, QUEENSLAND, AUSTRALIA.

OME sixty years ago Lord Macaulay said Byron was the most celebrated Englishman of the nineteenth century; and certainly Lord Byron is still at least one of the most fascinating literary men of this century in Europe. He was descended from the Scandinavian Vikings, those Norsemen of world-renown, who discovered and traded with America 600 years before its re-discovery by Columbus. Some of Byron's ancestors aided Rollo the Ganger to found the Duchy of Normandy in France in A.D. 912, and others crossed over with William the Conqueror to win the crown of England at Hastings in 1066.

Sold by OLLEY & CO., 8 Royal Avenue, Belfast.
Price 1/-. (Copyright 1899).

Ralf de Burun, the poet's ancestor, is named in "Doomsday Book" as having lands at Nottingham and Derby, in 1068. In 1540 Sir John Biron was made Stewart of Manchester by Henry VIII., who also gave to him Newstead Abbey, the future seat of the Byron family. To understand the pride, the peerage, the temper, and the poetry of Lord Byron, it is necessary to know his pedigree more than any other man's in literature. He was the outcome of a thousand years of Berserkers and stormy Norman blood.

She

His father, the Hon. John Byron, was a captain in the Guards; he was chased from the army, and disowned by his family. His mother, Catherine Gordon, a descendant of the Stuart kings of Scotland, was a singularly strange and silly woman. When their only child, George Gordon, the future poet, was born in London, January 22nd, 1788, the father had to flee to France for debt, where he soon died in disgrace. In his tenth year the boy succeeded his grand-uncle, as Lord Byron. The mother and son led a very unhappy life for some time in Scotland; and their home was never any better than a private pandemonium. She patted and kicked him by turns; sugar and stick were her alternatives. privately warned the local druggist not to sell any poison to her son, fearing he should poison her; and the son also warned the druggist not to sell any to his mother, fearing she should poison him! She was unfit to bring up any child, and was sure to spoil an only son. The boy had his foot twisted in his infancy, and the mother now took it into her head to have it straightened out at any cost. She sent for dentists, quacks, doctors, and he writhed beneath the straps, and remained with a club foot for life; he could bear no one to look at it as long as he lived; and 'tis said, though I question the authority, when they came to examine it after death, he actually twitched in his coffin !

He went to school at Dulwich and Harrow. At Harrow he was subject to those fits of melancholy which reappeared so oft in after life. He would wander for hours through the graveyard, unaccompanied save by

the shadow of the tombstones or the spirits of the dead. When a schoolboy he proposed marrying Miss Chaworth, who lived near Newstead Abbey; but this was already his third historic passion-to leave out Byron's loves would be like the play without the Hamlet. Besides losing his heart in a cousin, Mary Duff, when he was under nine years old (where, however, he had the precedent of the great Dante and the immortal Beatrice before him), Byron lost his heart again in another cousin, Margaret Parker, when he was only twelve. Of this Miss Parker he wrote long afterwards-" I have never seen anything equal to her transparent beauty. She seemed as if made out of a rainbow, all beauty and peace. My passion for her had the usual effect: I could not sleep, I could not eat, I could not rest; but I was a fool then, and not much wiser now!"

In 1805, aged seventeen, he went to Trinity College, Cambridge; but his mind had not been formed to run in the common groove of ordinary men. Schools and colleges have been founded only for the great average of youths; the very brightest and the very dullest find it impossible to conform to their restrictions or come up to their requirements; and this descendant of the Stuart kings and Scandinavian pirates was of a rare and stubborn order, made to dwell apart. He formed a narrow circle of acquaintances for himself, and flouted all the discipline and rules and studies of the college. In his rooms he kept what he called "the best friend in the world"- viz., a tame bear, to the terror of the neighbourhood; and when asked what he meant to do with it, he said "to make it study for a fellowship! He avoided the classrooms, and spent his time in swimming, fencing, and shooting; and in his careless, melancholy moments he amused and soothed himself by writing verses. These his friends advised him to publish, and they appeared in book form in 1807, entitled "Hours of Idleness," their truest appellation.

These first poems of Byron's have never received much consideration. Their literary value is but small, and their main use is chiefly to show that the boy is father of

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