In

ter his circumstances, and give his children a good education. Robert was first sent to a school about a mile distant, in his sixth year. Afterwards a young man was engaged by his father and some of the neighbors to teach their children in common, his employers boarding him in turns. When the family had removed to another situation, which deprived them of this advantage, the good man endeavored to instruct his children himself, after the hard day's work. this way," says Gilbert Burns, the second son, who wrote an interesting life of the poet, "my two eldest sisters got all the education they received. Robert obtained a little more school instruction by snatches, but the amount, altogether, was very inconsiderable. His chief acquisition was some acquaintance with French, and for this he was almost entirely indebted to himself. What other knowledge he obtained, he gathered from the few books, mostly odd volumes, which his father could contrive to borrow."

Of these early and interesting days, during which the future man was seen, like fruit shaping itself amid the unfolded bloom, we have a picture drawn by the poet's own hand, and touched off in his own vivid manner. "At seven years of age: I was," says he, "by no means a favorite with anybody. I was a good deal noted for a retentive memory, a stubborn, sturdy something in my disposition., and an enthusiastic idiot piety. I say idiot piety, because I was then but a child. Though it cost the schoolmaster some thrashings, I made an excellent English scholar; and by the time I was ten or eleven of age, years I was a critic in substantives, verbs, and participles.

The earliest composition that I recollect taking plea
sure in reading, was the Vision of Mirza, and a hymn
of Addison's, beginning,

'How are thy servants blest, O Lord!'

I particularly remember one half-stanza which was
music to my ear-

'For though on dreadful whirls we hung,
High on the broken wave.'

I met with these in Mason's English Collection, one of my school-books. The two first books I ever read in private, and which gave me more pleasure than any two I have read since, were the Life of Hannibal, and the History of the Acts and Deeds of Sir William Wallace. 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."

Burns enjoyed other schooling than that we have mentioned, and which doubtless exerted a powerful influence over his mind. "In my infant and boyish days," he observes in a letter to Dr. Moore, "I owed much to an old woman who resided in the family, Jenny Wilson by name, remarkable for her ignorance, credulity and superstition. She had, I suppose, the largest collection in the country of tales, and songs concerning devils, ghosts, fairies, brownies, witches, warlocks, spunkies, kelpies, elf-candles, deadlights, wraiths, apparitions, cantraips, giants, en

chanted towers, dragons and other trumpery. This cultivated the latent seeds of poesie, and had so strong an effect upon my imagination, that to this hour, in my nocturnal rambles, I sometimes keep a lookout in suspicious places."

Here we have the poet, taking lessons in the classic lore of his native land, and profiting largely; yet, to please a scholar like his correspondent, he calls his instructress an ignorant old woman, and her stories idle trumpery. The name of Jenny Wilson, however, deserves to be remembered by all lovers of the northern muse; her tales doubtless gave color and character to many fine effusions. The supernatural, in these legends, was corrected and modified by the natural, which Burns's growing sense saw in human life, and found in the songs of his native land.

"The collection of songs," he adds, "was my vade тесит. 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. I am convinced I owe to this practice much of my critic craft, such as it is." The songs of Scotland which are thus complimented, are doubtless among the richest of all those popular collections of national poetry which are the offspring of unlettered minds, and it is not surprising that Burns should have found in them an abundant source of inspiration.

But he had not yet completed his irregular and

unconscious studies. In his farther progress, his

mother was his instructress. Her rectitude of heart made an impression too strong to be ever effaced from the mind of her son. This was strengthened by the

songs and ballads, which she commonly chanted, all of which wore a moral hue. The ballad which she most loved to sing, or her son to hear, is one called "The Life and Age of Man." It is a work of imagination and piety, full of quaintness and nature: it compares the various periods of man's life to the months of the year; and the parallel is both ingenious and poetic.

In the depressed circumstances of the family, the youth and early manhood of the future poet were dark enough. "The cheerless gloom of a hermit," he says himself, " with the unceasing moil of a gal ley slave, brought me to my sixteenth year." His brother Gilbert writes, "To the buffetings of misfortune we could only oppose hard labor and the most rigid economy. We lived very sparingly. For several years butcher's meat was a stranger in the house; while all the members of the family exerted themselves to the utmost of their strength, and rather beyond it, in the labors of the farm. I doubt not but the hard labor and sorrow of this period of his life was in a great measure the cause of that depression of spirits with which Robert was so often afflicted through his whole life afterwards."

Though Burns's father may not have been profoundly skilled in farming, he was fertile in experiments. When he found that his farm was unproductive in corn, he thought the soil suitable for flax, and resolved, himself, to raise the commodity, while to the poet he allotted the task of manufacturing for the market. To accomplish this, it was necessary that he should be instructed in flax-dressing: accordingly, at midsum mer, 1781, Robert went to Irvine, where he wrought

under the eye of one Peacock, kinsman to his mother.

His mode of life was frugal enough. He possessed a single room for his lodgings, rented perhaps at the rate of a shilling a week. He passed his days in constant toil as a flax-dresser, and his food consisted chiefly of oatmeal sent to him from his father's family. A picture of his situation and feelings is luckily preserved, of his own drawing: the simplicity of the expression and the pure English style are not its highest qualities. He thus writes to his father:

"Honored sir :-I have purposely delayed writing, in the hope that I should have the pleasure of seeing you on new-year's day: but work comes so hard upon us that I do not choose to be absent on that account. My health is nearly the same as when you were here, only my sleep is a little sounder, and on the whole I am rather better than otherwise, though I mend by very slow degrees.

"The weakness of my nerves has so debilitated my mind that I dare neither review past wants, nor look forward into futurity: for the least anxiety or perturbation in my breast produces most unhappy effects on my whole frame. Sometimes, indeed, when for an hour my spirits are a little lightened, I glimmer a little into futurity; but my principal, and indeed my only pleasurable employment, is looking backwards and forwards in a moral and religious way. I am quite transported at the thought that ere long, perhaps very soon, I shall bid an eternal adieu to all pains, and uneasinesses, and disquietudes of this weary life, for I assure you, I am heartily tired of it; and, if I