Carlyle on Burns 
 
 By John Muir 
 
 It* 
 •I' 
 
 Glasgow: Wm. Hodge & Co. 
 
fyxmll Hmvmitg plrt^tJg 
 
 BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME 
 FROM THE 
 
 SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND 
 
 THE GIFT OF 
 
 Henrg ^, Sage 
 
 189Z 
 
 £:. «.3.f^/?. : . .M////.^^, 
 
 6896-1 
 
PR4331.C282M9r"'''''-'''"^ 
 Carlyle on Burns, 
 
 3 1924 013 447 218 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of this book is in 
 the Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924013447218 
 
Carlyle on Burns 
 
Carlyle on Burns 
 
 JOHN MUIR 
 
 GLASGOW: WM. HODGE & CO. 
 i8q8 
 
i^3 1^ 
 
" To the present Editor it has seemed possible 
 some glimmering of light, for here and there a 
 human soul, might lie in these confused Paper 
 Masses now entrusted to him ; wherefore he deter- 
 mines to edit the same." — Past and Present. 
 
Preface 
 
 'TpHOMAS CARLYLE is best known to the world 
 as a writer on Burns, by his Essay on the 
 Poet. But this Essay is so well known that I need 
 not do more than merely remind the reader, satiated 
 with the Bacchanalian insipidity of anniversary dinners, 
 that this deliverance is by universal consent considered 
 to be the best that has ever been said on the subject 
 with which it deals. 
 
 In addition to this Essay, there are to be found 
 scattered throughout Carlyle's writings and collateral 
 books — English and foreign — numerous passages on 
 Burns which are known only to students of the by- 
 ways of literature. It has been my aim to collect, 
 translate, and arrange these passages in such a form, 
 and with such editorial helps, as may assist the 
 general reader to understand the true value and 
 significance of these fragments. 
 
 As the circumstances in which he lived and the 
 subjects which occupied his thoughts when these 
 passages were written gave a colouring to these frag- 
 mentai-y utterances on his great countryman, I have 
 intercalated a short sketch of Carlyle's life and a strict 
 chronology of his productions. Viewed in the Hght of 
 this biographical information, the passages will not 
 
PREFACE 
 
 appear so disjointed and pointless as they otherwise 
 might seem, read apart from the context of the 
 subjects which the author evidently intended they 
 should illustrate. 
 
 I have refrained from loading my pages with a mass 
 of notes and references, which could only interest 
 students. I have preferred making sure of my infor- 
 mation and presenting it in the form of connecting 
 narrative, as perhaps more acceptable to the reader. 
 
 To Mr. John P. Anderson, of the British Museum, I 
 am obliged for procuring me a copy of Carlyle's review 
 of Heintze's translation of Burns into German, and to 
 my friend Mr. David Wilson, Deputy-Commissioner, 
 Burmah, for drawing my attention to this almost 
 unknown article, not the least of the many things 
 brought to light by his Mr. Froude and Thomas 
 Carlyle. This little reviev/ of Heintze will be none 
 the less welcomed by the reader that it has hitherto 
 escaped the notice not only of Carlyle's biographers, but, 
 what is more remarkable still, of his bibliographers. 
 
 JOHN MUIR. 
 
 12 Albert Drive, Crossbill, 
 Glasgow, \th December, 1897. 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 'T'^OWARDS the close of last century, 
 Ecclefechan presented an appearance 
 differing little from its aspect to-day. Lying 
 in a hollow surrounded by wooded slopes, it 
 consisted of two rows of houses of a plain, 
 unornamental character, which were annually 
 whitewashed in honour of the village fair. 
 Down one side of this single street, at that 
 period, ran an open brook, which has been 
 immortalised in Sartor Resartus as "the little 
 Kuhbach," but which is now, for sanitary 
 reasons, built over. The street is irregularly 
 formed, a circumstance due not only to the 
 
 9 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 disposition of the houses, but also to the 
 windings of the little stream which gushes 
 kindly by, wimpling and gurgling on its way 
 to join the Mein water at the foot of the 
 town, before the Mein loses itself in the river 
 Annan. On the west side of the burn the 
 houses are of single and two stories, almost 
 alternately, which, when seen from a distance, 
 resemble the battlements of an imposing 
 fortress. 
 
 In this little village Robert Burns might 
 frequently have been seen during the last 
 years of his life, while acting temporarily as 
 supervisor of excise during the illness of that 
 official. He made at least two visits to Eccle- 
 fechan, a record of which has been preserved 
 in print. One of these visits is recorded by 
 an individual who was lying in the womb of 
 Eternity at the time of the Poet's first recorded 
 visit; and the other, which took place early 
 in the spring of the year prior to his death, 
 has been recorded by Burns himself On the 
 day following his entry into Ecclefechan he 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 had the misfortune to be snowed up ; and, to 
 break the monotony of his enforced imprison- 
 ment in the village inn, he imbibed to an 
 extent which has left perceptible traces of 
 a suggestive nature on the orthography of a 
 letter to George Thomson, from which I borrow 
 the following extract — a strange mixture of 
 humour, exaggeration, and unconscious ungrate- 
 fulness : — 
 
 You cannot have any idea of the predicament in which 
 I write you. In the course of my duty as supervisor 
 (in which capacity I have acted of late), I came yester- 
 night to this unfortunate, wicked little village. I would 
 have gone forward, but snows of ten feet deep have 
 impeded my progress. I have tried to "gae back the 
 gate I cam again," but the same obstacle has shut me 
 up within insuperable bars. To add to my misfortune, 
 since dinner a scraper has been torturing cat-gut in 
 sounds that would have insulted the dying agonies of 
 a sow under the hand of a butcher, and thinks himself, 
 on that very account, exceeding good company. In 
 fact, I have been in a dilemma, either to get drunk, to 
 forget my miseries ; or to hang myself, to get rid of 
 them : like a prudent man (a character congenial to 
 my every thought, word, and deed), I, of two evils, have 
 chosen the least, and am very drunk, at your service ! 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 The reader, knowing the Poet's unreserve, 
 will not, I think, be disposed to accept the 
 above statements as a circumstantial account 
 of the conditions under which the letter was 
 written. Could any man, in the situation 
 described by Burns, have written such a letter? 
 I think not. Indeed, most of Burns's letters 
 to Thomson seem to have been often of the 
 nature of practical jokes played by a humorist 
 upon an essentially dull, serious man. Be this 
 as it may, it is to be regretted that our Poet 
 so far forgot himself as to call sweet Eccle- 
 fechan by the uncomplimentary epithets he 
 has used in describing that now famous village. 
 Little did he dream, in his barleycornian 
 humour, of the destinies of Ecclefechan infants ; 
 one of whom, named Thomas Carlyle, born on 
 the fourth of December of the very year of 
 Burns's unlucky visit, was afterwards to be 
 known to the world as the most sympathetic 
 interpreter of his life and writings. 
 
 It is not improbable that Burns, as he sat 
 at the window of the village inn on that bleak, 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 February day, more than a hundred years ago, 
 enjoying his post-prandial glass, and watching 
 the snowflakes melting in the spated stream, 
 may perhaps have cast his eyes on a white- 
 washed two -storey house on the opposite side 
 of the street, and a little way from the 
 hostelry. If he did, he may have observed 
 a man with a stern, resolute face; clear, intel- 
 telligent eyes ; and a strong, rather than refined, 
 but not a coarse, mouth. This man, a stone- 
 mason to trade, is well known to his neighbours 
 as a person of great force of character, and 
 much respected in the district, not less for 
 his moral worth than for his natural strength 
 of intellect. He is one year older than the 
 Poet, but outlived his ill-starred contemporary 
 thirty-six years. James Carlyle, the name of 
 the individual I have endeavoured to describe, 
 chanced on one of Burns's visits to Ecclefechan 
 to see the subject of his eldest son's future 
 Essay and Lecture. But I cannot do better 
 than allow the younger Carlyle to contrast 
 these tv/o remarkable men, with his reflections 
 13 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 thereon, for James Carlyle, in his own way, 
 
 was quite as remarkable as Robert Burns : — 
 
 The more I reflect on it, the more must I admire how 
 completely Nature had taught my Father ; how completely 
 he was devoted to his Work, to the Task of his Life ; and 
 content to let all pass by unheeded that had not relation 
 to this. It is a singular fact, for example, that though 
 a man of such openness and clearness, he had never, I 
 believe, read three pages of Bums's Poems. Not even 
 when all about him became noisy and enthusiastic (I 
 the loudest) on that matter, did he feel it worth his 
 while to renew his investigations of it, or once turn his 
 face towards it. The Poetry he liked (he did not call 
 it Poetry) was truth and the wisdom of Reality. Burns, 
 indeed, could have done nothing for him. As high a 
 Greatness hung over his world as over that of Burns 
 (the everlasting greatness of the Infinite itself) ; neither 
 was he, like Burns, called to rebel against the world, 
 but to labour patiently at his Task there ; " uniting the 
 Possible with the Necessary " to bring out the Real 
 (wherein also lay an Ideal). Burns could not have in 
 any way strengthened him in his course ; and, there- 
 fore, was for him a phenomenon merely. Nay, Rumour 
 had been so busy with Bums, and Destiny and his 
 own desert had in very deed so marred his name, 
 that the good rather avoided him. Yet it was not 
 with aversion that my Father regarded Burns ; at worse, 
 with indifference and neglect. I have heard him 
 
 14 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 speak of once seeing him : standing at " Rob Scott's 
 Smithy" (at Ecclefechan, no doubt superintending some 
 work), he heard some one say, "There is the Poet 
 Bums " ; he went out to look and saw a man with 
 boots on, hke a well-dressed farmer, walking down the 
 village on the opposite side of the burn. This was all 
 the relation these two men ever had ; they were very 
 nearly coevals. I know Robert Burns, and I knew my 
 Father ; yet were you to ask me which had the greater 
 natural faculty, I might perhaps actually pause before 
 replying ! Burns had an infinitely wider Education ; 
 my Father a far wholesomer ; besides, the one was a 
 man of Musical Utterance, and the other wholly a man 
 of action, even with speech subservient thereto. Never, 
 of all the men I have seen, has one come personally 
 in my way in whom the Endowment from Nature and 
 the Arena from Fortune were so utterly out of all pro- 
 portion. I have said this often, and partly know it. As 
 a man of speculation (bad Culture ever unfolded him) 
 he must have gone wild and desperate like Burns ; 
 but he was a man of conduct, and work kept him all 
 right. What strange, shapeable creatures we are ! 
 
 Although the elder Carlyle looked on Burns 
 with the indifference ascribed to him by his 
 gifted son, it was far otherwise with Thomas 
 Carlyle, whose love and admiration of our 
 Poet goes back to the opening years of the 
 
 15 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 present century, when young Carlyle was 
 acting as mathematical teacher in Annan 
 Academy, where he had been educated before 
 going to Edinburgh University. In one of 
 his letters to an old college friend we have a 
 pleasant glimpse of Carlyle's early enthusiasm 
 for Burns — an enthusiasm which subsequently 
 developed into what Carlyle, borrowing a 
 phrase of Hume's, called " hero worship," 
 which ultimately found expression in his 
 famous Essay and Lecture, and in numerous 
 passages, pitched on a somewhat higher key of 
 rapturous admiration, scattered throughout his 
 works, and now, for the first time, gathered 
 together and published in book form : — 
 
 It was near two o'clock when we got to Dumfries, 
 and being consequently prevented from getting within 
 a league of St. Michael's, we saw the ceremony of 
 laying the stone, exactly as well as if we had been in 
 the grand square of Timbuctoo. Yet, notwithstanding 
 this — notwithstanding that all the scullions in Dum- 
 friesshire were " let slip," notwithstanding the cantering 
 and parading of the Ettrick yeomen, notwithstanding 
 the paper caps, the figured roquelaures, the magic 
 
 16 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 lanterns of freemasonry, it was a striking scene — 
 Scotland paying the tribute of well-earned honour to 
 one of the noblest of her sons. It is a great pity 
 that the monument will not be over his grave ; many 
 inconveniences ought to have been submitted to in 
 order to gain this point. 
 
 In this account of the laying of the founda- 
 tion stone of the Burns Mausoleum in St. 
 Michael's churchyard, Dumfries, Carlyle seems 
 to have overlooked the fact that the remains 
 of the Poet could be transferred to the 
 memorial. This was afterwards done. But 
 to Carlyle, as to many others, the original 
 grave, with the plain tombstone, inscribed 
 simply with the Poet's name, was a far more 
 touching memorial than the Mausoleum. On 
 this point, one of his biographers says, in 
 ignorance of the letter just quoted : — 
 
 It was probably during the Annan days that Carlyle 
 went to Dumfries to see the grave of Burns. This 
 glimpse of his boyhood, a picture that must henceforth 
 be treasured in the Scottish heart, he gave to an 
 American visitor a few years ago, during a walk from 
 Chelsea to Piccadilly. He told of his early admiration 
 of Burns — how he used to creep into the churchyard 
 
 17 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 of Dumfries, when a little boy, and find the tomb of 
 the Poet, and sit and read the simple inscription by the 
 hour. "There it was," he said, "in the midst of poor 
 fellow-labourers and artizans, and the name — Robert 
 Bums ! " At morn, at noon, at eventide, he loved to 
 go and read that name. Thus were thoughts dimly 
 suggested to the mind of the boy, that quickened and 
 grew, till at length, in his manhood, they found ex- 
 pression in what was the first — and seems likely to be 
 the last — worthy and all-sufficing exposition of the life 
 and works of the Scottish bard. 
 
 Another reminiscence of Carlyle's Annan 
 days relates to a person whose connection 
 with our Poet left the same unfavourable im- 
 pression on Carlyle that it has made on many 
 others : — 
 
 Musical Thomson (memorable, rather than venerable, 
 as the publisher of Burns's Songs), him I saw one 
 evening in the reading-room [at Annan], a clean-shaved, 
 commonplace old gentleman in scratch wig, whom we 
 [Carlyle and Irving] spoke to a few words and took a 
 good look of. 
 
 The following extract from a letter of 
 Burns to Thomson seems to have struck 
 Carlyle very forcibly, and to have inspired 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 two remarkable passages which I shall after- 
 wards quote : — 
 
 As to remuneration, you may think my songs either 
 above or below price, for they shall absolutely be the 
 one or the other. In the honest enthusiasm with 
 which I embark in your undertaking, to talk of 
 money, fee, hire, &c., would be downright sodomy of 
 soul ! 
 
 Upon which singular passage Carlyle remarks, 
 
 in his dramatic fashion : — 
 
 In the most heroic age, as in the most unheroic, he 
 [the heroic man] will have to say, as Burns said proudly 
 and humbly of his little Scottish Songs — little dew- 
 drops of celestial melody in an age when so much was 
 unmelodious — "By Heaven, they shall either be invalu- 
 able or of no value ; I do not need your guineas for 
 them ! " 
 
 Comparing this with what Burns actually 
 
 said, the reader will observe that the passage 
 
 is evidently quoted from memory. In another 
 
 place, Carlyle refers to the same subject in a 
 
 quieter and more effective way, thus : — 
 
 Some brief, pure moments of poetic life were yet 
 appointed him in the composition of his Songs. We 
 can understand how he grasped at the employment ; 
 
 19 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 and how, too, he spurned all other reward for it but 
 what the labour itself brought him. For the soul of 
 Burns, though scathed and marred, was yet living in 
 its full moral strength, though sharply conscious of its 
 errors and abasement ; and here in his destitution and 
 degradation, was one act of seeming nobleness and 
 self-devotedness left even for him to perform. He felt, 
 too, that with all the "thoughtless follies" that had 
 "laid him low,'' the world was unjust and cruel to 
 him ; and he silently appealed to another and calmer 
 time. Not as a hired soldier, but as a patriot, would 
 he strive for the glory of his countiy : so he cast from 
 him the poor sixpence a day, and served zealously as 
 a Volunteer. Let us not grudge him this last luxury of 
 his existence ; let him not have appealed to us in 
 vain ! The money was not necessary to him ; he 
 struggled through without . it : long since these guineas 
 would have been gone, and now the high-mindedness of 
 refusing them will plead for him in all hearts for ever. 
 
 I may as well save the reader the trouble of 
 
 hunting up the verse from which Carlyle quotes 
 
 the touching words in the above extract : — 
 
 The poor inhabitant below 
 
 Was quick to learn, and wise to know. 
 
 And keenly felt the friendly glow. 
 
 And softer flame ; 
 But thoughtless follies laid him low, 
 
 And stain'd his name ! 
 20 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 Before two years had passed, Carlyle gave up 
 his situation in Annan, having been appointed 
 to the mastership of a Kirkcaldy school. Here 
 he formed the famous friendship with Edward 
 Irving (about which he afterwards wrote so 
 beautifully), a young man from Annan, who 
 had taught a school at Haddington, and had 
 acted as tutor to Jane Baillie Welsh, who 
 afterwards became Carlyle's wife, but who 
 narrowly escaped becoming the spouse of her 
 tutor. 
 
 In the summer of 1818 Irving gave up his 
 school at Kirkcaldy and removed to Edin- 
 burgh; and later in the same year Carlyle also 
 " kicked the schoolmaster function over," having 
 resolved " that I, for my part, would prefer to 
 perish in a ditch, if necessary, than continue 
 living by such a trade." The bent of his 
 mind will best be seen from this quotation : — 
 
 I was timorously aiming towards literature. I thought 
 in audacious moments I might perhaps earn some trifle 
 that way by honest labour somehow to help my finance. 
 But, in fact, there came little enough of produce or 
 finance to me from that source, and for the first years 
 21 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 absolutely none, in spite of my diligent and desperate 
 efforts, which are sad to me to think of even now. 
 
 Carlyle's literary work of this melancholy 
 period consisted of contributions to various 
 publications, which even his genius has scarcely 
 rescued from oblivion. 
 
 Through the suggestion of his faithful friend, 
 Edward Irving (who had entered on his 
 ministry in London), Carlyle, in 1822, became 
 tutor to Charles Buller. This took him, after 
 a time, from Edinburgh to London, and a two- 
 fold influence was now at work stimulating his 
 literary activity. He continued with the Bullers 
 for two years, during which time he published 
 his Life of Schiller. During 1824 he published 
 two translated works — Legendre's Elements of 
 Geometry, and Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's 
 Apprenticeship. 
 
 Carlyle has recorded a reminiscence of Burns, 
 told to him by one of his London friends — 
 "the noble lady" of his and Irving's corres- 
 pondence, Mrs. Basil Montagu, to whom, as 
 Miss Benson, the Poet had addressed a letter 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 enclosing a copy of the sonnet which he com- 
 posed on his thirty-fourth birthday. Carlyle 
 says : — 
 
 In early life she had made some visits to Nithsdale 
 (to the Craiks of Arbigland), and had seen Burns, of 
 whom her worship continued fervent, her few recollec- 
 tions always a jewel she was ready to produce. She 
 must have been strikingly beautiful at that time, and 
 Bums's recognition and adoration would not be wanting ; 
 the most royally courteous of mankind she always 
 defined him, as the first mark of his genius. I think 1 
 have heard that, at a ball at Dumfries, she had frugally 
 constructed some dress by sewing real flowers upon it, 
 and shone by that bit of art and by her fine bearing, 
 as the cynosure of all eyes. Her father, I gradually 
 understood (not from herself), had been a man of incon- 
 siderable wealth or position, a wine merchant in York, 
 his name Benson. 
 
 Perhaps Carlyle had the above reminiscence 
 
 in his mind when he wrote the following 
 
 passage, which I transcribe from one of his 
 
 most scathing books : — 
 
 No " politer " man was to be found in Britain than the 
 rustic Robert Burns : high duchesses were captivated 
 with the chivalrous ways of the man ; recognised that 
 here was the true chivalry and divine nobleness of 
 
 23 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 bearing — as indeed they well might — now when the 
 Peasant God and Norse Thor had come down among 
 them again ! Chivalry this, if not as they do chivalry in 
 Drury Lane or West End Drawing-rooms, yet as they do 
 it in Valhalla and the General Assembly of the Gods. 
 For, indeed, who invented chivalry, politeness, or any- 
 thing that is noble and melodious and beautiful among 
 us, except, precisely, the like of Johnson and Burns ? 
 
 But Mrs. Montagu has left on record a 
 much more preferable account of her meeting 
 with Burns than that given by Carlyle. It is 
 so little known and so characteristic of the 
 Poet, that I do not hesitate to quote it here as 
 explanatory of and supplementary to Carlyle's 
 reminiscences : — 
 
 I dined with Burns at Arbigland ; he was witty, 
 drank as others drank, was long in coming to the tea 
 table. It was then the fashion for young ladies to be 
 busy with something — I was working a flower, and 
 asked the Poet if he would do a bit of my work. 
 " Oh," said he, " you think my hand unsteady with 
 wine. I cannot work a flower, Madam, but I can 
 thread a needle." He pulled the thread from the 
 needle, and re-threaded it in a moment. " Can a tipsy 
 man do that?" He talked to me of his children, 
 particularly of his eldest boy, whom he praised as a lad 
 
 24 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 of promise. "And yet, Madam," he said, with a 
 sarcastic glance, " I hope he will turn out a glorious 
 blockhead, and so make his fortune." 
 
 The lad here referred to, the Poet's eldest 
 son, Robert Burns, Junior ("the laird"), did 
 not turn out a glorious blockhead, and con- 
 sequently failed to realise the fortune which 
 his fond parent had predicted, had Nature, 
 and her best beloved Bard, been less kind to 
 him. He spent the best part of his life in 
 the Stamp Office, London, from which he 
 retired on a small annuity, and removed per- 
 manently to Dumfries, just one year before the 
 death of his mother. In 1895, his grandson, 
 Robert Burns the Fourth, died near Edinburgh 
 in poverty ; an ineffectual appeal having been 
 made to the public on his behalf by a few 
 kindly-disposed individuals. 
 
 It was during his visits to Miss Welsh at 
 Haddington, to whom he had been introduced 
 by Irving, that Carlyle made the acquaintance 
 of the Poet's brother Gilbert, who was at that 
 time acting as factor on Lord Blantyre's 
 
 25 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 Lennoxton estate, near Bolton, and about three 
 
 miles from Haddington, the birthplace of John 
 
 Knox, from whom Miss Welsh was descended 
 
 on the maternal side. Carlyle derived a good 
 
 deal of information from Gilbert concerning his 
 
 brother, which he afterwards put to good use. 
 
 He refers to Gilbert Burns, in his Essay on 
 
 the Poet, as "the best evidence*'; and in his 
 
 Lecture, as " Burns's Brother Gilbert, a man of 
 
 much sense and worth"; and in one of his 
 
 letters he speaks of him as "a most estimable 
 
 man." In this connection I may here quote 
 
 a letter written by Miss Welsh many years 
 
 after she had become Mrs. Carlyle : — 
 
 That little picture of your visit to Grant's Braes ! 
 How pretty, how dream-like ! Awaking so many re- 
 collections of my own young visiting there ! The 
 dinners of rice and currants — a very few currrants — 
 kind, thrifty Mrs. Gilbert Burns used to give me, and 
 such a welcome ! Of play-fellows, boys and girls — all, 
 I fancy, dead now — who made my Saturdays at Grant's 
 Braes white days for me ! I went to see the dear old 
 home when I was last at Sunny Bank, and found the 
 new prosaic farmhouse in its stead, and it was as if 
 my heart had knocked against it ! A sort of (moral) 
 
 26 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 blow in the breast is what I feel always at these sudden 
 revelations of the new, strange, uncared-for thing 
 usurping the place of the thing one knew as well as 
 one's self, and had all sorts -of associations with, and 
 had hung the fondest memories on ! When I first saw 
 Mrs. Somerville (of mathematical celebrity), I was struck 
 with her exact likeness to Mrs. Gilbert Bums — minus 
 the geniality and plus the feathers on her head — and 
 I remember remarking to my husband that, after all, 
 Mrs. Burns was far the cleverer v/oman of the two, 
 inasmuch as to bring up twelve children, as these 
 young Burnses were brought up, and keep up such a 
 comfortable house as Grant's Braes, all on eighty pounds 
 a year, was a much more intricate problem than the 
 reconcilement of the Physical Sciences ! And Mr. 
 Carlyle cordially agreed with me. 
 
 The friend to whom Mrs. Carlyle addressed 
 the above letter has also recorded his re- 
 membrance of a visit in early life to Grant's 
 Braes : — 
 
 Grant's Braes happened to be the residence of Gilbert 
 Burns, the elder brother of the Poet. He was standing 
 at his door . . . and brought me into the house. I 
 sat patiently and wonderingly by one side of the fire- 
 place, and, young as I was, I felt a sort of awe. I 
 knew about Burns and his songs, and a kind of 
 i-everential feeling possessed me as I sat in his brother's 
 
 27 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 house. I had often seen Gilbert in church, where 
 he was an elder, and had marked him, especially 
 on sacramental occasions, when he solemnly dis- 
 pensed the sacred bread. He had a splendid head, 
 with high forehead and "lyart haffets wearing thin 
 and bare.'' The lower part of his face was less 
 refined than that of his brother : the mouth larger, 
 the chin well developed, indicating stronger moral 
 qualities. 
 
 Carlyle married Miss Welsh on October 17, 
 1826. The young couple took up house in 
 Comely Bank, Edinburgh. Here he wrote 
 Wotton Reinfred, an unfinished novel containing 
 much of the rough material out of which part 
 of Sartor Resartus was afterwards fashioned ; 
 and published German Romance. 
 
 The Carlyles left the Scottish Metropolis 
 after a residence of only eighteen months, and 
 settled on Craigenputtoch, a small estate be- 
 longing to Mrs. Carlyle, situated about fifteen 
 miles north-west of Dumfries. It was from 
 this moorland retreat, where Sartor and most 
 of his Essays were written, that Carlyle sent 
 forth the magnificent Essay on Burns, con- 
 28 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 cerning which he wrote to Goethe under date 
 
 September 25, 1828, as follows: — 
 
 The only thing of any moment I have written since 
 I came hither is an " Essay on Bums " for the next 
 number of the Edinburgh Review, which, I suppose, 
 will be published in a few weeks. Perhaps you have 
 never heard of this Burns ; and yet he was a man of 
 the most decisive genius, but bom in the rank of a 
 peasant, and miserably wasted away by the complexities 
 of his strange situation ; so that all he effected was 
 comparatively a trifle, and he died before middle age. 
 We English, especially we Scotch, love Bums more 
 than any other poet we have had for centuries. It has 
 often struck me to remark that he was born a few 
 months only before Schiller, in the year 1759, and that 
 neither of these two men, of whom I reckon Burns, 
 perhaps naturally, even the greater, ever heard the 
 other's name, but that they shone as stars in opposite 
 hemispheres, the little atmosphere of the earth inter- 
 cepting their mutual light. 
 
 Carlyle is in error in saying that the German 
 and Scottish poets were unknown to each other; 
 and it would have given him great pleasure 
 had he known, as he may have learned after- 
 wards, that Burns possessed a copy of Schiller's 
 Robbers, and that he had also read Goethe's 
 29 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 Werter, both of which had become popular in 
 this country on being translated into English; 
 and were, moreover, of a nature, both in subject 
 and method of treatment, likely to attract our 
 National Bard. 
 
 Readers of Carlyle must have noticed with 
 what fondness he dwells on the births of such 
 of his heroes as chanced to be born in the 
 same year ; and this fact of Schiller having 
 been born a few months after Burns, which he 
 refers to above as having often struck him, 
 was present to his mind when writing his 
 Life of Schiller, in which will be found the 
 following passage : — 
 
 Johann Christoph Friedrich Schiller was a native of 
 Marbach, a small town of Wurtemberg, situated on the 
 banks of the Nekar. He was born on the loth of 
 November, 1759 — a few months later than our own 
 Robert Burns. 
 
 In the same biography he institutes the 
 following comparison of Wilhehn Tell, pro- 
 duced in 1804, and Schiller's delineation of 
 Swiss peasant life, with the peasantry of 
 Burns's Cottar's Saturday Night: — 
 3° 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 The highest quahty of art is to conceal itself: these 
 peasants of Schiller's are what everyone imagines he 
 could imitate successfully ; yet, in the hands of any 
 but a true and strong-minded poet, they dwindle into 
 repulsive coarseness or mawkish insipidity. Among our 
 own writers who have tried such subjects, we remember 
 none that has succeeded equally with Schiller. One 
 potent, but ill-fated genius, has, in far different circum- 
 stances and with far other means, shown that he could 
 have equalled him. The Cottar's Saturday Night of 
 Burns is, in its own humble way, as quietly beautiful, 
 as simplex mundiiiis, as the scenes of Tell. No other 
 has even approached them, though some gifted persons 
 have attempted it. 
 
 Apposite this comparison by a British critic 
 of Burns's work with that of Schiller may be 
 placed Sainte-Beuve's remarks on the same 
 poem, and Aloisius Bertrand's description of 
 the interior of a farmhouse, whither he had 
 gone for shelter from a storm : — 
 
 By the side of this, we may set the Poet Burns's 
 famous piece. The Cottar's Saturday Night. We should 
 then see in what respect, quite apart from the poetic 
 form, the latter maintains a great superiority. For, 
 where Bertrand strives, above all, to be picturesque. 
 Bums shows himself — in addition to this — cordial, moral, 
 
 31 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 Christian, patriotic. His episode of Jenny introduces 
 and personifies the chastity of emotion ; the Bible, read 
 aloud, casts a religious glow over the whole scene. 
 Then come those lofty thoughts upon the greatness of 
 old Scotland, which is based on such home scenes 
 as this : Sic fortis Etruria crevit. 
 
 Replying to Carlyle's letter on June 25 th, 
 1829, Goethe says: — 
 
 With your countryman Burns, who, if he were still 
 living, would be your neighbour, I am sufficiently ac- 
 quainted to prize him. The mention of him in your 
 letter leads me to take up his poems again, and 
 especially to read once more the story of his life, which, 
 truly, like the history of many a fair genius, is extremely 
 sad. 
 
 The poetic gift is seldom united with the gift 
 of managing life, and making good any adequate 
 position. 
 
 In his poems I have recognised a free spirit, capable 
 of grasping the moment with vigour, and winning 
 gladness from it. To my regret, I could gather this 
 from a few pieces only, for the Scottish dialect makes 
 most of his poems perplexing to us, and both time and 
 opportunity are wanting for the explanation of them 
 in detail. 
 
 Writing again on the 5th of October, 1830, 
 32 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 Goethe communicates the interesting information 
 that— 
 
 A young man of much talent, and successful as a 
 translator, is busy with Burns. I take an eager interest 
 in the work. 
 
 Such intelligence could hardly fail to give 
 
 Carlyle great satisfaction. This appears in a 
 
 letter to another German correspondent : — 
 
 That one of my fellow-associates is engaged with a 
 translation of our much-loved Burns is an incident 
 which no Briton can take due notice of without intei-est. 
 May this world-wide Nature singer and people's poet 
 find fit treatment at his [Kaufmann's] hands ! In these 
 Scotch wood-notes wild, if they might find fit echo in 
 a foreign tongue, linger sighings of the eternal melodies, 
 which are the more stirring on account of their simplicity. 
 By all manner of Britons Burns's Poems are talked of 
 and sung, read and re-read from childhood upward. 
 The translation thereof is no doubt beset with diffi- 
 culties extreme — in the idiomatic turns of Scottish 
 speech, those tender outbursts, and that simple rustic 
 charm of Scottish dialect ; which, notwithstanding, the 
 German tongue before all others is fitted to faithfully 
 picture and truly body forth. My best wishes go with 
 Herr Kaufmann in his difficult undertaking. 
 
 " Fellow -associates " refers to Kaufmann, 
 
 33 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 who was a member of the Berlin Society for 
 Foreign Literature, of which Carlyle was a 
 foreign honorary member. His Gedichte von 
 Robert Burns, published in 1839, was the first 
 translation of Burns into German. We shall 
 presently see that Carlyle, after examining 
 Kaufmann's work, had but a poor opinion of 
 the " young man's " abilities, so laudably 
 referred to by Goethe, who, as the result now 
 shows, was a little too sanguine. 
 
 Writing to Goethe, in reply to his letter of 
 5th October, 1830, Carlyle makes the following 
 remarks on Burns, apropos the publication of 
 the correspondence between Schiller and 
 Goethe : — 
 
 In Schiller himself there is almost a spirit -like 
 abstraction ; yet a painful isolation, except from you, 
 is also manifest : we could figure him as some 
 Prometheus stealing fire, indeed, from Heaven ; but to 
 whom also the Gods, as punishment, had sent chains 
 and a gnawing vulture. How different was his fate 
 from our own poor Burns, blest with an equal talent, 
 as high a spirit, but smitten with a far heavier curse, 
 and to whom no guiding friend, warmly as his heart 
 could love, and still long for Wisdom, was ever given ! 
 
 34 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 One such as you might have saved him, and nothing 
 else would ; but only the vain, the idle, the dissipated 
 gathered round him — he was alone among his kind, 
 and courage and patience at last failed him, and he 
 lost all that made him man. He was of Schiller's age : 
 in the second year of that fair Weimar union, Burns 
 perished miserably, deserted and disgraced, in that 
 same Dumfries where they have erected Mausoleums 
 over him, now that it is all unavailing, and would buy 
 a scrap of his handwriting as if it were bank-paper. 
 Such is the sad history which, in generation after 
 generation, is too often repeated to us. 
 
 Having here come upon Burns, I will add my heartiest 
 wishes, not unmixed with considerable fears of a negative 
 result, that your young translator may be successful with 
 him. The changeful, too fugitive expressiveness of his 
 diction is one great charm with Burns ; at all times 
 hard to seize by a translator, and no doubt doubly so 
 when hidden in the rough guise of our Scottish pro- 
 vincial dialect. Besides, his chief, indeed his only, true 
 poetical writings are songs, which are of all the most 
 unmanageable. Otherwise Burns is only a Volksdichter, 
 more notable for shrewd sense, passionate attachment, 
 and a certain rustic humour, than any higher qualities. 
 I shall be full of curiosity to see your countryman's 
 version, the first, I beheve, into any foreign tongue : if 
 he fail, beyond the limits of poetical and translatorial 
 licence, the highest kindness we can do him here will 
 be to forget him ; the whole British nation is passion- 
 
 35 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 ately attached to Burns ; the very inn windows where 
 he chanced to scribble in idle hours, with his versifying 
 and often satirical diamond, have all been unglassed, 
 and the scribbled panes sold into distant quarters, 
 there to be hung up in frames ! There is an infinite 
 dilettantism in the world ; but also a certain universal 
 love for spiritual light, and "reverence for what is 
 above us." 
 
 The quotation marked off with inverted 
 commas is taken from Goethe's Wilhelm 
 Meister, a work which Carlyle translated early 
 in his literary career. It was frequently quoted 
 by Carlyle, and is, so to speak, sprinkled over 
 a large number of his pages. 
 
 Carlyle is in error in thinking Kaufmann's 
 version "the first into any foreign tongue." 
 That honour belongs to MM. James Ayton 
 and J. B. Mesnard, whose translation into 
 French appeared at Paris in 1826. But even 
 so early as 1788, Dr. Moore's son had trans- 
 lated portions of Burns's poems into Latin. 
 But to translate Burns into Latin, or indeed 
 into almost any other language, is like trans- 
 lating Rabelais into Hebrew. 
 
 36 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 "In the second year of that fair Weimar 
 union, Burns perished." That is to say, the 
 Schiller-Goethe friendship began in 1794, and 
 our Poet, as all the world knows, died in 1796 
 — over a hundred years now. 
 
 It will perhaps surprise the reader when I 
 mention a fact not generally known, namely, 
 that the above letter of Carlyle's and the one 
 dated September 25, 1828, were both written 
 in German. 
 
 To the German translation of Carlyle's Life 
 of Schiller [Schiller's Leben) Goethe contri- 
 buted a lengthy Preface and Introduction of 
 great interest, from which I make the following 
 excerpts : — 
 
 As now from that region we enjoy, in what so closely 
 concerns us here, a sincere and pure sympathy in 
 these ethic and aesthetic efiforts of ours, which may be 
 regarded as a special trait in the German character, we 
 must now on our part look about for whatever of the 
 same sort lies near their own hearts. I refer at once 
 to the name of Burns, concerning whom a letter of 
 Mr. Carlyle's contained the following passage. 
 
 The passage quoted by Goethe is that given 
 
 37 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 above from the letter dated September 25th, 
 1828. The German poet goes on to say: — 
 
 Yet Robert Bums was better known to us than 
 our friend conjectured. The charming poem, John 
 Barleycorn, had come to us anonymously, and being 
 deservedly praised, led to many attempts to appro- 
 priate it in our own language. Johfi Barleycorn {Hans 
 Gerstenkom), a valiant man, has many enemies, who 
 incessantly persecute and harm him, at length even 
 threaten to kill him outright. From all these injuries, 
 however, he finally emerges triumphant, for the special 
 blessing and cheer of eager beer-drinkers. In this 
 lively, happy anthropomoi-phism. Burns is at once seen 
 to be a genuine poet. 
 
 On further investigation we found the poem in the 
 edition of his \works of 1822, to which a sketch of his 
 life is prefixed, instructing us, in some manner at least, 
 as to his outward circumstances. Those of his poems 
 that we have made our own convinced us of his extra- 
 ordinary talent, and we regretted that the Scottish 
 dialect proved a hindrance precisely where he must 
 have attained his finest and most natural expression. 
 On the whole, however, we have carried our studies so 
 far that we can subscribe to the laudatory statement 
 quoted below as agreeing with our own conviction. 
 
 For the rest, how far this Burns of ours may be known 
 in Germany beyond what the Conversations-Lexicon 
 reports of him I should be unable to say, being ignorant 
 
 38 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 of the new literary movements in Germany ; still, I would 
 at anyrate set the friends of foreign literature upon the 
 right road by mentioning the Life of Robert Burns, by 
 J. G. Lockhart, Edinburgh, 1828, criticised by our friend 
 in the Edinburgh Review, December, 1828. 
 
 The following passages translated from this article 
 will, it may be hoped, arouse an eager desire to become 
 thoroughly acquainted with the work and with the man 
 himself. 
 
 The reader will be curious to see the passages 
 
 selected and translated by the German poet 
 
 from Carlyle's Essay on Burns, for the benefit 
 
 of his countrymen, and included in the final 
 
 edition of the Works of Goethe, as revised 
 
 and edited by himself towards the end of his 
 
 long career as the foremost Man of Letters 
 
 then living, and the greatest of all German 
 
 writers. The passages, which are amongst the 
 
 very finest Carlyle ever wrote, as translated by 
 
 Goethe, are as follows : — 
 
 Burns was born in an age the most prosaic Britain 
 had yet seen, and in a condition the most disadvan- 
 tageous, where his mind, if it accomplished aught, 
 must accomplish it under the pressure of continual 
 bodily toil, nay, of penury and desponding apprehension 
 
 39 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 of the worst evils ; and with no furtherance but such 
 knowledge as dwells in a poor man's hut, and the 
 rhymes of a Ferguson or Ramsay for his standard of 
 beauty, he sinks not under all these impediments : 
 through the fogs and darkness of that obscure region, 
 his lynx eye discerns the true relations of the world 
 and human lite ; he grows into intellectual strength, 
 and trains himself into intellectual expertness. Impelled 
 by the expansive movement of his own irrepressible 
 soul, he struggles forward into the general view ; and, 
 with haughty modesty, lays down before us, as the fruit 
 of his labour, a gift, which Time has now pronounced 
 imperishable. 
 
 A true Poet, a man in whose heart resides some 
 effluence of Wisdom, some tone of the "Eternal 
 Melodies," is the most precious gift that can be 
 bestowed on a generation : we see in him a freer, 
 purer development of whatever is noblest in ourselves ; 
 his hfe is a rich lesson to us; and we mourn his death 
 as that of a benefactor who loved and taught us. 
 
 Such a gift had Nature, in her bounty, bestowed on 
 us in Robert Burns ; but, with queenlike indifference, 
 she cast it from her hand, like a thing of no moment ; 
 and it was defaced and torn asunder, as an idle bauble, 
 before we recognised it. To the ill-starred Bums was 
 given the power of making man's life more venerable, 
 but that of wisely guiding his own life was not given. 
 Destiny — for so in our ignorance we must speak — 
 his faults, the faults of others, proved too hard for 
 40 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 him, and that spirit, which might have soared could 
 it but have walked, soon sank to the dust, its glorious 
 faculties trodden under foot in the blossom ; and died, 
 we may almost say, without ever having lived. And 
 so kind and warm a soul ; so full of inborn riches, of 
 love to all living and lifeless things ! How his heart 
 flows out in sympathy over universal Nature ; and in 
 her bleakest provinces discerns a beauty and a meaning ! 
 The "Daisy" falls not unheeded under his ploughshare; 
 nor the ruined nest of that "wee, cowering, timorous 
 beastie," cast forth, after all its provident pains, to 
 " thole the sleety dribble and cranreuch cauld." The 
 "hoar visage" of Winter dehghts him ; he dwells with 
 a sad and oft -returning fondness on these scenes ol 
 solemn desolation ; but the voice of the tempest becomes 
 an anthem to his ears ; he loves to walk in the sounding 
 woods, for "it raises his thoughts to Him that walketh 
 on the wings of the wind." A true Poet-soul, for it 
 needs but to be struck, and the sound it yields will be 
 music ! What warm, all -comprehending fellow-feeling ; 
 what trustful, boundless love ; what generous exaggeration 
 of the object loved! His rustic friend, his nut-brown 
 maiden, are no longer mean and homely, but a hero 
 and a queen, whom he prizes as the paragons of Earth. 
 The rough scenes of Scottish life, not seen by him in any 
 Arcadian illusion, but in the rude contradiction, in the 
 smoke and soil of a too harsh reality, are still lovely to 
 him : Poverty is indeed his companion, but Love also, 
 and Courage ; the simple feelings, the worth, the noble- 
 41 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 ness, that dwell under the straw roof, are dear and 
 venerable to his heart : and thus over the lowest 
 provinces of man's existence he pours the glory of his 
 own soul ; and they rise, in shadow and sunshine, 
 softened and brightened into a beauty which other 
 eyes discern not in the highest. He has a just, self- 
 consciousness, which too often degenerates into pride ; 
 yet it is a noble pride, for defence, not for offence; 
 no cold suspicious feeling, but a frank and social one. 
 The Peasant Poet bears himself, we might say, like a 
 King in exile ; he is cast among the low, and feels 
 himself equal to the highest ; yet he claims no rank, 
 that none may be disputed to him. The forward 
 he can repel, the supercilious he can subdue ; pre- 
 tensions of wealth or ancestry are of no avail with 
 him ; there is a fire in that dark eye, under which 
 the " insolence of condescension " cannot thrive. In 
 his abasement, in his extreme need, he forgets not 
 for a moment the majesty of Poetry and Manhood. 
 And yet, far as he feels himself above common 
 men, he wanders not apart from them, but mixes 
 warmly in their interests ; nay, throws himself into 
 their arms, and, as it were, entreats them to love him. 
 It is moving to see how, in his darkest despondency, 
 this proud being still seeks relief from friendship. And 
 yet he was " quick to learn " ; a man of keen vision, 
 before whom common disguises afforded no conceal- 
 ment. His understanding saw through the shallowness 
 even of accomplished deceivers ; but there was a 
 42 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 generous credulity in his heart. And so did our Peasant 
 show himself among us ; "a soul like an ^Eolian Harp, 
 in whose strings the vulgar wind, as it passed through 
 them, changed itself into articulate melody.'' And this 
 was he for whom the world found no fitter business 
 than quarrelling with smugglers and vintners, computing 
 excise-dues upon tallow, and gauging ale-barrels ! In 
 such toils was that mighty spirit sorrowfully wasted, and 
 a hundred years may pass on before another such is 
 given us to waste. 
 
 Goethe, speaking in his own person, goes on 
 to say : — 
 
 And as we wish the Germans joy in their Schiller, 
 so, with the same feeling, will we congratulate the Scots. 
 They have indeed bestowed on our friend Schiller 
 so much attention and sympathy that it would be but 
 just if we, in like manner, should introduce their Burns 
 to our people. Some young member of the honourable 
 society to which, as a whole, the present pages are 
 dedicated, would find his time and labour abundantly 
 rewarded should he determine to perform this friendly 
 service in return to a nation so worthy of honour, and 
 faithfully carry out his undertaking. We esteem this 
 highly-praised Robert Burns among the first poetical 
 spirits which the past century has produced. 
 
 Carlyle, it seems to me, in the first para- 
 graph quoted by Goethe, gives a very imperfect 
 
 43 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 account of the literary origins of Burns, and 
 
 greatly underrates the Poet's indebtedness to 
 
 Ramsay and Fergusson, and the rest of his 
 
 predecessors. He quite ignores the fact that 
 
 even as a song-writer, which Carlyle thinks is 
 
 the ultimate basis on which the fame of Burns 
 
 will be found to rest, our Poet only continued 
 
 and improved what Ramsay, Fergusson, and 
 
 others had so well begun. Even some of the 
 
 words and phrases which Carlyle commends 
 
 for their picturesque beauty and graphic force 
 
 are borrowed from the elder, and, unfortunately, 
 
 in many cases, nameless, Scots Minstrels. 
 
 Speaking of a phrase which occurs in one of 
 
 his poems, Carlyle says : — 
 
 Our Scottish forefathers in the battlefield struggled for- 
 ward " red-wat-shod " : in this one word, a full vision of 
 horror and carnage, perhaps too frightfully accurate for art ! 
 
 Burns seems to have borrowed the phrase 
 from the fine old ballad of Otterbourne : — 
 
 The Gordons gude, in English blude. 
 They wat their hose and shoonj 
 
 The Lindsays flew like fire about. 
 Till all the fray was done. 
 
 44 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 As was to be expected, Goethe, with that 
 marvellous catholicity of poetic insight for 
 which he was remarkable above all men, gives 
 a more adequate account of the secret of 
 Burns's success as a National Poet, in a 
 conversation with Dr. Eckermann, who reports 
 the German poet as saying : — 
 
 Take Burns, for example. Wherein lies the cause 
 of his greatness, except that the old songs of his 
 forefathers were still living in the mouths of his people, 
 that they were, so to speak, sung to him in his cradle, 
 that as a boy he grew up amongst them, and the high 
 excellence of these models so dwelt in him, that he 
 had in them a living basis on which he could proceed ? 
 And, further, wherein is he great except that his own 
 songs at once found receptive ears among his people ? 
 they were re-echoed by the reapers and binders in the 
 fields, and he was greeted with them by his boon 
 companions in the ale-house. How poor in comparison 
 do things seem with us in Germany ! For how many 
 of our old, no less significant songs were alive in the 
 hearts of the people, even when I was a youth ? 
 Herder and those who followed after him had to 
 begin, first of all, to collect them ; to drag them from 
 oblivion ; then they were at last to be had in the 
 libraries. And, later, what songs have not Burger 
 and Voss composed ! Who can say that they are less 
 
 45 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 aluable or less national than those of the excellent 
 Bums? And yet, which of them has become living so 
 that the people can re-echo them ? They have been 
 written and published, and they stand in libraries and 
 take the common fate of German poets. Then, of my 
 own songs, which of them is living? One and another 
 is perhaps now and then sung by a pretty girl at the 
 piano, but among the common people all is silence. 
 With what feelings must I look back upon the time 
 when Italian fishermen sang to me fragments of Tasso ! 
 
 As the reader was informed above, Herr 
 Kaufmann was the " young member " who 
 attempted to carry out Goethe's suggestion 
 regarding a rendering of Burns into German. 
 His work lies before me, and from its pages I 
 transcribe the ballad so enthusiastically praised 
 by Goethe, together with Burns's version, so that 
 the German as well as the English reader may 
 have an opportunity of judging with what degree 
 of success Kaufmann has executed his task: — 
 HANS GERSTENKORN. 
 
 (JOHN BARLEYCORN). 
 
 Drei Konige im Morgenland, 
 
 Die hatten einst gedroht 
 Mit einem hohen heil'gen Eid 
 
 Hans Gerstenkom den Lod. 
 
 46 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 There was three Kings into the east, 
 Three Kings both great and high, 
 
 And they ha'e sworn a solemn oath 
 John Barleycorn should die. 
 
 Mit einen Pfluge pflugten sie 
 
 Ihm Schollen auf sein Haupt, 
 Und schwuren drauf, des Lebens sey 
 
 Hans Gerstenkorn beraubt. 
 
 They took a plough and plough'd him down, 
 
 Put clods upon his head ; 
 And they ha'e sworn a solemn oath 
 
 John Barleycorn was dead. 
 
 Doch freundlich kam der holde Lenz 
 
 Mit warmem Regenfall 
 Da macht Hans Gerstenkorn sich auf, 
 
 Und uberrascht sie all'. 
 
 But the cheerful spring came kindly on. 
 
 And show'rs began to fall ; 
 John Barleycorn got up again, 
 
 And sore surpris'd them all. 
 
 Die heisze Sommersonne kam, 
 
 Gar Krastig wuchs er da, 
 Und Speere starrten um sein Haupt, 
 
 Dasz Keiner ihm Ram' nah. 
 
 The sultry suns of summer came. 
 And he grew thick and strong ; 
 
 His head well arm'd wi' pointed spears. 
 That no one should him wrong. 
 
 47 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 Der stille, milde Herbst trat ein, 
 
 De ward er matt und bleich, 
 Sein wankend Knie, sein hangend Haupt 
 
 Zeigt an, er sinke Gleich. 
 
 The sober autumn entered mild, 
 When he grew wan and pale ; 
 
 His bending joints and drooping head 
 Show'd he began to fail. 
 
 Die Farbe schwand ihm mehr und mehr, 
 
 Das Alter brach den Muth, 
 Da fingen seine Feinde an 
 
 Zu zeigen ihre Muth. 
 
 His colour sicken'd more and more, 
 
 He faded into age ; 
 And then his enemies began 
 
 To show their deadly rage. 
 
 Mit einer Waffe, lang und sharf. 
 
 Am Knie man ab ihn hieb, 
 Un band ihn auf den wagen feist, 
 
 So reicht wie einen Dieb. 
 
 They've ta'en a weapon long and sharp 
 
 And cut him by the knee ; 
 Then tied him fast upon a cart, 
 
 Like a rogue for forgerie. 
 
 Dann legte man ihn auf den Bauch, 
 
 Und schlug auf ihm herum, 
 Und hing darauft im Wind ihn auf, 
 
 Und dreht' ihn um und um. 
 
 48 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 They laid him down upon his back, 
 And cudgell'd him full sore ; 
 
 They hung him up before the storm, 
 And turned him o'er and o'er. 
 
 In eine Wassergrube tief. 
 
 Da stieszen sie im Grimm 
 Hinein den armen Gerstenkorn : 
 
 Da sin knun oder schwimm ! 
 
 They filled up a darksome pit 
 
 With water to the brim ; 
 They heaved in John Barleycorn, 
 
 There let him sink or swim. 
 
 Sie breiten aus ihn auf dem Grund, 
 Und qualen ihn noch mehr, 
 
 Und zeigt ein Lebenszeichen sich, 
 So reiben sie ihn sehr. 
 
 They laid him out upon the floor, 
 
 To work him farther woe : 
 And still, as signs of life appear'd. 
 
 They toss'd him to and fro. 
 
 Sie braten langsam an der Glut 
 
 Das Mark ihm in Gebein ; 
 Am schlimmsten macht's ein Muller ihm 
 
 Der malmt ihn zwischen Stein. 
 
 They wasted o'er a scorching flame 
 
 The marrow of his bones ; 
 But a miller us'd him worst of all — 
 
 He crush'd him 'tween two stones. 
 
 49 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 Sie zapfen ihm sein Herzblut ab, 
 
 Und trinken's in die Rund', 
 Und mehr, je mehr sie trinken, fleiszt 
 
 Von Freude jeder Wund. 
 
 And they ha'e ta'en his veiy heart's blood, 
 And drank it round and round ; 
 
 And still the more and more they drank, 
 Their joy did more abound. 
 
 Hans Gerstenkorn, der war ein Held, 
 
 Gar tapfer stolz und gut. 
 Drum wenn sein Blut ihr trinkt, fogleich 
 
 Hebt kuhn sich euer Muth. 
 
 John Barleycorn was a hero bold, 
 
 Of noble enterprise ; 
 For if you do but taste his blood, 
 
 'Twin make your courage rise. 
 
 Es macht, dasz man sein Leid vergiszt, 
 
 Es wurzt uns jedes Gluck, 
 Es macht, dasz eine Wittwe singt, 
 
 Perlt auch die Thran' im Blick. 
 
 'Twill make a man forget his woe ; 
 
 'Twill heighten all his joy : 
 'Twill make the widow's heart to sing, 
 
 Tho' the tear were in her eye. 
 
 Drum lebe hoch Hans Gerstenkorn i 
 
 Kinm jeder's Glas zur Hand, 
 Kie fehlen tausend Enkel ihm 
 
 Im alten Schottenland ! 
 
 S° 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 Then let us toast John Barleycorn, 
 
 Each man a glass in hand ; 
 And may his great prosperity 
 
 Ne'er fail in old Scotland ! 
 
 No more striking and convincing example 
 of the truth of Goethe's view of Burns as a 
 folks-poet could anywhere be found than the 
 above ballad. Perhaps Goethe was not aware 
 of the fact that Burns avowedly composed the 
 ballad on the plan of one which, in various 
 forms, had been long current among the people. 
 If any reader, curious in such matters, will 
 take the trouble of comparing Burns's ballad 
 with the version printed in the ballad collections 
 from the black - letter copy in the Pepysian 
 Library, he will see at a glance to what 
 extent Burns was indebted to his forbears. 
 To look upon Burns, as the two Carlyles 
 seem to have done, as a " phenomenon," 
 without education and owing nothing to his 
 poetic forerunners, is as unfair to Burns and 
 them as it is misleading to the public. The 
 explanation is that Carlyle knew little and 
 cared nothing for the vast body of poetry which 
 
 51 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 went to the making of Burns as assuredly as the 
 study of the German language and literature 
 made Carlyle what he is. But the subject is 
 too wide for adequate treatment here. 
 
 A more important contribution to Burns 
 literature than that of Kaufmann's, both on its 
 own merits and as having drawn from Carlyle 
 two deliverances which fall to be recorded 
 here, was the translation by Julius Heintze, 
 one of whose friends seems to have sent a 
 copy to Carlyle who acknowledged receipt of 
 the gift in the following letter which was 
 published in a privately -printed book, and 
 which seems to me too valuable not to find 
 a place here, the more so as it is not likely 
 to be known to many of my readers. At all 
 events, it forms a fitting introduction to Cartyle's 
 short review of Heintze's translation : — 
 
 Will you return many thanks on my part to Herr 
 Heintze for the gift you were good enough to forward 
 from him? You judged rightly that it would give me 
 pleasure. Germany will have to get acquainted with 
 Burns yet. Four translations in one year do seem to 
 betoken that it wants not the will towards that ! Of 
 
 52 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 Kaufmann's projected version I recollect hearing once 
 from Goethe ; nay, I think I saw some specimens of 
 it, which, however, did not seem to promise much. 
 That his and Herr Heintze's and two other translations 
 had actually come forth in print was entirely new 
 to me. 
 
 This work I find to be done throughout in a really 
 meritorious manner, all things considered. The gram- 
 matical sense is in general accurately seized, a thing 
 not easy to do always in such a case. The poetical 
 expression and physiognomy is given also, more or less ; 
 if not always Burns's, then Heintze's, who, I find, has 
 one of his own too. Some songs I would even call 
 felicitously done ; I have read nine that were not done 
 creditably. Perhaps the one counsel I would venture 
 to give Herr Heintze were this : in all cases to learn 
 the tune first. Thomson's collection of Scotch songs, 
 Johnson's collection, or other like works are not difficult 
 to procure ; and all the Germans are musicians. The 
 tune is the soul of a true song ; that is to say, if it 
 be a song at all, if it have any soul. Burns always 
 strummed upon the fiddle till he got his head and 
 mind filled with the tune (such is his own account), 
 then came the words, the thoughts, all singing them- 
 selves by that. There is tune in every syllable. They 
 are the truest songs, these of Burns, that we have in 
 Europe for a a long while. The prime root of Herr 
 Heintze's shortcomings, when he has come short, one 
 might define to be this : that he had forsaken the 
 S3 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 tune, that he did not know the tune. Pray tell him 
 so, if you judge it worth while. 
 
 I should guess, further, that the Germans would like 
 well to be acquainted with Burns as a man, no less 
 than a singer. Herr Heintze might make himself at 
 home in this ; his sketch of Burns's life already indicates 
 that he is on the way thither. He ought to read 
 Lockhart's life, Cunningham's life, Currie's life — above 
 all, the letters of Burns himself, with annotations, till 
 he make the whole present to his own conception. 
 Much might be selected, which once judiciously put 
 together, the whole world would like to read on that 
 side of the sea as on this. 
 
 My brave German friends, if their honest hearts are 
 not all changed since I used to know them as a nation, 
 would hail with welcome this rugged Saxon brother ; 
 one of the strongest, noblest men ; a Scottish Thor^ as 
 I sometimes call him — a true Peasant-Thunder-god_. as 
 the old Scandinavian was. 
 
 With many thanks and compliments to yourself, with 
 grateful pleasure in the past, and good hope in the future 
 towards your friend. 
 
 The above letter is substantially the same as 
 a short review of Heintze's translation which 
 Carlyle seems to have contributed to the 
 Examiner of Sunday, September 27, 1840, and 
 which, but for the following notice of it by 
 
 54 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 Espinasse in his " Recollections," might never 
 
 have been recovered, as no bibliographer of 
 
 Carlyle down till now had ever discovered it : — 
 
 Up to the time I am writing, Carlyle had contributed 
 only one article to the Examiner ; of his subsequent 
 contributions to it more in a future chapter. He did not 
 include that one article in any edition of his works, and 
 it has escaped the notice not only of his biographers, 
 but, what is more remarkable, of his bibliographers. It 
 was a pleasant little review of Heintze's German trans- 
 lation of selected poems of Burns, from which, not then 
 such a Prussophile as he became, Carlyle noted the 
 absence of any version of " A man's a man for a' that," 
 as a lay the sentiment of which would not be acceptable 
 to certain persons in the Berlin of those days. 
 
 And now, without note or comment, I will 
 
 transcribe the article referred to : — 
 
 Genius, like murder, "will out." Here is the Scottish 
 Ploughman done partly into German verse. It is very 
 curious to see the old familiar face of the " Peasant 
 Thunder-god," as our engravers have a hundred times 
 given it (for want of a better and truer to give), repro- 
 duced here from German copper, with the rugged fac- 
 simile, Robert Burns, Poet, engraved by Schwerdgeburth 
 of Weimar ! This man wrote in the dialect of obscure 
 peasants ; as a ploughman in the shire of Ayr ; as a 
 guager in the httle burgh of Dumfries ; but he has 
 
 55 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 travelled far since then. A polished, almost fastidious 
 Goethe is drawn from his artistic height to comment 
 lovingly on this fiery son of Nature, whom he recognises 
 for a brother ; and Goethe's countrymen, we find, have 
 produced yijwr versions, or select versions, of him this 
 summer ! So goes it. Let but any son of Adam, in the 
 obscurest slough of human existence, in the rudest dialect 
 of men, utter from the heart of him a genuine word — 
 all sons of Adam feel it to be genuine, and will lay hold 
 of it as the undoubted possession of all. Such a word, 
 if it do come from the heart, has by-and-by to go into 
 all hearts ; to be reproduced in all corners of the articu- 
 late-speaking world ; till, consciously or unconsciously, 
 all mankind have got the good of it. For indeed, not 
 this man or that man, but mankind, is the true owner of 
 such a word — it was spoken from the general heart that 
 belongs to us all. 
 
 Whether the Germans mean now to run upon Burns, 
 and produce translation on translation of him, thick as 
 blackberries — thick as English Fausts — we cannot say. 
 Four in one summer do seem to be enough ! But the 
 Germans themselves can look to that. WTiat we have to 
 report is that there are four : Kaufmann's from Berlin, 
 this of Heintze's from Brunswick — both these reported to 
 be good ; then two others, names not given, which 
 probably are rather bad. We ourselves know little of 
 Kaufmann, of the other two nothing at all. But this 
 Heintze, in smart blue octavo, from " the firm of George 
 Westermann, Braunschweig" — him we will salute with 
 56 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 some kind of welcome, if merely as the first that has 
 arrived here. 
 
 Considering all things, it must be said that Herr 
 Heintze has done his task in a decidedly creditable 
 manner. The selection of pieces is good ; if perhaps not 
 the best. For cC that, and cC that, is not one of the songs 
 chosen ; the German latitude, we suppose, did not well 
 admit it. One could have liked to see 
 
 The rank is but the guinea-stamp, 
 The man's the gowd for a' that, 
 
 how it would have sounded in German ; but perhaps 
 some Schmidt-Phiseldeck would not have liked ! 
 
 Heintze in general has seized the grammatical sense 
 very correctly ; a thing which in translating from 
 Ayrshire Scotch cannot always have been easy. 
 Neither has the poetical expression entirely evaporated, 
 as the risk was : for the most part there is a kind 
 of poetical expression ; if not Burns's, then something 
 which a German may have taken to be Burns's. 
 Herr Heintze himself has clearly some music in his 
 head. In one or two instances, of singular felicity, 
 we have, as it were, the very Burns, with all his 
 graces and rhythms ; and always, over and above 
 the mere prosaic sense, there is a poetic something 
 which afar off resembles Burns. We should say in 
 general that Herr Heintze had not always learnt the 
 tune of his song. Burns's songs have a tune, so as 
 few or rather as no modern songs we know have. 
 
 57 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 Every thought, every turn of phrase, siiigs itself: the 
 tune modulates it all, shapes it as a soul does the 
 body it is to dwell in. The tune is always the soul 
 of a song, in this sense ; that is to say, provided the 
 song be a tnae song, and have any soul ! As Herr 
 Heintze, it would seem, purposes to go on translating 
 Burns, let us recommend him to procure Thomson's 
 Collection, or some such musical work ; and before 
 entering on any song, fill his head and heart with the 
 melody of it, and never start till his whole mind is 
 singing to it ; the words will then come dancing 
 to the right measure, in every syllable of them a 
 tune. 
 
 Green grow the rashes, O, is but indifferently given 
 here : " Griin werden nun die Binsen, O," is even 
 grammatically incorrect ; the meaning is not that the 
 rushes are now becomijig green, but that they stand 
 habitually in that state : " griin wachst das Binsenkraut " 
 gives the sense, and would have also preserved the 
 tune. However, that is not the worst. Rashes, except 
 as a kind of rough rhyme for lasses, is of no particular 
 significance ; but as such a rhyme, the whole song 
 rests on it ; and Heintze's accordingly is either no 
 song or another. A perfect translator would have to 
 find some equivalent German word signifying this or 
 that, rushes, ragweed, water-cresses, it matters little ; 
 but rhytning to " Madchen " (to " weiberchen " were 
 better), as this does to " lasses " ; otherwise it is not 
 to the purpose. 
 
 58 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 Auld Nature swears, the lovely dears 
 Her noblest work she classes, O ; 
 
 Her 'prentice hand she tried on man, 
 And then she made the lasses, O. 
 
 Green grow the rashes, O, etc. 
 
 Perhaps about a half of Herr Heintze's songs are 
 decidedly below what he could make them, did he 
 know the tune, and stand honestly by it. We have 
 met grammatically with no important blunder, but 
 one ; a very excusable blunder, but of a rather sad 
 effect where it stands. In Macpherson's Farewell 
 Herr Heintze has considered that those words, "He 
 played a spring, and danced it round below the 
 gallows tree," must signify the leap a condemned 
 robber gives from the ladder, and his dance — alas, 
 too hideous a dance for singing of ! " Spring " he did 
 not know to mean dancing -tune, which a man plays 
 on his fiddle, dancing to it ; and so, of this wild 
 burden, 
 
 Sae rantingly, sae wantonly, 
 
 Sae dauntingly gaed he ; 
 He played a spring and danced it round 
 
 Below the gallows tree. 
 
 Herr Heintze has made this altogether horrible one : — 
 
 So ging er froh und Wohlgemuth 
 
 Und unerschrocken fort ; 
 Ein Sprung — dann tantzt' er in der Luft [Ach Gott !] 
 
 Am Galgenstamme dort. 
 
 59 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 But let us now, by way of counterpoise, give Heintze's 
 best translation, the best we have fallen in with : that 
 of Duncan Gray. Readers who know, and all song 
 readers and singers might as well know, what the jovial, 
 genial humour of the original is, will find that it bounds 
 along with little less expressiveness in German than in 
 Scotch. Freit, indeed, is far inferior as a singing or speak- 
 ing phrase to wooing o't; but that and several other 
 things we must even put up with. Hear Heintze : — 
 
 Duncan Gray kam her zu frein, 
 
 Ha, ha, die lust'ge Freit ! 
 Als zu Christnacht wir voll Wein, 
 
 Ha, ha, die lust'ge Freit ! 
 Gretchen that gewaltig dick. 
 Gab ihm manchen schwoden Blick ; 
 Duncan fuhr erschreckt Zuriick, 
 
 Ha, ha, die lust'ge Freit ! 
 
 Duncan bat und Duncan fleht', 
 
 Ha, ha, die lust'ge Freit ! 
 Sie blieb taub wie Ailsa Ci-aig, 
 
 Ha, ha, die lust'ge Freit ! 
 Duncan seufzt in Liebesnoth, 
 Weinte sich die Augen roth 
 Sprach von Strick und Wassertod, 
 
 Ha, ha, die lust'ge Freit ! 
 
 Zeit und Gliick sind Ebb' und Fluth, 
 
 Ha, ha, die lust'ge Freit 1 
 Berschmahte Lieb' gar wehe thut 
 
 Ha, ha, die lust'ge Freit ? 
 
 60 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 Soil ich, sprach er, wie ein Fant 
 Sterben, weil sie hirnverbrannt ? 
 Geh sie doch — ins" Pfefferland ! 
 Ha, ha, die lust'ge Freit ! 
 
 Wie's nun kam genug's hat Grund 
 
 Ha, ha, die lust'ge Freit ! 
 Sie ward krank — als er gesund, 
 
 Ha, ha, die lust'ge Freit ! 
 Ihren Busen Etwas druckt, 
 Bis ein Seufzer sie erguickt, 
 Und was aus dem Aug 'ihr blickt ! 
 
 Ha, ha, die lust'ge Freit ! 
 
 Duncan hatt' ein meiches Herz, 
 
 Ha, ha, die lust'ge Freit ! 
 Und mit Gretchem war's kein Scherz, 
 
 Ha, ha, die lust'ge Freit ! 
 Duncan konnt 'ihr Tod nicht Tain, 
 Und den Zorn weigt' Mitleid ein ; 
 Nun sind froh sie in Herein, 
 
 Ha, ha, die lust'ge Freit ! 
 
 We shall be glad to hear of Herr Heintze's progress 
 in this work of translating Bums. Probably not more 
 than half his songs are given here ; of his poems only 
 some three. To the Daisy, The Mouse, and Man was 
 made to Mourn — an imperfect sample. To a man 
 meritoriously bent on making Burns known to his 
 countrymen, we would recommend, as more decisively 
 legible at least, the Letters of Burns. The whole or 
 part of these, intercalated at the due place in the 
 
 6i 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 Poet's history, would show the Germans a man they 
 have not yet seen, and perhaps would like to see. 
 Heintze has given a praiseworthy sketch by way of 
 Life, but seems not to have read it well. He has not 
 even sufficiently consulted his Goethe. Let him read 
 Cunningham, Currie, above all, the Letters themselves, 
 and then see what he does see, and what he has got 
 to tell his people about that. Right good speed to him. 
 
 After finishing the review of Heintze's trans- 
 lation, Carlyle presented the book to Major 
 James Glencairn Burns, the Poet's second son. 
 
 In 1834 the Carlyles removed from Craigen- 
 puttock to London. They took up their abode 
 in the house No. 5 (now re-numbered 24), 
 Cheyne Row, Chelsea, which was their first 
 and only house in London, Carlyle continuing 
 to reside there till the day of his death — that 
 is, for the long space of forty -seven years. 
 In 1837 he delivered a series of six lectures 
 on German Literature, a record of which has 
 not been preserved. In the following year he 
 gave a second series, his subject being On the 
 History of Literature, or the Successive Periods 
 of European Culture, which have recently been 
 62 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 published ; and issued The French Revolution : 
 A History — notable, in the first instance, as 
 the first book which bore on its title-page the 
 name of Thomas Carlyle. Next year he again 
 took the platform, his subject being The Revo- 
 lutions of Modern Europe, which have shared 
 the fate of the lectures on German Literature. 
 In 1839 Chartism was published ; and in the 
 following year he delivered what was to prove 
 his last series of six lectures — On Heroes and 
 Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History, 
 published in book form in 1841. In this book, 
 for some reason or other not easily understood, 
 he classified Burns, not as a Poet, but as a 
 Man of Letters — not, however, going so far as 
 to dub him an " English Man of Letters," as 
 the fashion of some is — and speaks eloquently 
 of the Poet's heroism ; the whole deliverance 
 being pitched on a high key of rapturous 
 admiration. Past and Present was published in 
 1843 ; and two years afterwards he gave to the 
 world Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches, 
 with Elucidations. The year 1850 is notable for 
 
 63 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 the publication of Latter Day Pamphlets; and 
 a year afterwards The Life of John Sterling 
 took the reading pubHc by surprise. 
 
 During the time the Cromwell volumes were 
 in preparation, we get a picture of Carlyle and 
 a self-revelation of his wife in one of her letters 
 from which I extract the following : — 
 
 My husband goes on, still willing to write this life of 
 Cromwell under the most desperate apprehension that it 
 will " never come to anything," as if people had the use 
 of their faculties in all states of the atmosphere! And 
 so he does himself a deal of harm and nobody any good. 
 He came into this room the other morning when I was 
 sitting peacefully darning his stockings, and laid a great 
 bundle of papers on my fire, enough to have kindled the 
 chimney, if it had not been, providentially, swept quite 
 lately — the kindling of a chimney subjecting one here in 
 London to the awful visitation of three fire-engines, 
 besides a fine of five pounds ! I fancied it the contents 
 of his waste-paper basket that he was ridding himself of 
 by this summary process. But happening to look up at 
 his face, I saw in its grim, concentrated self-complacency 
 the astounding truth that it was all his labour since he 
 returned from Scotland that had been there sent up the 
 vent in smoke. " He had discovered overnight," he said, 
 " that he must take up the datnnable thing on quite a 
 new tack ! " Oh, a very damnable thing indeed ! I tell 
 64 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 you in secret, I begin to be seriously afraid that his Life 
 of Cromwell is going to have the same strange fate as 
 the child of a certain French Marchioness that I once 
 read of, which never could get itself born, though carried 
 about in her for twenty years till she died ! A wit is 
 said to have once asked this poor woman if " Madame 
 was not thinking of swallowing a tutor for her son.'' 
 So one might ask Carlyle if he is not thinking of swallow- 
 ing a publisher for his book, only that he is too miser- 
 able, poor fellow, without the addition of being laughed 
 at. In lamenting his slow progress, or, rather, non- 
 progress, he said to me one day, with a naivete altogether 
 touching : " Well, they may twaddle as they like about 
 the miseries of a bad conscience, but I should like to 
 know whether Judas Iscariot was more miserable than 
 Thomas Carlyle, who never did anything criminal, so 
 far as he retneinbers !" Ah, my dear, this is all very 
 easy to write about, but to transact! 
 
 In his forty-seventh year Carlyle addressed 
 himself to his greatest task, The History of 
 Frederick the Great, completed in six volumes, 
 forming nearly a third part of all that he had 
 written, and representing the labours of upwards 
 of fourteen years. The first two volumes were 
 published in 1856, the third and fourth in 1862, 
 and the last instalment early in 1865. In 
 
 65 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 November of the same year he was elected 
 Lord Rector of Edinburgh University, his 
 "dear old Alma Maters On the 2ist of April 
 of the following year, in the midst of the rec- 
 torial celebrations, Mrs. Carlyle died, "suddenly 
 snatched away from him, and the light of his 
 life as if gone out." In 1875 the illustrious sage 
 finished his literary labours by publishing 
 Early Kings of Norway, and The Portraits of 
 John Knox. He had now reached his eightieth 
 birthday, and on the 4th of December he was 
 presented with a gold medal and congratulatory 
 address, signed by all the leading men and 
 women of the day in literature, science, and art, 
 in commemoration of the event. 
 
 The venerable seer passed away on the 
 5 th of February, 1881, aged eighty-six years 
 and two months. His remains were interred 
 beside those of his father and mother in the 
 little churchyard of Ecclefechan ; Mrs. Carlyle 
 having been laid by the side of her father 
 in the chancel of Haddington Old Abbey 
 Church. They had no family. His books, 
 66 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 says Carlyle, " are our only children — and in 
 a true sense these are verily ours, and will 
 perhaps live some time in the world after we 
 are both gone." 
 
 It is only stating what has been said 
 repeatedly, that Burns and Carlyle had many 
 qualities in common, which is the secret of 
 Carlyle's success as a writer on Burns. His 
 broad sympathies, keen susceptibilities, and 
 penetrating intellect, combined with an artistic 
 discrimination and thorough earnestness and 
 sterling honesty of purpose, gave Carlyle an 
 ascendency over every other writer on the 
 subject. Stripping Burns of all the fine linen 
 and dirty patchwork with which some in their 
 enthusiasm and others in their villainy had 
 draped him, he re-Sartorized this Joseph-coated 
 hero, and presented him to the world in his 
 own inspiring mantle, heedless as to whether 
 it were fashionable or not, provided he came 
 by it honestly. Carlyle believed that even 
 the Devil is not nearly so black as he is 
 painted ; and, looking around him, he found 
 67 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 much "dirty linen" which, with his washing 
 tub, sincerity, he alone could make clean and 
 presentable to the world. The first to undergo 
 the cleansing operation was Burns ; next, 
 Cromwell ; and, lastly, Frederick the Great. 
 Such a literary laundry was Carlyle's noise- 
 proof and dirt-proof study. 
 
 As a fitting introduction to the excerpts 
 that follow, I cannot do better than quote our 
 author's opinion of modern hero-worship : — 
 
 I think that we, on the whole, do our hero-worship 
 worse than any nation in the world ever did it before : 
 that the Burns an Exciseman, the Byron a Literary 
 Lion, are intrinsically, all things considered, a baser 
 and falser phenomenon than the Odin a God, the 
 Mahomet a prophet of God. 
 
 Carlyle is no less severe on those people 
 
 who are continually protesting that the age 
 
 of chivalry and poetry is gone. Like Mira- 
 
 beau, who said to his secretary, " Ne me dites 
 
 jamais ce bete de mot," Carlyle dislikes the word 
 
 "impossible" as heartily as Napoleon himself: — 
 
 In Art, in Practice, innumerable critics demonstrate 
 that most things are henceforth impossible ; that we are 
 
 ^8 
 
CARLYLi: ON BURNS 
 
 got once for all into the region of perennial common- 
 place, and must contentedly continue there. Let such 
 critics demonstrate ; it is the nature of them 1 What 
 harm is in it? Poetry, once well demonstrated to be 
 impossible, arises in Burns, arises in Goethe. 
 
 William Burnes, the Poet's father, has never, 
 
 in the whole range of literature, had a more 
 
 able and touching exposition of his heroism 
 
 than in the following exquisite passage : — 
 
 Beautiful it is to see and understand that no worth, 
 known or unknown, can die even in this earth. The 
 work an unknown good man has done is like a vein 
 of water flowing hidden underground, secretly making 
 the ground green; it flows and flows — it joins itself 
 with other veins and veinlets ; one day it will start 
 forth as a visible perennial well. Ten dumb centuries 
 had made the speaking Dante ; a well he of many 
 veinlets. William Burnes, or Burns, was a poor 
 peasant ; could not prosper in his " seven acres of 
 nursery ground," nor any enterprise of trade and toil ; 
 had to "thole a factor's snash," and read attorney- 
 letters, in his poor hut, "which threw us all into 
 tears": a man of no money -capital at all, of no 
 account at all : yet a brave man, a wise and just, 
 in evil fortune faithful, unconquerable to the death. 
 And there wept withal, among the others, a boy 
 named Robert, with a heart of melting pity, of 
 
 69 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 greatness and fiery wrath ; and Ms voice, fashioned 
 here by the poor father, does it not already reach like 
 a great elegy — like a stem prophecy — to the ends of 
 the world ? " Let me make the songs, and you shall 
 make the laws ! " What chancellor, king, senator, 
 begirt with never such sumptuosity, dyed-velvet, blaring 
 and celebrity, could you have named in England that 
 was so momentous as that WilHam Barnes? Courage! 
 
 After this panegyric on the father of our 
 Poet, from the pen of the greatest writer of 
 the nineteenth century, the reader will not 
 be surprised to find the encomiastic strain 
 heightened when he speaks of the son : — 
 
 From the lowest and broadest stratum of society, 
 where the births are by the million, there was born, 
 almost in our own memory, a Robert Burns, son of 
 one who "had not capital for his poor moor-farm of 
 twenty pounds a year." Robert Burns never had the 
 smallest chance to get into Parliament, much as Robert 
 Burns deserved, for all our sakes, to have been found 
 there. For the man — it was not known to men pur- 
 blind, sunk in their poor, dim, vulgar element, but 
 might have been known to men of insight, who had 
 any loyalty or any royalty of their own — was a born 
 King of men : full of valour, and intelligence, and 
 heroic nobleness ; fit for other work than to break 
 his heart among poor mortals gauging beer ! Him no 
 
 70 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 Ten-Pound constituency chose, nor did any Reforming 
 Premier, in the deep-sunk British nation overwhelmed 
 in foggy stupor, with the lode-stars all gone out for it ; 
 there was no whisper of a notion that it could be desir- 
 able to choose him — except to come and dine with you, 
 and in the interim to gauge. And yet heaven-born 
 Mr. Pitt, at that period, was by no means without 
 need of Heroic Intellect for other purposes than gauging ! 
 But sorrowful strangulation by red-tape, much tighter 
 then than it now is, when so many revolutionary earth- 
 quakes have tussled it, quite tied up the meagre Pitt ; 
 and he said, on hearing of this Burns and his sad hamp- 
 ered case : " Literature will take care of itself" — " Yes, 
 and of you, too, if you don't mind it ! " answers one. 
 
 However, the patrons of genius in our 
 
 Scottish metropolis were not so callous as the 
 
 great statesman : — 
 
 A Scottish poet, "proud of his name and country,'' 
 can apply fervently to "Gentlemen of the Caledonian 
 Hunt," and be made a ganger of beer-baiTels, and 
 tragical, immortal, broken-hearted singer ; the stifled 
 echo of his melody, audible through long centuries, 
 one other note of "that sacred Miserere^' that rises 
 up to heaven, out of all times and lands. 
 
 Carlyle is fond of comparing Burns to 
 Apollo and the Teutonic god Thor, to whom 
 
 71 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 Thursday, or Thor's-day, was dedicated by 
 our ancestors : — ■ 
 
 And so, like Apollo taken for a Neatherd, and per- 
 haps for none of the best, on the Admetus establishment, 
 this new Norse Thor had to put-up with what was 
 going ; to gauge ale, and be thankful ; pouring his 
 celestial sunlight through Scottish Song-writing — the 
 narrowest chink ever offered to a Thunder-god before ! 
 And the meagre Pitt, and his Dundasses and red-tape 
 Phantasms (growing very ghastly now to think of), did 
 not in the least know or understand, the impious, god- 
 forgetting mortals, that Heroic Intellects, if Heaven 
 were pleased to send such, were the one salvation for 
 the world and for them and all of us. No ; they " had 
 done very well without such " ; did not see the use of 
 such ; went along " very well " without such ; well 
 presided over by that singular Heroic Intellect called 
 George the Third : and the Thunder-god, as was rather 
 fit of him, departed early, still in the noon of life, some- 
 what weary of gauging ale ! — O Peter, what a scandalous, 
 torpid element of yellow London fog, favourable to owls 
 only and their mousing operations, has blotted out the 
 stars of Heaven for us these several generations back 
 — which, I rejoice to see, is now visibly about to take 
 itself away again, or perhaps to be dispelled in a very 
 tremendous manner ! 
 
 But we have not done with this Georgius 
 72 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 Tertius yet. The great philosopher is more 
 and more enraged (if a philosopher may be 
 allowed to get angry with downright stupidity), 
 the longer he contemplates the history of that 
 miserable era, and contrasts the pig-headedness 
 of the King with the transcendent genius of 
 the Poet: — 
 
 George the Third is Defender of something we call 
 " the Faith " in these years ; George the Third is head 
 charioteer of the Destinies of England, to guide them 
 through the gulf of French Revolutions, American In- 
 dependencies ; and Robert Burns is Gauger of ale in 
 Dumfries. It is an Iliad in a nutshell. The physiog- 
 nomy of a world now verging towards dissolution, 
 reduced now to spasms and death-throes, lies pictured 
 in that one fact — which astonishes nobody, except at 
 me for being astonished at it. The fruit of long ages 
 of confirmed Valethood, entirely confirmed as into a 
 Law of Nature ; cloth -worship and quack -worship : 
 entirely confirmed Valethood — which will have to un- 
 confirm itself again ; God knows, with difficulty enough ! 
 
 But the reader will exclaim : " To what 
 purpose are those lacerating passages, and how 
 is the thing to be put right ? " — thinking that 
 perhaps our philosopher, like old Homer — whom 
 
 73 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 Horace accuses of nodding occasionally — is here 
 napping ; but Carlyle has a remedy, actually in 
 working order, and tested by the experience 
 of the Arabians — no mean judges, be it spoken 
 — for a period of some thousand years : — 
 
 Alas, the defect, as we must often urge and again 
 urge, is less a defect of telescopes than of some eye- 
 sight. Those superstitious blockheads of the Twelfth 
 Century had no telescopes, but they had still an eye ; 
 not ballot-boxes ; only reverence for Worth, abhorrence 
 of Unworth. It is the way with all barbarians. Thus 
 Mr. Sale informs me, the old Arab Tribes would gather 
 in liveliest gaudeamus, and sing, and kindle bonfires, 
 and wreathe crowns of honour, and solemnly thank the 
 gods that, in their Tribe, too, a Poet had shown himself 
 As indeed they well might ; for what usefuler, I say not 
 nobler and heavenlier thing could the gods, doing their 
 very kindest, send to any Tribe or Nation, in any time 
 or circumstance? I declare to thee, my afflicted quack- 
 ridden brother, in spite of thy astonishment, it is very 
 lamentable ! We English find a Poet, as brave a man 
 as has been made for a hundred years or so anywhere 
 under the Sun ; and do we kindle bonfires, or thank 
 the gods? Not at all. We, taking due counsel of it, 
 set the man to gauge ale -barrels in the Burgh of 
 Dumfries; and pique ourselves on our "patronage of 
 genius.'' 
 
 74 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 Genius, Poet : do we know what these words mean ? 
 An inspired Soul once more vouchsafed us, direct from 
 Nature's own great fire-heart, to see the Truth, and 
 speak it, and do it ; Nature's own sacred voice heard 
 once more athwart the dreary boundless element of hear- 
 saying and canting, of twaddle and poltroonery, in 
 which the bewildered Earth, nigh perishing, has lost its 
 way. Hear once more, ye bewildered, benighted mortals ; 
 listen once again to a voice from the inner Light -sea 
 and Flame-sea, Nature's and Truth's own heart ; know 
 the fact of your Existence what it is, put away the 
 Cant of it which it is not; and knowing, do, and let it 
 be well with you ! 
 
 Carlyle thinks, too, that much might be done 
 for the furtherance of the Reign of the Aristo- 
 cracy of Talent by the landed classes, as if it 
 were not the interest of these classes to prevent 
 the reign of what must prove destructive to 
 their claims ; let us hear him on this point : — 
 
 Will he awaken, be alive again, and have a soul ; or 
 is this death-fit very death ? It is a question of ques- 
 tions, for himself and for us all ! Alas, is there no 
 noble work for this man too ? Has not he thick-headed 
 ignorant boors ; lazy, enslaved farmers ; weedy lands ? 
 Lands ! Has not he weary, heavy-laden ploughers of 
 land ; immortal souls of men, ploughing, ditching, day- 
 
 75 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 drudging ; bare of back, empty of stomach, nigh 
 desperate of heart ; and none peaceably to help them 
 but he, under Heaven? Does he find, with his three 
 hundred thousand pounds, no noble thing trodden down 
 in the thoroughfares, which it were god-like to help up ? 
 Can he do nothing for his Burns but make a Ganger of 
 him ; lionise him, bedinner him, for a foolish while ; 
 then whistle him down the wind, to desperation and 
 bitter death ? His work too is difficult, in these modern, 
 far-dislocated ages. But it may be done ; it may be 
 tried ; it must be done. 
 
 Whereupon he gives an instance of where 
 and by whom it is done : — 
 
 A modern Duke of Weimar, not a god he either, but 
 a human duke, levied, as I reckon, in rents and taxes 
 and all incomings whatsoever, less than several of our 
 English Dukes do in rents alone. The Duke of Weimar, 
 with these incomings, had to govern, judge, defend, 
 every way administer his Dukedom. He does all this 
 as few others did ; and he improves lands besides all 
 this, makes river-embankments, maintains not soldiers 
 only but Universities and Institutions — and in his Court 
 were these four men : Wieland, Herder, Schiller, Goethe. 
 Not as parasites, which was impossible ; not as table- 
 wits and poetic Katerfeltoes ; but as noble spiritual men 
 working under a noble Practical Man. Shielded by him 
 from many miseries ; perhaps from many shortcomings, 
 
 76 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 destructive aberrations. Heaven had sent, once more, 
 heavenly light into the world ; and this man's honour 
 was that he gave it welcome. A new noble kind of 
 clergy, under an old but still noble kind of King ! I 
 reckon that this one Duke of Weimar did more for the 
 Culture of his Nation than all the English Dukes and 
 Duces now extant, or that were extant since Henry the 
 Eighth gave them the Church Lands to eat, have done 
 for theirs ! I am ashamed, I am alarmed for my 
 English Dukes : what word have I to say ? 
 
 Commenting on Frederick the Great's simple 
 
 style of living, and how the king would not 
 
 even allow his servants to black his boots, 
 
 Carlyle says: — 
 
 The Art-manufacture of your Friedrich can come veiy 
 cheap, it would appear, if once nature have done her 
 part in regard to him, and there be mere honest will on 
 the part of the bystanders. Thus Samuel Johnson, too, 
 cost next to nothing in the way of board and entertain- 
 ment in this world. And a Robert Burns, remarkable 
 modem Thor, a Peasant-God in these sunk ages, with 
 a touch of melodious runes in him (since all else lay 
 under ban for the poor fellow), was raised on frugal 
 oatmeal, at an expense of perhaps half-a-crown a week. 
 
 This is literally true. We have it on the 
 Poet's authority that he has existed on a little 
 
 77 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 more than half that sum. With a fling of con- 
 temptuous defiance at fortune, he sings, with 
 reference to the servility of authors : — 
 
 In all the clamorous cry of starving want, 
 They dun benevolence with shameless front ; 
 Oblige them, patronise their tinsel lays. 
 They persecute you all your future days ! 
 Ere my poor soul such deep damnation stain, 
 My horny fist assume the plough again ; 
 The piebald jacket let me patch once more. 
 On eighteenpence a week Pve lived before. 
 
 Another passage, apropos Johnson and Burns, 
 may be quoted here : — 
 
 To no man does Fortune throw open all the King- 
 doms of the world, and say : It is thine ; choose where 
 thou wilt dwell ! To the most she opens hardly the 
 smallest cranny or doghutch, and says, not without 
 asperity : There, that is thine while thou canst keep it ; 
 nestle thyself there, and bless Heaven ! Alas, men 
 must fit themselves into many things : some forty years 
 ago, for instance, the noblest and ablest Man in all 
 the British lands might be seen, not swaying the royal 
 sceptre, or the pontiif's censer, on the pinnacle of the 
 World, but gauging ale-tubs in the little burgh of 
 Dumfries ! Johnson came a little nearer the mark than 
 Burns ; but with him, too, " strength was mournfully 
 
 78 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 denied its arena " ; he too had to fight Fortune at 
 strange odds all his life long. 
 
 It has been contended that, after Carlyle 
 has said all he has to say about Mirabeau, 
 the facts do not justify his estimate of his 
 genius. However this may be, certain it is 
 that our Poet, in the passage about to be 
 quoted, has for once found himself in company 
 worthy of his acquaintance. Carlyle, as a sort 
 of literary Lord Chamberlain, ushers our Poet 
 into the Temple of Fame in the following char- 
 acteristic though ceremonious manner : — 
 
 Truly, looking now into the matter, we might say, in 
 spite of the gossips, that on this whole Planet, in those 
 years, there was hardly born such a man-child as this 
 same, in the " Mansion-house of Bignon, not far from 
 Paris," whom they named Gabriel Honor^. Nowhere, 
 we say, came there a stouter or braver into this earth ; 
 whither they come marching by the legion and the 
 myriad, out of Eternity and Night ! Except, indeed, 
 what is notable enough, one other that arrived some few 
 months later, at the town of Frankfort-on-Mayn, and got 
 christened Johann Wolfgang Goethe. Then again, in 
 some ten years more, there came another, still liker 
 Gabriel Honorfe in his brawny ways. It was into a 
 
 79 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 mean hut that this one came, an infirm hut (which the 
 wind blew down at the time), in the shire of Ayr, in 
 Scotland : him they named Robert Burns. These, in 
 that epoch, were the Well-born of the World ; by whom 
 the world's history was to be carried on. Ah, could the 
 well-born of the world be always rightly bred, rightly 
 intreated there, what a world were it ! But it is not so ; 
 it is the reverse of so. And then few, like that Frankfort 
 one, can peaceably vanquish the world, with its black 
 imbroglios, and shine above it, in serene help of it, like a 
 sun ! The most can but Titanically vanquish it, or be 
 vanquished by it : hence, instead of light (stillest and 
 strongest of things), we have but lightning, red fire, and 
 oftentimes conflagrations, which are very woful. 
 
 Those who deplore the imperfect education 
 which Burns received had better read the follow- 
 ing extract before they pour forth their lamen- 
 tations and patronisingly contemplate his 
 " crumbs of Latin and scraps of French," as 
 some people phrase it, in that dainty manner 
 which sits so easy on the tribe of cheap patrons. 
 Commenting on the rigid system of education 
 enforced by the old Marquis on his son, Count 
 Mirabeau, Carlyle goes on to say : — 
 
 How much better was Burns's education (though this, 
 too, went on under the grimmest pressures) on the wild 
 
 80 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 hill-side, by the teave peasant's hearth, with no theory 
 of education at all, but poverty, toil, tempest, and the 
 handles of the plough I 
 
 Some of these quotations have such a far- 
 reaching, perennial significance, quite apart from 
 their value as appreciations of the life and 
 genius of Burns, that I do not hesitate to tran- 
 scribe a passage such as this : — 
 
 A man willing to work, and unable to find work, is 
 perhaps the saddest sight that Fortune's inequality 
 exhibits under this sun. Burns expresses feelingly what 
 thoughts it gave him : a poor man seeking work; seek- 
 ing leave to toil that he might be fed and sheltered ! 
 That he might but be put on a level with the four-footed 
 workers of the Planet which is his ! There is not a 
 horse willing to work but can get food and shelter in 
 requital ; a thing this two-footed worker has to seek for, 
 to solicit occasionally in vain. He is nobody's two-footed 
 worker ; he is not even anybody's slave. And yet he 
 is a /sx/o-footed worker ; it is currently reported there is 
 an immortal soul in him, sent down out of Heaven into 
 the Earth ; and one beholds him seeking for this ! Nay, 
 what will a wise Legislature say if it turn out that he 
 cannot find it ; that the answer to their postulate pro- 
 position is not affirmative but negative? 
 
 The poem of Burns's which Carlyle had 
 Si 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 in his mind when he penned the above 
 passage is that from which the following 
 stanzas are borrowed — the most mournful of 
 all his dirges : — 
 
 See yonder poor, o'erlabour'd wight, 
 
 So abject, mean, and vile ; 
 Who begs a brother of the earth 
 
 To ghe him leave to toil ; 
 And see his lordly fellow-worm 
 
 The poor petition spurn, 
 Unmindful, tho' a weeping wife 
 
 And helpless offspring mourn. 
 
 If I'm design'd yon lordhng's slave — 
 
 By Nature's law design'd — 
 Why was an independent wish 
 
 E'er planted in my mind? 
 If not, why am I subject to 
 
 His cruelty, or scorn? 
 Or why has Man the will and pow'r 
 
 To make his fellow mourn ? 
 
 Carlyle seizes every opportunity of intro- 
 ducing even the slightest mention of his 
 Hero ; and, as in the following passage, 
 sometimes gives information not generally 
 known. Speaking of Edward Irving's father, 
 Gavin Irving, he says : — 
 82 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 Gavin was bailie in Annan when the furious election 
 sung by Burns ("there were five carlines in the south" 
 — five burghs, namely), took place. Gavin voted the 
 right way (Duke of Queensberry's way) and got for 
 his two brothers each the lease of a snug Queensberry 
 farm, which grew even the snugger, as dissolute old 
 Queensberry developed himself more and more into a 
 cynical egoist, sensualist, and hater of his next heir 
 (the Buccleuch, not a Douglas but a Scott, who now 
 holds both dukedoms), a story well-known over Scotland, 
 and of altogether lively interest in Annandale (where 
 it meant entail-leases and large sums of money) during 
 several years of my youth. 
 
 A favourite metaphor with writers on Burns 
 is to liken the Poet to a skylark, in reference to 
 the naturalness of his song and the genuine- 
 ness of his singing. It is an image that has 
 presented itself to many minds, especially to 
 those of the numberless poets who have sung 
 the praises of Burns ; some of whose references 
 may be quoted as introducing a very fine 
 passage from Carlyle which falls to be 
 recorded here, in pursuance of the object 
 the writer has in view in collecting these 
 fragments. 
 
 83 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 Longfellow sings — 
 
 I see amid the fields of Ayr 
 
 A ploughman who, in foul and fair, 
 
 Sings at his task 
 So clear, we know not if it is 
 The laverock's song we hear or his. 
 
 Nor care to ask. 
 
 Equally fine is James Graham's reference 
 
 to Burns in one of his poems : — 
 
 Thou simple bird. 
 Of all the vocal quire, dwell'st in a home 
 The humblest ; yet thy morning song ascends 
 Nearest to Heaven — sweet emblem of his song. 
 Who sang thee wakening by the daisy's side ! 
 
 The reference here, in the last two lines, is 
 
 to Burns and the second verse of his poem 
 
 on the daisy ; a verse which has been greatly 
 
 admired from the time of Henry Mackenzie, 
 
 who first struck the note of admiration : — 
 
 Alas ! it's no' thy neebor sweet, 
 The bonnie Lark, companion meet ! 
 Bending thee 'mang the dewy weet ! 
 
 Wi' spreckl'd breast, 
 When upward-springing, blythe, to greet 
 
 The purpling East. 
 
 84 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 Carlyle, in prose, even surpasses the two 
 
 poets from whom I have just quoted : — 
 
 They are something, too, those humble, genuine lark- 
 notes of a Burns — skylark, starting from the humble 
 furrow, far overhead into the blue depths, and singing 
 to us so genuinely there. For all true singing is of the 
 nature of worship ; as, indeed, all true working may be 
 said to be — whereof such singing is but the record, and 
 fit melodious presentation, to us. 
 
 I have already quoted more than one passage 
 
 in which Carlyle insists on the necessity of 
 
 Hero Worship. In nearly every instance he 
 
 gives Burns as an example of how poorly such 
 
 worship flourishes in these islands : — 
 
 It was a rude, gross error, that of counting the Great 
 Man a god. Yet let us say that it is difficult to know 
 what he is, or how to account of him and receive him ! 
 The most significant feature in the history of an epoch 
 is the manner it has of welcoming a Great Man. Ever, 
 to the true instincts of men, there is something godlike 
 in him. Whether they shall take him to be a god, to 
 be a prophet, or what they shall take him to be? that 
 is ever a grand question ; by their way of answering 
 that, we shall see, as through a little window, into the 
 very heart of these men's spiritual condition. For at 
 bottom the Great Man, as he comes from the hand of 
 
 85 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 Nature, is ever the same kind of thing : Odin, Luther, 
 Johnson, Burns ; I hope to make it appear that these 
 are all originally of one stuff; that only in the world's 
 reception of them, and the shapes they assume, are 
 they so immeasurably diverse. The worship of Odin 
 astonishes us — to fall prostrate before the Great Man, 
 into deliquium of love and wonder over him, and feel 
 in their hearts that he was a denizen of the skies, 
 a god ! This was imperfect enough : but to welcome, 
 for example, a Burns as we did, was that what we can 
 call perfect ? The most precious gift that Heaven can give 
 to the Earth ; a man of " genius " as we call it ; the 
 Soul of a Man actually sent down from the skies with 
 a God's-message to us — this we waste away as an idle 
 artificial firework, sent to amuse us a little, and sink it 
 into ashes, wreck, and ineffectuality ; such reception of a 
 Great Man I do not call very perfect either ! Looking 
 into the heart of the thing, one may perhaps call that 
 of Burns a still uglier phenomenon, betokening still 
 sadder imperfections in mankind's ways, than the 
 Scandinavian method itself! To fall into mere un- 
 reasoning deliquium of love and admiration was not 
 good ; but such unreasoning, nay, irrational, supercilious 
 no-love at all is perhaps still worse ! It is a thing for 
 ever changing, this of Hero-worship : different in each 
 age, difficult to do well in any age. Indeed, the heart of 
 the whole business of the age, one may say, is to do 
 it well. 
 
 86 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 In more than one passage, already quoted, 
 
 Carlyle compares Burns to Mirabeau. " They 
 
 differ widely in vesture," he admits ; but, he 
 
 argues, " look at them intrinsically. There is 
 
 the same burly, thick-necked strength of body 
 
 as of soul." Elsewhere he says : — 
 
 I confess I have no notion of a truly great man that 
 could not be all sorts of men. The Poet who could 
 merely sit on a chair and compose stanzas would never 
 make a stanza worth much. He could not sing the Heroic 
 warrior, unless he himself were at least a Heroic warrior 
 too. I fancy there is in him the Politician, the Thinker, 
 Legislator, Philosopher — in one or the other degree, he 
 could have been, he is all these. So, too, I cannot 
 understand how a Mirabeau, with that great glowing- 
 heart, with the fire that was in it, with the bursting 
 tears that were in it, could not have written verses, 
 tragedies, poems, and touched all hearts in that way, 
 had his course of life and education led him thither- 
 ward. The grand fundamental character is that of Great 
 Man ; that the man be great. Napoleon has words in 
 him which are like Austerhtz Battles. Louis Four- 
 teenth's Marshals are a kind of poetical men withal ; 
 the things Turenne says are full of sagacity and 
 geniality, like sayings of Samuel Johnson. The great 
 heart, the clear, deep-seeing eye : there it lies ; no man 
 whatever, in what province soever, can prosper at all 
 
 87 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 without these. Petrarch and Boccaccio did diplomatic 
 messages, it seems, quite well : one can easily believe 
 it ; they had done things a Uttle harder than these ! 
 Burns, a gifted song-writer, might have made a still 
 better Mirabeau. Shakespeare — one knows not what 
 he could not have made, in the supreme degree. 
 
 This similarity of Burns to Mirabeau has 
 also been pointed out by Mr. Henley in his 
 essay on the Poet — an essay which, in every 
 other respect, is the very antithesis of Carlyle's, 
 being what I suppose Mr. Henley would call 
 a natural, in opposition to a phenomenal, ex- 
 position of the genius of Burns. A reviewer in 
 the Times, ignorant of Carlyle, having referred to 
 Mr. Henley's parallel as " a happy originality," 
 it may be quoted here : — 
 
 Speaking broadly, I can call none to mind who, in 
 strength and genius and temperament, presents so 
 close a general likeness to Burns as Mirabeau. Bom 
 a noble, and given an opportunity commensurate with 
 himself. Bums would certainly have done such work 
 as Mirabeau's, and done it at least as well. Born a 
 Scots peasant, Mirabeau must as certainly have lived 
 the life and died the death of Burns. In tmth, it is 
 only the fortune of war that we remember the one by 
 
 88 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 his conduct of the Revolution, which called his highest 
 capacities into action, while we turn to the other for 
 his verses, which are the outcome (so Maria Riddell 
 thought, and was not alone in thinking) of by no means 
 his strongest gift. 
 
 Equally frequent has Carlyle referred to an 
 incident in the life of Burns, during the Poet's 
 first visit to Edinburgh. It is an incident 
 calculated indeed to make one pause and 
 ponder ; and one need not wonder that it 
 should once more fall to be recorded here, in 
 a slightly different form, as the reader may see, 
 by comparing the following passage with some 
 of those already given : — 
 
 High Duchesses, and ostlers of inns, gather round the 
 Scottish rustic. Bums — a strange feeling dwelling in each 
 that they never heard a man like this ; that, on the whole, 
 this is the man ! In the secret heart of these people it 
 still dimly reveals itself, though there is no accredited 
 way of uttering it at present, that this rustic, with his 
 black brows and flashing sun-eyes, and strange words 
 moving laughter and tears, is of a dignity far beyond all 
 others, incommensurable with all others. Do not we feel 
 it so ? But now, were Dilettantism, Scepticism, Trivi- 
 ality, and all that sorrowful brood cast out of us — as, by 
 God's blessing, they shall one day be ; were faith in the 
 
 89 
 
CARLYLE 0]Sr BURNS 
 
 shows of things entirely swept out, replaced by clear 
 faith in the things, so that a man acted on the impulse 
 of that only, and counted the other non-extant, what a 
 new liveher feeUng towards this Bums were it ! 
 
 The reader may remember that one of the 
 most powerful passages on Burns quoted from 
 Carlyle closed with a reference to the applica- 
 tion which was made to Pitt, the then Prime 
 Minister, on behalf of the Poet. He returns to 
 the subject once again : — 
 
 I say, of all Priesthoods, Aristocracies, Governing 
 Classes at present extant in the world, there is no 
 class comparable for importance to that Priesthood of 
 the Writers of Books. This is a fact which he who 
 runs may read — and draw inferences from. " Literature 
 will take care of itself," answered Mr. Pitt, when applied 
 to for some help for Burns. "Yes," adds Mr. Southey, 
 " it will take care of itself ; and of you too, if you do 
 not look to it ! " 
 
 I may bring these jottings to an end by 
 transcribing a few notes, interesting when 
 viewed from the standpoint from which I have 
 treated the subject, but otherwise of little 
 importance. In his sketch of Wordsworth, 
 Carlyle says : — ■ 
 
 90 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 I tried him with Burns, of whom he had sung 
 tender recognition ; but Burns also turned out to be 
 a limited, inferior creature, any genius he had a 
 theme for one's pathos rather. 
 
 The reader who is acquainted with Words- 
 worth's prose and poetical writings on Burns 
 will not need to be told that he did not 
 consider the Poet " a limited, inferior creature " ; 
 and certainly, as " a theme for one's pathos," 
 Wordsworth's lines on the Poet have seldom 
 been equalled. Witness these verses in the 
 favourite stave of Burns : — 
 
 Too frail to keep the lofty vow 
 
 That must have followed when his brow 
 
 Was wreathed — "The Vision" tells us how — 
 
 With holly spray, 
 He faltered, drifted to and fro. 
 
 And passed away. 
 
 Well might such thoughts, dear sister, throng 
 Our minds when lingering, all too long, 
 Over the grave of Burns we hung, 
 
 In social grief — 
 Indulged as if it were a wrong 
 
 To seek relief. 
 
 91 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 But leaving each unquiet theme 
 
 Where gentlest judgments may misdeem, 
 
 And prompt to welcome every gleam 
 
 Of good and fair, 
 Let us beside this limpid stream 
 
 Breathe hopeful air. 
 
 Enough of sorrow, wreck, and blight ; 
 Think rather of those moments bright 
 When to the unconsciousness of right 
 
 His course was true, 
 When Wisdom prospered in his sight 
 
 And virtue grew. 
 
 Yes, freely let our hands expand, 
 Freely as in youth's season bland, 
 When side by side, his Book in hand. 
 
 We wont to stay, 
 Our pleasure varying at command 
 
 Of each sweet Lay. 
 
 How oft inspired must he have trode 
 Those pathways, yon far-stretching road ! 
 There lurks his home ; in that Abode, 
 
 With mirth elate. 
 Or in his nobly pensive mood, 
 
 The Rustic sate. 
 
 Proud thoughts that Image overawes, 
 
 Before it humbly let us pause. 
 
 And ask of Nature, from which cause 
 
 And by what rules 
 She trained her Burns to win applause 
 
 That shames the Schools. 
 
 92 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 Through busiest street and lonehest glen 
 
 Are felt the flashes of his pen : 
 
 He rules, mid winter snows, and when 
 
 Bees fill their hives 
 Deep in the general heart of men 
 
 His power survives. 
 
 What need of fields in some far chme 
 Where Heroes, Sages, Bards sublime. 
 And all that fetched the flowing rhyme 
 
 From genuine springs, 
 Shall dwell together till old Time 
 
 Folds up his wings ? 
 
 Sweet Mercy ! to the gates of Heaven 
 The minstrel lead, his sins forgiven ; 
 The rueful conflict, the heart riven 
 
 With vain endeavour. 
 And memory of Earth's bitter leaven. 
 
 Effaced for ever. 
 
 But why to him confine the prayer. 
 
 When kindred thoughts and yearnings bear 
 
 On the frail heart the purest share 
 
 With all that live?— 
 The best of what we do and are 
 
 Just God forgive ! 
 
 The probability is that Carlyle misunder- 
 stood Wordsworth, and that the Lake poet 
 only objected to the songs of Burns, for which 
 Carlyle, as we have seen, had an especial fond- 
 
 93 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 ness, but for which, as will be presently seen, 
 Wordsworth cared little. At least, I can see no 
 other way of harmonizing his conversation, as 
 reported by Carlyle, with his published writings 
 on Burns. I am confirmed in this view of the 
 matter by a passage in Mr. Aubrey de Vere's 
 recollections of Lord Tennyson, in which he 
 chronicles a curious incident which happened: — 
 
 " Read the exquisite songs of Burns," he [Tennyson] 
 exclaimed. " In shape each of them has the perfection 
 of the berry ; in light the radiance of the dew^jdrop ; 
 you forget for its sake those stupid things, his serious 
 pieces ! " The same day I met Wordsworth, and named 
 Burns to him. Wordsworth praised him, even more 
 vehemently than Tennyson had done, as the great 
 genius who had brought Poetry back to Nature ; but 
 ended V "Of course I refer to his serious efforts, such 
 as the Cottar's Saturday Night; those foolish little 
 amatory songs of his one has to forget." I told the 
 tale to Henry Taylor that evening; and his answer 
 was : " Burns's exquisite songs and Burns's serious 
 efforts are to me alike tedious and disagreeable reading." 
 So much for the infallibility of poets in their own art ! 
 
 Although not exactly pertinent to the subject 
 of this essay, I may here quote the following 
 
 94 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 passage from Mr. de Vere's Recollections, 
 
 which were published soon after the Tennyson 
 
 memoir : — 
 
 I was his convert and owed him loyalty. The book 
 had been my guide book in Scotland. It did not guide 
 me to the best hotels or to the best views ; but it guided 
 me to the heart of a " never-vanquished nation " and him 
 who sat there enthroned. I read his book on mountain 
 and moor, by the fruitful slope and the torrent's fall, 
 by the woodland red with the embers of the dying year, 
 and by the cottage hearth. It had interpreted for me 
 everything that I came across, whether of character or of 
 manners, whether of mirthful or of sad. I saw all things 
 with Burns's eyes ; and Scotland became in turn the inter- 
 preter of Burns. During ray farewell visit to Edinburgh 
 I wrote a poem in token of gratitude to Burns. 
 
 In the Diary of his Trip to Paris, under 
 
 Sunday (the "' unco guid " reader need not be 
 
 unduly shocked), Carlyle writes : — 
 
 After coffee, English talk ; winded up with (obligato) 
 readings of Burns, which were not very successful, in 
 my own sunnise. 
 
 Carlyle was very fond of reading and reciting 
 the Poems of Burns. Professor Masson says 
 of him in this respect : — 
 
 95 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 He was a tremendous enthusiast about Bums, as 
 you may understand from his essay. He was never so 
 happy as when reciting Burns, to whom he did full 
 justice. The Jolly Beggars was a special favourite. 
 
 In one of his letters to Clarinda, Bums 
 says : — 
 
 Let us pray with the honest weaver of Kilbarchan, 
 " Lord, send us a' a guid conceit o' oursel's ! " or in 
 the words of the auld sang — 
 
 "Who does me disdain, I can scorn them again. 
 And I'll never mind any such foes." 
 
 Carlyle, in one of his essays, alludes to this 
 
 most original prayer, changing the locale: — 
 
 Fortune, it is said, favours the brave ; and the prayer 
 of Bums's Kilmarnock weaver is not always unheard 
 of Heaven. 
 
 And Mrs. Carlyle, in the letter already quoted, 
 in which she gives an amusing account of the 
 burning of the Cromwell manuscripts, per- 
 petrates and extends her husband's error by 
 changing not only the locality, but the pro- 
 fession of the individual whose prayer is quoted 
 by Burns and referred to by Carlyle : — 
 96 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 God help us well through it ! And, as the Kilmarnock 
 preacher prayed, " Give us all a good conceit of our- 
 selves," for this is what is chiefly wanted here at present ! 
 If my husband had half the conceit of himself which 
 shines so conspicuous in some writers I could name, he 
 would "take it aisy^' and regenerate the world with 
 rose-water {twaddle) as they do, instead of ruining his 
 digestive organs in the manufacture of oil of vitriol for 
 that purpose ! 
 
 Perhaps Mrs. Carlyle thought the prayer 
 more befitting the clergy, who are proverbial 
 for their modesty! 
 
 I cannot end this patching and stitching 
 without placing one aspect of Carlyle's attitude 
 to Burns worship in its proper light I refer 
 to his persistent refusal to countenance by his 
 presence or furtherance the annual Saturnalia 
 held ostensibly to commemorate the birthday 
 of Burns, but in reality for such purposes as 
 are only too apparent to those who care to look 
 beneath the surface a little. Carlyle knew — 
 none better — that ninety-nine out of every 
 hundred persons that meet yearly to celebrate 
 the birthday of Burns know little and care less 
 
 97 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 for the works of the man under the auspices of 
 whose name they meet than for the good fare 
 and generous Hquor without which these gath- 
 erings would be as dull as they are said to be 
 brilliant. Not that Carlyle had any repugnance 
 to good cheer. By no means. He was no 
 ascetic or rigid teetotaler, but a man who, 
 from all accounts we have of him, could both 
 eat and drink as sociably as any other man. 
 But the cant and sham of the thing disgusted 
 him. He much preferred using his eloquence 
 for the promotion of such objects as he could 
 approve of One of these which did not fail 
 to gain his enthusiastic support was the project 
 set on foot in 1842 by Richard Monckton 
 Milnes (afterwards Lord Houghton), Dr. 
 Chambers, and others, to secure for Mrs. Begg, 
 the Poet's youngest and only surviving sister, 
 a Government pension of twenty pounds per 
 annum, with reversion of ten pounds to each 
 of her two daughters. In announcing the suc- 
 cess of the application, Carlyle wrote to Mrs. 
 Begg :— 
 
 98 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 Properly, however, you do not owe this to anybody 
 but to your own illustrious Brother, whose noble life — 
 wasted tragically away — pleads now aloud to all men of 
 every rank and class for some humanity to his last 
 surviving sister. May God give you all good of this 
 gift, and make it really useful to you ! You need not 
 answer this letter ; it is a mere luxury that I give myself 
 in writing it. 
 
 Between the interest consequent on the death 
 of Mrs. Begg and the excitement caused by the 
 preparations for the Centenary Celebrations of 
 1859, a project was set on foot to raise a 
 thousand pounds with the view of purchasing 
 a small annuity for the Misses Begg. Car- 
 lyle again lent his services by addressing the 
 following letter to the editor of the Ayj- 
 Advertiser: — 
 
 I very much approve your and Mr. Milnes's notion 
 about the Misses Begg, and I hope you will not fail to 
 get your plan executed with all the energy and skill 
 possible, and with corresponding success. Could all 
 the eloquence that will be uttered over the world on 
 the 25th inst., or even all the tavern bills that will 
 be incurred, but convert themselves into solid cash for 
 these two interesting persons, what a sum were there 
 of benefit received and of loss avoided to all parties 
 
 99 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 concerned ! serving indigent merit on the one hand, and 
 saving, on the other hand, what is too tnily a frightful 
 (though eloquent) expenditure oi pavement to a certain 
 locality we have all heard of ! 
 
 And now, as concluding summary of the 
 whole thing, I transcribe the lecture on Burns, 
 as Man of Letters, which he never was in any 
 sense, and, above all, in the sense in which 
 Carlyle used the phrase : — 
 
 It was a curious phenomenon, in the withered, unbe- 
 lieving, secondhand Eighteenth Century, that of a Hero 
 starting up, among the artificial pasteboard figures and 
 productions, in the guise of a Robert Burns. Like a 
 little well in the rocky desert places, — like a sudden 
 splendour of Heaven in the artificial Vauxhall ! People 
 knew not what to make of it. They took it for a piece 
 of the Vauxhall fire-work ; alas, it let itself be so taken, 
 though struggling half-blindly, as in bitterness of death, 
 against that ! Perhaps no man had such a false 
 reception from his fellow-men. Once more a veiy 
 wasteful life-drama was enacted under the sun. 
 
 The tragedy of Burns's life is kno^vn to all of you. 
 Surely we may say, if discrepancy between place held 
 and place merited constitute perverseness of lot for a 
 man, no lot could be more perverse than Burns's. 
 Among those secondhand acting-figures, mimes for most 
 part, of the Eighteenth Century, once more a giant 
 
 100 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 Original Man ; one of those men who reach down to 
 the perennial Deeps, who take rank with the Heroic 
 among men . and he was born in a poor Ayrshire hut. 
 The largest soul of all the British lands came among 
 us in the shape of a hard-handed Scottish Peasant. 
 
 His Father, a poor toiling man, tried various things ; 
 did not succeed' in any ; was involved in continual 
 difficulties. The Steward, Factor as the Scotch call 
 him, used to send letters and threatenings. Burns says, 
 " which threw us all into tears." The brave, hard-toiling, 
 hard-suffering Father, his brave heroine of a wife ; and 
 those children, of whom Robert was one ! In this 
 Earth, so wide otherwise, no shelter for them. The 
 letters "threw us all into tears": figure it. The brave 
 Father, I say always ; — a silent Hero and Poet ; with- 
 out whom the son had never been a speaking one ! 
 Burns's Schot)lmaster came afterwards to London, learnt 
 what good society was ; but declares that in no meeting 
 of men did he ever enjoy better discourse than at the 
 hearth of this peasant. And his poor "seven acres of 
 nursery-ground," — not that, nor the miserable patch of 
 clay-farm, nor anything he tried to get a living by, 
 would prosper with him ; he had a sore unequal battle 
 all his days. But he stood to it valiantly ; a wise, 
 faithful, unconquerable man ; — swallowing-down how 
 many sore sufferings daily into silence ; fighting like 
 an unseen Hero, — nobody publishing newspaper para 
 graphs about his nobleness ; voting pieces of plate to 
 him ! However, he was not lost ; nothing is lost. 
 
 lOI 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 Robert is ' there ; the outcome of him, — and indeed of 
 many generations of such as him. 
 
 This Burns appeared under ' every disadvantage : 
 uninstructed, poor, born only to hard manual toil ; and 
 writing, when it came to that, in a rustic special dialect, 
 known only to a small province of the country he lived 
 in. Had he written, even what he did write, in the 
 general language of England, I doubt not he had 
 already become universally recognised as being, or 
 capable to be, one of our greatest men. That he 
 should have tempted so many to penetrate through the 
 rough husk of that dialect of his, is proof that there 
 lay something- far from common within it. He has 
 gained a certain recognition, and is continuing to do 
 so over all quarters of our wide Saxon world ; where- 
 soever a Saxon dialect is spoken, it begins to be 
 understood, by personal inspection of this and the 
 other, that one of the most considerable Saxon men of 
 the Eighteenth Centuiy was an Ayrshire Peasant named 
 Robert Burns. Yes, I will say, here too was a piece of 
 the right Saxon stuff: strong as the Harz-rock, rooted 
 in the depths of the world ; — rock, yet with wells of 
 living softness in it ! A wild impetuous whirlwind of 
 passion and faculty slumbered quiet there ; such heavenly 
 melody dwelling in the heart of it. A noble rough 
 genuineness ; homely, rustic, honest ; true simplicity of 
 strength : with its lightning fire, with its soft dewy 
 pity ; — like the old Norse Thor, the Peasant-god ! — 
 
 Burns's Brother Gilbert, a man of much sense and 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 worth, has told me that Robert, in his young days, in 
 spite of their hardship, was usually the gayest of speech ; 
 a fellow of infinite frolic, laughter, sense and heart ; far 
 pleasanter to hear there, stript cutting peats in the bog, 
 or suchhke, than he ever afterwards knew him. I can 
 well believe it. This basis of mirth ('■'■fond gaillard" as 
 old Marquis Mirabeau calls it), a primal-element of sun- 
 shine and joyfulness, coupled with his other deep and 
 earnest qualities, is one of the most attractive charac- 
 teristics of Burns. A large fund of Hope dwells in 
 him ; spite of his tragical history, he is not a mourning 
 man. He shakes his sorrows gallantly aside ; bounds 
 forth victorious over them. It is as the lion shaking 
 "dew-drops from his mane"; as the swift-bounding horse, 
 that laughs at the shaking of the spear. — But indeed, 
 Hope, Mirth, of the sort like Burns's, are they not the " 
 outcome properly of warm generous affection, — such as 
 is the beginning of all to every man ? 
 
 You would think it strange if I called Burns the most 
 gifted British soul we had in all that century of his : 
 and yet I believe the day is coming when there will be 
 little danger in saying so. His writings, all that he did 
 under such obstructions, are only a poor fragment of 
 him. Professor Stewart remarked very justly, what in- 
 deed is true of all Poets good for much, that his poetry 
 was not any particular faculty ; but the general result 
 of a naturally vigorous original mind expressing itself 
 in that way. Burns's gifts, expressed in conversation, 
 are the theme of all that ever heard him. All kinds of 
 103 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 gifts : from the gracefulest utterances of courtesy, to 
 the highest fire of passionate speech ; loud floods of 
 mirth, soft wailings of affection, laconic emphasis, clear 
 piercing insight ; all was in him. Witty duchesses 
 celebrate him as a man whose speech "led them off 
 their feet." This is beautiful ; but still more beautiful 
 that which Mr. Lockhart has recorded, which I have 
 more than once alluded to. How the waiters and ostlers 
 at inns would get out of bed, and come crowding to 
 hear this man speak ! Waiters and ostlers ! — they too 
 were men, and here was a man ! I have heard much 
 about his speech ; but one of the best things I ever 
 heard of it was, last year, from a venerable gentleman 
 long famihar with him. That it was speech distinguished 
 by always having something in it. "He spoke rather 
 little than much," this old man told me ; " sat rather 
 silent in those early days, as in the company of persons 
 above him ; and always when he did speak, it was to 
 throw new light on the matter." I know not why any 
 one should ever speak otherwise ! — But if we look at his 
 general force of soul, his healthy robustness evei-y way, 
 the rugged downrightness, penetration, generous valour 
 and manfulness that was in him, — where shall we readily 
 find a better-gifted man? 
 
 Among the great men of the Eighteenth Century, I 
 sometimes feel as if Burns might be found to resemble 
 Mirabeau more than any other. They differ widely in 
 vesture ; yet look at them intrinsically. There is the 
 same burly thick-necked strength of body as of soul ; — 
 IC4 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 built, in both cases, on what the old Marquis calls a 
 fond gaillard. By nature, by course of breeding, in- 
 deed by nation, Mirabeau has much more of bluster ; 
 a noisy, forward, unresting man. But the characteristic 
 of Mirabeau too is veracity and sense, power of true 
 insight, superiority of vision. The thing that he says 
 is worth remembering. It is a flash of insight into some 
 object or other : so do both these men speak. The 
 same raging passions ; capable too in both of manifest- 
 ing themselves as the tenderest noble affections. Wit, 
 wild laughter, energy, directness, sincerity : these were 
 in both. The types of the two men are not dissimilar. 
 Burns too could have governed, debated in National 
 Assemblies ; politicised, as few could. Alas, the cour- 
 age which had to exhibit itself in capture of smuggling 
 schooners in the Solway Frith ; in keeping silence over 
 so much, where no good speech, but only inarticulate 
 rage was possible : this might have bellowed forth 
 Ushers de Brdze and the like ; and made itself visible 
 to all men, in managing of kingdoms, in ruling of great 
 ever-memorable epochs ! But they said to him reprov- 
 ingly, his Official Superiors said, and wrote: "You are 
 to work, not think." Of your ihinking-ia.c\x\ty, the 
 greatest in this land, we have no need ; you are to 
 guage beer there ; for that only are you wanted. Very 
 notable ; — and worth mentioning, though we know what 
 is to be said and answered ! As if Thought, Power of 
 Thinking, were not, at all times, in all places and situ- 
 ations of the world, precisely the thing that was wanted.- 
 
 105 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 The fatal man, is he not always the a^thinking man, 
 the man who cannot think and see; but only grope, 
 and hallucinate, and missee the nature of the thing he 
 works with ? He misses it, misiaies it as we say ; 
 takes it for one thing, and it is another thing, — and 
 leaves him standing hke a Futility there ! He is the 
 fatal man ; unutterably fatal, put in the high places of 
 men. — " Why complain of this ? " say some : " Strength 
 is mournfully denied its arena ; that was true from of 
 old." Doubtless : and the worse for the arena, answer 
 I ! Complaining profits little ; stating of the truth may 
 profit. That a Europe, with its French Revolution just 
 breaking out, finds no need of a Burns except for gaug- 
 ing beer, — is a thing I, for one, cannot rejoice at ! — 
 
 Once more we have to say here, that the chief quality 
 of Burns is the sincerity of him. So in his Poetry, so 
 in his Life. The Song he sings is not of fantasticalities ; 
 it is of a thing felt, really there ; the prime merit of this, 
 as of all in him, and of his Life generally, is truth. The 
 Life of Burns is what we may call a great tragic sincerity. 
 A sort of savage sincerity, — not cruel, far from that ; but 
 wild, wrestling naked with the truth of things. In that 
 sense, there is something of the savage in all great men. 
 
 Hero-worship, — Odin, Burns ? Well ; these Men of 
 Letters too were not without a kind of Hero-worship : 
 but what a strange condition has that got into now ! 
 The waiters and ostlers of Scotch inns, prying about 
 the door, eager to catch any word that fell from Bums, 
 were doing unconscious reverence to the Heroic. 
 
 I0& 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 Johnson had his Boswell for worshipper. Rousseau 
 had worshippers enough : princes calHng on him in 
 his mean garret ; the great, the beautiful doing rever- 
 ence to the poor moonstruck man. For himself a most 
 portentous contradiction ; the two ends of his life not to be 
 brought into harmony. He sits at the tables of grandees ; 
 and has to copy music for his own living. He cannot 
 even get his music copied. "By dint of dining out," 
 says he, " I run the risk of dying by starvation at 
 home." For his worshippers too a most questionable 
 thing ! If doing Hero-worship well or badly be the 
 test of vital wellbeing or illbeing to a generation, can 
 we say that these generations are very first-rate? — And 
 yet our Heroic Men of Letters do teach, govern, are 
 kings, priests, or what you like to call them ; intrinsi- 
 cally there is no preventing it by any means whatever. 
 The world has to obey him who thinks and sees in the 
 world. The world can alter the manner of that ; can 
 either have it as blessed continuous summer sunshine, or as 
 unblessed black thunder and tornado, — with unspeakable 
 difference of profit for the world ! The manner of it is 
 very alterable ; the matter and fact of it is not alterable 
 by any power under the sky. Light ; or, failing that, 
 lightning : the world can take its choice. Not whether 
 we call an Odin god, prophet, priest, or what we call 
 him ; but whether we believe the word he tells us : 
 there it all lies. If it be a true word, we shall have to 
 believe it ; believing it, we shall have to do it. What 
 name or welcome we give him or it, is a point that 
 107 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 concerns ourselves mainly. //, the new Truth, new 
 deeper revealing of the Secret of this Universe, is 
 verily of the nature of a message from on high ; and 
 must and will have itself obeyed. — 
 
 My last remark is on that notablest phasis of Burns's 
 history, — his visit to Edinburgh. Often it seems to me 
 as if his demeanour there were the highest proof he 
 gave of what a fund of worth and genuine manhood 
 was in him. If we think of it, few heavier burdens 
 could be laid on the strength of a man. So sudden ; 
 all common Liomsin, which ruins innumerable men, 
 was as nothing to this. It is as if Napoleon had been 
 made a King of, not gradually, but at once from the 
 Artillery Lieutenancy in the Regiment La Ffere. Burns, 
 still only in his twenty-seventh year, is no longer even 
 a ploughman ; he is flying to the West Indies to escape 
 disgrace and a jail. This month he is a ruined peas- 
 ant, his wages seven pounds a year, and these gone 
 from him : next month he is in the blaze of rank and 
 beauty, handing down jewelled Duchesses to dinner ; 
 the cynosure of all eyes ! Adversity is sometimes hard 
 upon a man ; but for one man who can stand prosperity, 
 there are a hundred that will stand adversity. I admire 
 much the way in which Burns met all this. Perhaps no 
 man one could point out, was ever so sorely tried, and 
 so little forgot himself. Tranquil, unastonished ; not 
 abashed, not inflated, neither awkwardness nor affecta- 
 tion : he feels that he there is the man Robert Burns ; 
 that the "rank is but the guinea-stamp" ; that the 
 io8 
 
CARLYLE ON BURNS 
 
 celebrity is but the candle-light, which will show what 
 man, not in the least make him a better or other man ! 
 Alas, it may readily, unless he look to it, make him a 
 •worse man ; a wretched inflated windbag, — inflated till 
 he burst and become a dead lion ; for whom, as some 
 one has said, "there is no resurrection of the body"; 
 worse than a living dog!— Burns is admirable here. 
 
 And yet, alas, as I have observed elsewhere, these 
 Lion-hunters were the ruin and death of Burns. It was 
 they that rendered it impossible for him to live ! They 
 gathered round him in his Farm ; hindered his industry ; 
 no place was remote enough from them. He could not 
 get his Lionism forgotten, honestly as he was disposed 
 to do so. He falls into discontents, into miseries, faults ; 
 the world getting ever more desolate for him ; health, 
 character, peace of mind all gone ; — solitary enough now. 
 It is tragical to think of! These men came but to see 
 him ; it was out of no sympathy with him, nor no hatred 
 to him. They came to get a little amusement : they got 
 their amusement ; — and the Hero's life went for it ! 
 
 Richter says, in the 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— ! — 
 
 The End. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Adam, 56 
 
 Admetus, 72 
 
 Ailsa Craig, 60 
 
 Alma Mater, 66 
 
 A maris a man for a' that, 55, 57 
 
 American Independence, 73 
 
 Annan, 17, 18, 21,83 
 
 Annan Academy, 16 
 
 Annandale, 83 
 
 Annan Water, 10 
 
 Apollo, 71, 72 
 
 Arbigland, 23, 24 
 
 Austerlitz, 87 
 
 Ayr, 55 
 
 Ayrshire, 57, 80, loi 
 
 Ayr Advertiser, 99 
 
 Aytoun, James, 36 
 
 Begg, The Misses Agnes and 
 Isabella, 99 
 
 Begg, Mrs. John (Isobel Bums), 
 98 
 
 Benson, Miss, see under Mon- 
 tagu, Mrs. Basil 
 
 Berlin, 55, 56 
 
 Berlin Society for Foreign Litera- 
 ture, 34 
 
 Bertrand, Aloisius, 31 
 
 Bignon, 79 
 
 Blantyre, Lord, 25 
 
 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 88 
 
 Bolton, 26 
 
 Boswell, James, 107 
 
 Br^ze, Marquis de, 105 
 Brunswick (Ger. Braunschweig), 
 
 56 
 Buccleuch, Duke of, and Queens- 
 berry, 83 
 BuUer, Charles, 22 
 Biirger, Gottfiried August, 45 
 Burns, Gilbert, 25, 26, 102 
 Bums, Mrs. Gilbert, 26, 27, 28 
 Bums, James Glencairn, 62 
 Burns, Robert — 
 his visits to Ecclefechan, 10 
 is snowed up there, 1 1 
 seen by James Carlyle, 14 
 compared with, 1 5 
 his songs, 19, 94 
 his high-mindedness, 20 
 dines at Arbigland, 23, 24 
 talks of his children, 24 
 introduced to Goethe, 29 
 compared to Schiller, 31 
 Goethe's admiration for, 32, 
 
 34. 35 
 translations of, 33, 36, 43 
 graphic words, 44 
 his secret as a national poet, 45 
 a phenomenon, 51 
 methods of learning a tune, 53 
 a peasant Thunder-god, 54, 72, 
 
 77, 102 
 a man the Germans should know, 
 
 62 
 as man of letters, 62, 107 
 
 III 
 
INDEX 
 
 Burns, Robert — 
 whitewashed, 68 
 fit for Parliament, 70 
 guager of ale barrels, 74, 7^ 
 one of the well-born of the 
 
 world, 80 
 his education compared with 
 
 Mirabeau's, 80 
 on want of employment, 81 
 furious election sung by, 83 
 compared to the skylark, 84, 85 
 compared to Mirabeau, 87, 88, 
 
 103, 105 
 his gifts of speech, 89, 90 
 Pitt's callousness to, 90 
 thoughts on, by Wordsworth, 
 
 91. 92- 93 
 
 quotes the Kilbarchan weaver s 
 prayer, 96, 97 
 
 his sister and nieces, 99 
 
 his large soul, loi 
 
 his sincerity, 106 
 
 at Edinburgh, 108 
 
 his lionism, 108, 109 
 
 his tragic death, 109 
 Burns Celebrations, 99 
 Burns' s Letters, 61, 62 
 Burns's Mausoleum, 17, 35 
 Burns' s Poems, 14, 33 
 Burns's Songs, 57, 94 
 Burns, Robert, the second ("the 
 
 Laird"), 25 
 Burns, Robert, the fourth, 25 
 Burnes, William, 69, 70 
 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 68 
 
 Carlyle, James, 13, 14, 15, 51 
 
 Carlyle, Thomas — 
 
 his Sartor Resartus, 9, 28 
 his birth at Ecclefechan, 12 
 compares his father to Burns, 
 
 14. 15 
 
 at Annan, 16 
 
 Carlyle, Thomas — 
 
 at inauguration of the Burns 
 
 Mausoleum, 16, 17 
 at the grave of Burns, 17, 18 
 at Kirkcaldy, 21 
 at Edinburgh, 21 
 aims at literature, 21 
 tutor in London, 22 
 translates Legendre's Elements 
 
 of Geometry and Goethe's 
 
 Wilhelm Meister, 22 
 hisZ«/d! of Schiller, 22, 30, 37 
 acquaintance with Gilbert Burns, 
 
 25, 26, 27 
 marries Miss Welsh, 28 
 his Wotton Reinfred, 28 
 his German Romance, 28 
 his Essay on Burns, 28, 29 
 on Burns and Schiller, 30, 31, 
 
 34. 35. 3S 
 on Burns the artist, 44 
 on Burns the " phenomenon," 51 
 on Heintze's translation, 52, 53, 
 
 54, 55. 62 
 his lectures on Gentian Litera- 
 ture, ill, 63 
 on the History of Literature, 62 
 his French Revolution, 63 
 his The Revolutions of Modern 
 
 Europe, 63 
 his Chartisfii, 63 
 his Past and Present, 63 
 his Oliver Cromwell, 63 
 his Frederick the Great, 65, 77 
 Lord Rector of Edinburgh 
 
 University, 66 
 Early Kings of Noriuay, 66 
 The Portraits ofjohti Knox, 66 
 his death, 66 
 on his books, 67 
 his cleansing operations, 67, 68 
 dislike of theword "impossible," 
 
 112 
 
INDEX 
 
 Carlyle, Thomas — 
 
 on Wm. Burnes, 69 
 
 on Dante, 69 
 
 on Dukes, 76, 77 
 
 on Hero Worship, 85, 87, 89, 
 90 
 
 on Wordsworth, 90, 91, 93, 94 
 
 his readings of Burns, 95, 96 
 
 on Bums's Kilbarchan Weaver's 
 Prayer, 96, 97 
 
 against Burns Anniversary 
 Suppers, 97, 98 
 
 letters to Mrs. Begg, 98, 99 
 
 regarding the Misses Begg, 99, 
 100 
 Carlyle, Mrs. Thomas (nie Jane 
 
 Baillie Welsh), 21, 25, 26, 28, 
 
 66, 96, 97 
 Chambers, Robert, 98 
 Chartism, 63 
 Chelsea, 17, 62 
 Cheyne Row, 62 
 Clarinda. See under Maclehose, 
 
 Mrs. Robert 
 Comely Bank, 28 
 Conversations — Lexicon, 38 
 Craigenputtoch, 28, 62 
 Craik, William, 23 
 Cromwell, Oliver, 64, 68, 96 
 Cunningham, Allan, 54, 62 
 Currie, James, 54, 62 
 
 Defender of the Faith, 73 
 Dante. Durante Alighieri, 69 
 Drury Lane, 24 
 Dumfries, 16, 17, 1 8, 23, 28, 35, 
 
 55. 73. 74. 78 
 Dumfriesshire, 16 
 Duncan Gray, 60 
 Dundas, Henry, 72 
 
 Early Kings of Norway, 66 
 Ecclefechan, 9, 10, 12, 13, 15, 66 
 
 Eckermann, Johann Peter, 45 
 Edinburgh, 21, 22, 25, 89, 95, 108 
 Edinburgh Review, 29, 39 
 Edinburgh University, 16, 66 
 Elements of Geometry, 22 
 England, 73, 102 
 Espinasse, Francis, 55 
 Essay on Burns, 28, 29, 39 
 Ettrick Yeomen, 16 
 Europe, 53, 106 
 
 Faust, 56 
 
 Fergusson, Robert, 40, 44 
 Frankfort-on-Mayn, 79, 80 
 Frederick II., of Prussia, sur- 
 
 named the Great, 68, 77 
 French Revolution, 73, 106 
 
 Gedichte von Robert Burns, 34 
 Gentlemen of the Caledonian 
 
 Hunt, 71 
 George III., King of Great 
 
 Britain, 72, 73 
 German Literature, (>2, 63 
 German Romance, 28 
 Germany, 45 
 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 22, 29, 
 
 32. 33. 34. 37, 39. 43. 45. 46, 
 
 51. 53. 56. 62, 69, 76, 79 
 Gordons, 44 
 Graham, James, 84 
 Grant's Braes, 26, 27 
 Green grow the Rashes, 0, 58 
 
 Haddington, 21, 25, 26 
 Haddington Old Abbey Church, 66 
 Hans Gerstenkom, 38, 46 
 Harz, 102 
 
 Heintze, Heinrich Julius, 52, 53, 
 54,55.56,57.58,59.60,61,62 
 Henley, WilUam Enghsh, 88 
 Henry VIII. , King of England, 77 
 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 45, 76 
 
 "3 
 
INDEX 
 
 Homer, 73 
 
 Horace. QuintusHoratiusFIaccus, 
 
 74 
 Houghton, Richard Monckton 
 
 Milnes, ist Lord, 98, 99 
 Hume, David, 16 
 
 Iliad, Homer's, 73 
 Irving, Edward, 18, 25, 82 
 Irving, Gavin, 82, 83 
 
 John Barleycorn, 38, 46 
 
 Johnson, James, 53 
 
 Johnson, Samuel, 24, 77> 78, 86, 
 
 87, 107 
 Judas Iscariot, 65 
 
 Kaufmann, Phihpp, 33, 34, 36, 
 
 46, 52. S3. 56 
 Kilbarchan, 96 
 Kilmarnock, 96, 97 
 Kirkcaldy, 21 
 Knox, John, 26 
 Kuhbach (in Sartor), 9 
 
 Latter-Day Pamphlets, 64 
 
 Legendre, Adrien Marie, 22 
 
 Lennoxton, 26 
 
 Life of Schiller, 22, 30, 37 
 
 Zz/« of Robert Burns, 39 
 
 Lindsays, 44 
 
 Lockhart, John Gibson, 39, 54, 104 
 
 London, 22, 62, 64, 72, loi 
 
 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 84 
 
 Lord Chamberlain, 79 
 
 Lord Rector, 66 
 
 Louis XIV. (Le Grand Monarque), 
 
 King of France, 87 
 Luther, Martin, 86 
 
 Mackenzie, Henry, 84 
 Maclehose, Mrs. Robert {>iie 
 Agnes Craig), 96 
 
 Macpherson's Farewell, 59 
 
 Mahomet, 68 
 
 Afan was made to mourn, 61, 82 
 
 Marbach, 30 
 
 Masson, David, 95 
 
 Mein Water, 10 
 
 Mesnard, J. B., 36 
 
 Milnes, Richard Monckton. See 
 
 under Lord Houghton 
 Mirabeau, HonoreGabriel Riquetti, 
 
 Comte De, 68, 79, 80, 87, 88, 
 
 104, 105 
 Mirabeau, Victor Riquetti, Marquis 
 
 De, 80, 103, 105 
 Montagu, Mrs. Basil (nee Benson), 
 
 22, 23, 24 
 Moore, John, 36 
 
 Napoleon I., Emperor of the 
 
 French, 68, 87, 108 
 Nekar, 30 
 Nithsdale, 23 
 
 Odin, Norse Deity, 68, 86, 106, 
 
 107 
 Oliver Cromwell's Letters and 
 
 Speeches, with Elucidations, 
 
 63,65 
 Ott Heroes and Hero Worship, and 
 
 the Heroic in History, 63 
 On the History of Literature, or the 
 
 Successive Periods of European 
 
 Culture, 62 
 Otterbourne, 44 
 
 Paris, 36, 79, 95 
 
 Parliament, 70, 81 
 
 Past aiid Present, 63 
 
 Pepysian Library, 51 
 
 Petrarch. Francesco Petrarca, 89 
 
 Piccadilly, 17 
 
 Pitt, William, 71, 72, 90 
 
 Prometheus, 34 
 
 114 
 
INDEX 
 
 QuEENSBERRY, William Douglas, 
 4th Duke of (" Old Q."). See 
 under Buccleuch, Duke of, and 
 Queensberry 
 
 Rabelais, Fran9ois, 36 
 Ramsay, Allan, 40, 44 
 Regiment La Fere, 108 
 Reign of the Aristocracy of Talent, 
 
 75 
 Richter, Jean Paul Friedrich, 109 
 Riddell, Mrs Walter [nie Maria 
 
 Woodley, 7, 89 
 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 107 
 
 SAINTE-Beuve, Charles-Augustin, 
 
 31 
 
 St. Michael's Churchyard, 16, 17 
 
 Sale, George, 74 
 
 Sartor Resartus, 9, 28 
 
 Schiller, Johann Christoph Fried- 
 rich, 29, 30, 31, 34, 35, 37, 43, 76 
 
 Schiller's Lehen, 37 
 
 Schwerdgeburth, , 55 
 
 Scotland, 17, 32, 50, 51, 64, 80, 95 
 
 Scots Minstrels, 44 
 
 Scott, Rob's, Smithy, 15 
 
 Scottish Life, 41 
 
 Scottish Songs, 19 
 
 Shakespeare, William, 88 
 
 Solway Firth, 105 
 
 Somerville, Mrs Mary, 27 
 
 Sorrows of Werter, 30 
 
 Southey, Robert, 90 
 
 Stamp Office, 25 
 
 Stewart, Dugald, 103 
 
 Sumatra, Island of, 109 
 
 Sunny Bank, 26 
 
 Tasso, Torquato, 46 
 Taylor, Henry, 94 
 Tennyson, Alfred, First Lord, 94, 
 95 
 
 The Cottar's Saturday Night, 30, 
 
 31. 94 
 
 The Examiner, 54, 55 
 
 The French Revolution, 63 
 
 The History of Frederick the Great, 
 
 65 
 
 The Jolly Beggars, 96 
 The Life of John Sterling, 64 
 The Portraits of John Knox, 66 
 The Revolutions of Modern Europe, 
 
 63 
 The Mouse, 41, 6 1 
 The Robbers, 29 
 The Times, 88 
 The Vision, 91 
 Thomson, George, 11, 12, 18, 53, 
 
 58 
 Thor, Norse Deity. 24, 54, 71, 
 
 72, 77, 102 
 Timbuctoo, 16 
 To the Daisy, 41, 61 
 Turenne, Henri De La Tour 
 
 D'Auvergne, Vicomte De, 87 
 
 Valhalla, 24 
 Vauxhall, 100 
 Vere, Aubrey De, 94, 95 
 Voss, Johann Heinrich, 45 
 
 Weimar, 35, 55 
 Weimar, Duke of, 76, 77 
 Welsh, Jane Baillie. See under 
 
 Carlyle, Mrs. Thomas 
 Westermann, George, 56 
 Wieland, Christoph Martin, 76 
 Wilhelm Meisier's Apprenticeship, 
 
 22, 36 
 Wilhelm Tell, 30, 31 
 Wordsworth,WilUam,90,9i,93,94 
 Wotton Reinfred, 28 
 Wurtemberg, 30 
 
 York, 23 
 
 IIS 
 
WILLIAM HODGE AND CO. 
 
 PRINTERS 
 GLASGOW AND EDINBURGH 
 
BURNS 
 
 AT 
 
 GALSTON AND ECCLEFECHAN. 
 
 ISITB SIX ILLUSTBATIONS. 
 
 ^ By JOHN MUIR, F.S.A., Scot. 
 
 Second Sdltion. Hlay be had from all Booksellers, or direct from the 
 Author. Pplce Sixpence nett. 
 
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS: 
 
 GALSTON BURGH ARMS. 
 
 GAWTON PARISH CHURCH, AS SBBN 
 
 PROM NEAR THE MUCKLE BRIG. 
 TUMBLER THAT BELONGED TO 
 
 BURNS, WITH A HISTORIC BOX 
 
 FOR HOLDING SAME. 
 
 THE POET'S SEAL. 
 
 PORTRAIT OE THOMAS CARLYLS. 
 
 VIEW OE ECCLEFECHAN, WITH 
 
 BURNS WALKING DOWN THE 
 
 STREET. 
 
 OPINIONS OF THE PRESS: 
 
 "In respect to Galston, and the men and women in or connected with it who 
 were associated with Burns and are mentioned in his writings, Mr. Muir's 
 information is very full. Thus he has not a little to say that will be quite 
 fresh to most readers about, among others, "rough, rude, ready-witted" John 
 Rankine, Ellison Begbie, the family of "Wee Davock," John Goldie, and 
 Dr. Smith." — Glasgow Herald. 
 
 "Mr. Muir has explored with reverent steps the portions of the Burns 
 country that form the topics of his monograph; and he has made several 
 discoveries which are valuable." — Dundee Advertiser. 
 
 "Gives a careful and highly-interesting account of Bums at Galston and at 
 Ecclefechan. From the biographical and from the literary point of view, 
 Mr. Muir's inquiries and discoveries are worthy of preservation." — Scotsman. 
 
 "Mr. Muir is one of the most diligent students of Bums, and goes over his 
 theme with the utmost care. It is safe to say that he leaves nothing further, 
 fact or tradition, to be recorded of Bums's connection with Galston or 
 Ecclefechan." — Evening Times. 
 
 "The little work is very interesting, and will be welcomed by all lovers of 
 the poet." — Glasgow Weekly Herald. 
 
 " Mr. Muir gives an interesting description of some relics of the poet in his 
 possession, of which he is pardonably proud. At the present time, when the 
 interest in the poet is more than usually keen, Mr. Muir's pamphlet was well 
 worth publishing, and it is marked throughout by the original observations of 
 one who knows Bums and his localities thoroughly." — Daily Record. 
 
 "Taking Mr. Muir's production as a whole, we heartily recommend it to the 
 notice of our readers, assured that a perusal of its scholarly pages will be 
 amply rewarded by an enlarged knowledge of Burns. We may add that the 
 illustrations with which the booklet is embellished are at once striking and 
 effective." — Scottish Nights. 
 
 "Besides its general value as a contribution to Bumsiana, the article on 
 Burns's connection with Galston is of great local interest. The fullest possible 
 information is here given as to Bums's intimacy and correspondence with 
 Ellison Begbie and Dr. Smith. The gallery of characters also includes, 
 "rough, rude, ready-witted Rankine" and "Wee Davock," whose connection 
 with Burns was first made known by the writer." — Kilmarnock Standard. 
 
 " The brochtire, which is very readable, will be valued by enthusiasts of the 
 Bums cult and minute students of the poet's \-S&."— Daily Free Press. 
 
 "Mr. Muir relates in a very pleasant manner much that will be read with 
 interest regarding Bams and his connection with Galston and EU:clefechan." — 
 Govan Press. 
 
'cj