and in 1808 it was published in London in four cantos. Of this edition Sir Walter Scott said (in a note to the Lady of the Lake) 'that it surpassed the efforts of Fergusson and came near to those of Burns.' An edition in five cantos was published in 1836. Mayne was author of a short poem on Hallowe'en,' printed in Ruddiman's Magazine in 1780, which had a direct influence on Burns's treatment of the same subject; and in 1781 he published his fine ballad of Logan Braes, two lines of which Burns copied into his Logan Water. Many have thought Mayne's the better poem of the two. His version of Helen of Kirkconnel is often quoted. For five years (1782-87) he was employed in the office of the brothers Foulis in Glasgow. His poem on 'Glasgow,' published in the Glasgow Magazine in 1783, was separately issued in 1803, and is a description of Glasgow and its ways, in the verse specially favoured by Burns, and a laudation of the energy and accomplishments of its citizens. The Siller Gun is humorous and descriptive. The subject of the poem is an ancient custom in Dumfries, called 'Shooting for the Siller Gun,' the gun being a small silver tube presented by James VI. to the incorporated trades as a prize to the best marksman. It is after the manner of Peblis to the Play and cognate rhymes down to Fergusson and Burns. Logan Braes. By Logan's streams that rin sae deep, But wae's my heart, thae days are gane, The characteristic short line, Herded sheep and gathered slaes, is in some of the versions filled out as I've herded sheep or gathered slaes. I dander dowie and forlane; Helen of Kirkconnel. I wish I were where Helen lies, Still seems to beckon me! Took deadly aim at me : My love, to disappoint the foe, On fair Kirkconnel-Lee! Though Heaven forbids my wrath to swell, For if, where all the graces shine- Ah, what avails it that, amain, I clove the assassin's head in twain ; I see her spirit in the air— Oh! when I'm sleeping in my grave, And o'er my head the rank weeds wave, Unite my love and me! Then from this world of doubts and sighs, Forget Kirkconnel-Lee! The story of Helen Irving (or Bell), daughter of the Laird of Kirkconnel, in Annandale, slain by the bullet aimed by a rejected suitor at his favoured rival, her betrothed, seems to date from the sixteenth century, and is enshrined in a fine old ballad. There are modern versions by Pinkerton and Jamieson - -not to speak of Wordsworth's Ellen Irwin-besides Mayne's. Many of the verses of the old ballad are incomparably more poetic, such as the last : I wish I were where Helen lies! For her sake that died for me. From The Siller Gun.' Frae far and near the country lads jades-nags Through crowds on crowds, collected round, The Corporations Trudge aff, while Echo's self is drowned In acclamations ! Alexander Wilson (1766-1813), a Scottish weaver-poet, became famous as the skilful delineator of American birds and the enthusiastic describer of American scenery and bird life. Born in Paisley, he was brought up a weaver, but became a pedlar, and in 1789 he added to his muslin goods and other commodities a prospectus of a volume of poems. But his hopes from the sale of his own verse proved vain, and he returned to the loom, at Lochwinnoch and at Paisley. In 1792 he issued anonymously his best poem, Watty and Meg, which was at first attributed to Burns. And Burns almost justified the implied criticism. His wife told Dr Robert Chambers that on hearing a hawker of chapbooks cry Watty and Meg, a new ballad by Robert Burns,' Burns exclaimed, 'I would make your plack a bawbee if it were mine.' A lampoon on the master-weavers during a trade dispute in Paisley, implying indiscreet sympathy with formers and French revolutionists, drove him to America in 1794. He got work in Philadelphia, travelled as a pedlar in New Jersey, and was a school-teacher in Pennsylvania. His skill in drawing birds led him to make a collection of all the birds in America. In October 1804 he set out on his first excursion, and wrote The Foresters, a Poem. In 1806 he was employed on the American edition of Rees's Cyclopædia. He soon prevailed upon the publisher to undertake a new venture-a work illustrating, by his own drawings and with full descriptions, all the birds of America, and in 1808-10 he brought out the first two volumes of the American Ornithology. In 1811 he made a canoe voyage down the Ohio, and travelled overland through the Mississippi Valley from Nashville to New Orleans. He continued 'collecting birds and subscribers,' writing and publishing, traversing swamps and forests in quest of rare birds, and undergoing the greatest privations and fatigues, till he had issued a seventh volume. At Philadelphia he sank under his severe labours, and there he was buried. In his Ornithology he showed he possessed descriptive powers, artistic sensibilities, and a varied and ornate style quite exceptional even in a Paisley poet.· The Bald Eagle. The celebrated cataract of Niagara is a noted place of resort for the bald eagle, as well on account of the fish procured there, as for the numerous carcases of squirrels, deer, bears, and various other animals that, in their attempts to cross the river above the falls, have been dragged into the current, and precipitated down that tremendous gulf, where, among the rocks that bound the rapids below, they furnish a rich repast for the vulture, the raven, and the bald eagle, the subject of the present account. This bird has been long known to naturalists, being common to both continents, and occasionally met with from a very high northern latitude to the borders of the torrid zone, but chiefly in the vicinity of the sea, and along the shores and cliffs of our lakes and large rivers. Formed by nature for braving the severest cold; feeding equally on the produce of the sea and of the land; possessing powers of flight capable of outstripping even the tempests themselves; unawed by anything but man; and, from the ethereal heights to which he soars, looking abroad at one glance on an immeasurable expanse of forests, fields, lakes, and ocean deep below him, he appears indifferent to [localities or] change of seasons, as in a few minutes he can pass from summer to winter, from the lower to the higher regions of the atmosphere, the abode of eternal cold, and from thence descend at will to the torrid or the arctic regions of the earth. In procuring fish he displays, in a very singular manner, the genius and energy of his character, which is fierce, contemplative, daring, and tyrannical-attributes not exerted but on particular occasions, but when put forth, overpowering all opposition. Elevated on the high dead limb of some gigantic tree that commands a wide view of the neighbouring shore and ocean, he seems calmly to contemplate the motions of the various feathered tribes that pursue their busy avocations below; the snow-white gulls slowly winnowing the air, the busy tringæ coursing along the sands, trains of ducks streaming over the surface, silent and watchful cranes intent and wading, clamorous crows, and all the winged multitudes that subsist by the bounty of this vast liquid magazine of nature. High over all these hovers one whose action instantly arrests his whole attention. By his wide curvature of wing and sudden suspension in air, he knows him to be the fish-hawk, settling over some devoted victim of the deep. His eye kindles at the sight, and balancing himself with half-opened wings on the branch, he watches the result. Down, rapid as an arrow from heaven, descends the distant object of his attention, the roar of its wings reaching the ear as it disappears in the deep, making the surges foam around. At this moment the eager looks of the eagle are all ardour; and, levelling his neck for flight, he sees the fish-hawk once more emerge, struggling with his prey, and mounting in the air with screams of exultation. These are the signal for our hero, who, launching into the air, instantly gives chase, and soon gains on the fish-hawk; each exerts his utmost to mount above the other, displaying in these rencontres the most elegant and sublime aërial evolutions. The unencumbered eagle rapidly advances, and is just on the point of reaching his opponent, when, with a sudden scream, probably of Is nae mortal vexed like me!' Volumes viii. and ix. of the Ornithology were published after Wilson's death by Ord, his assistant. The work was continued by Charles Lucien Bonaparte (1828-33); and an edition by Jardine (1832) has been more than once reprinted. See Lives by Crichton (1816), Ord (1828), Hetherington (1831), Jared Sparks (1851), Brightwell (1861), and Paton (1863); and a Sketch prefixed to Grosart's edition of Poems and Miscellaneous Prose (1876). Robert Burns.* Robert Burns was born on the 25th of January 1759, in a two-roomed clay cottage built by his father in the village of Alloway, which, carefully preserved, still stands-although there is some obstinate local scepticism on this point-about two miles from the town of Ayr. He came, on the one side, of a Kincardineshire yeoman family which, he believed, had suffered for the Stewarts; and on the other, of undoubted Ayrshire Covenanting stock. In his brief autobiography, written in the form of a letter to Dr John Moore, the novelist, in 1787, he says: 'My forefathers rented lands of the famous noble Keiths of Marshal, and had the honour to share their fate.' He told his friend, Ramsay of Ochtertyre, that his paternal grandfather 'had been plundered and driven out in the year 1715, when gardener to Earl Marischal,' and that his maternal great-grandfather was 'shot at Aird's Moss,' when Richard Cameron was taken prisoner. William Burnes, a gardener, nurseryman, and farmer who was thirty-eight years of age when his eldest son Robert was born, and is described as of thin sinewy figure, about five feet eight or nine inches in height, somewhat bent with toil, his haffet locks thin and bare, with a dark swarthy complexion-was a man of notable character and individuality. He wrote for his children a Manual of Religious Belief; induced his neighbours to hire a competent teacher, John Murdoch, for the village; and showed his boys-he had seven children in all-both by precept and by practice, how to base conduct on reason. Agnes Broun, the poet's mother, and eleven years her husband's junior, was an excellent housewife, with no pretensions to education; but it was probably from her that he inherited the lyrical gift. According to her daughter, Mrs Begg, she had a well-made sonsy figure of about the ordinary height, with a beautiful red and white complexion, a skin the most transparent I ever saw, red hair, dark eyes and eyebrows, with a fine square forehead.' Life was hard with the Burneses. Robert had two and a half years' schooling in Alloway. Then his father, with a view to keeping his children about him, ventured to take the farm of Mount Oliphant, a couple of miles distant from the seven-acre croft he had hitherto cultivated, undertaking to pay forty or forty-five pounds a year for seventy acres of poor land which he had to stock with £100 borrowed from his employer. From the age of nine the boy had none but intermittent schoolteaching; but his education was steadily carried on by his father, who taught his boys, in addition to the three 'R's,' geography and the rudiments both of ancient and of natural history, and, as Gilbert, the second son, testified, 'conversed familiarly on all subjects with us as if we had been men.' Possession of a Complete Letter-Writer inspired Robert with a strong desire to excel in letter-writ- 'After three years' tossing and whirling in the vortex of litigation,' William Burnes died of consumption in 1784; and, rescuing some small remains from his embarrassed estate, Robert and Gilbert took the farm of Mossgiel, in the adjoining parish of Mauchline. The poet's life continued to * Copyright 1902 by J. B. Lippincott Company to the poem entitled " Tam o'Shanter," page 819. be, on his brother's testimony, frugal and temperate ; it must have been so, for he had not more than seven pounds a year in cash. But before leaving Lochlea he had for the first time deviated from propriety in his relations with women, and Elizabeth Paton, his mother's maid-servant, bore him a daughter. The first genuine determination of his mind towards literary effort, the first appreciation of its usual aims and results, appears in certain entries in his Commonplace Book, which are undated, but may, though not without some hesitation, be ascribed to 1784. There he expressed a strong wish that he might be able to celebrate in verse the scenes of his native county, the locus of many of the actions of the 'Glorious Wallace, the Saviour of his Country,' as 'the excellent Ramsay' and the still more excellent Fergusson' had celebrated the scenes with which they were familiar. So he made poetry at once the exposition and the sedative of his passions, wrote a welcome to his illegitimate child, Burns was never more productive than at this time; it is safe to set down as the output of the later autumn and early winter these poems: To a Mouse,' 'Halloween,' 'Man was Made to Mourn,' 'The Cotter's Saturday Night,' 'Address to the Deil,' 'The Jolly Beggars,' 'To James Smith,' 'The Vision,' 'The Author's Earnest Cry and Prayer,' 'The Twa Dogs,' 'The Ordination,' and Scotch Drink'-the works which formed the foundation of his future fame. Publication was precipitated by the discovery that Jean Ar ROBERT BURNS. From the Portrait by Nasmyth in the National Gallery of Scotland at Edinburgh. and versified epistles to local brother poets, such as David Sillar and John Lapraik. He threw his whole soul into the task. He fell in love with Jean Armour, daughter of a master-mason in Mauchline. He took sides with the New Lights. or Liberal clergy against the Old Lights or Highflyers, of whom his own minister in Mauchline, the Rev. William Auld, was one; wrote skits in verse for the cause-'The Twa Herds,' the 'Epistle to John Goldie,' 'Holy Willie's Prayer' --and was encouraged by the countenance and friendship of clergymen and lawyers who appreciated his cleverness. His poems circulated in manuscript; and as by 1785 Mossgiel, which 'lies very high and mostly on a cold wet bottom,' promised to be no more profitable than Lochlea, he had doubtless come to contemplate publishing. mour was soon to become a mother. Burns gave her a writing acknowledging her as his wife under certain conditions, but Armour disapproved of the proposal made, and induced his daughter to destroy the document. The poet, rendered wellnigh desperate, resolved to emigrate to Jamaica as book-keeper on the estate of an Ayr family of the name of Douglas. Partly to raise money for his passage, he now brought out his first volume, the famous Kilmarnock edition -Poems chiefly in the Scottish Dialect-a copy of which was sold in 1898 for five hundred and forty-five guineas. Meantime there seems to have occurred the 'Highland Mary' episode. According to the the best hypothesis. founded on the few facts that have been ascertained, almost immediately after the breach with the Armour family, Jean having been despatched to Paisley, the poet plighted his troth to Mary Campbell, a Highland maid-servant residing in the neighbourhood, who went home to Dunoon to prepare for marriage, and straightway died, to be apparently forgotten for the moment by Burns (who had never ceased to love Jean), but to live for ever in 'To Mary in Heaven' and other poems. The success of the Kilmarnock edition of the poems (July 1786) changed the current of the poet's life. He was induced to abandon the Jamaica |