Of professional teaching, Robert Burns, in truth, had but a limited and erratic experience. His father and a few neighbouring householders engaged between them for two years a young itinerant teacher for the tuition of their children, and on this excellent dominie's removal elsewhere the father himself taught the boy at home. A precocious passion for reading was evoked; Pope's works and a collection of letters by the best prose-writers of Queen Anne's time set young Burns assiduously scribbling at the age of twelve. At thirteen he went for a few weeks to a school in Dalrymple to improve his penmanship; at fourteen a like brief period was spent with his first tutor, in Ayr, in the study of English, French (which in course of time he could read with some facility), and Latin, in which he never got beyond the rudiments. At seventeen he attended a school at Kirkoswald for the study of mensuration, and the few months spent there completed all the orthodox education he was ever to have.

Its spasmodic character was unavoidably due to the straitened circumstances of the Burns family. Ill-fortune attended every effort of William Burns to improve his social condition; having left the Alloway cottage and croft to lease, in succession, the farms of Mount Oliphant and Lochlea, he failed with both, and in 1784 died of consumption.

Early Struggles

Anticipating the failure with Lochlea, Robert and his brother Gilbert, three months before their father's death, took the farm of Mossgiel, which was stocked with the individual savings of the whole family, who wrought upon its cold and grudging acres for four years, during which the two brothers allowed themselves each only £7 per annum of wages.

If Mossgiel gave a wretched return to husbandry it was fertile enough in poetry. Burns was now 25 years of age. For ten years, in his hours of remission from hard manual labour on his father's holdings, he had read widely and wisely. He had

shone in the rustic debates of young men's "mutual improvement" societies, had been shedding his native shyness and gaucherie at masonic gatherings and village dances; had gained self-assurance from manifold opportunities for pitting his native wit and logic against the academic dogmas of many social superiors. From early manhood he had manifestly been an idealist and a sentimentalist, acutely responsive to feminine charms, and his first verses were a tribute at 15 years of age to a girl whose singing in the harvest field had enraptured him. A second platonic charmer, when he was but seventeen, had "overset his trigonometry and sent him off from his studies at a tangent." At twenty-two he was more genuinely in love with Alison Begbie, a servant-maid on a neighbouring farm; wrote three poems to her, proposed to marry her, and was rejected.

The heroine of "Sweet Afton" is supposed to have been Mary Campbell, the poet's "Highland Mary."

Flow gently, sweet Afton! among thy green braes;
Flow gently, I'll sing thee a song in thy praise;
My Mary's asleep by thy murmuring stream,
Flow gently, sweet Afton, disturb not her dream.

Thou stock-dove whose echo resounds thro' the glen,
Ye wild whistling blackbirds, in yon thorny den,
Thou green-crested lapwing, thy screaming forbear;
I charge you, disturb not my slumbering Fair.

To the untimely death of Mary Campbell we owe his "Address to Mary in Heaven," written on the third anniversary of her death. The poet's wife noticed that towards the darkening he grew sad and wandered into the barn-yard, "where his Jean found him lying on some straw with his eyes fixed on a shining star. Immediately on entering the house he sat down and wrote the lines, 'To Mary in Heaven,' and gave them to his wife."

Thou ling'ring star, with less'ning ray,

That lov'st to greet the early morn,

Again thou usher'st in the day
My Mary from my soul was torn.

O Mary! dear departed shade!

Where is thy place of blissful rest?
See'st thou thy lover lowly laid?

Hear'st thou the groans that rend his breast?

That sacred hour can I forget,

Can I forget the hallow'd grove,
Where, by the winding Ayr, we met,

To live one day of parting love!
Eternity can not efface

Those records dear of transports past,
Thy image at our last embrace,

Ah! little thought we 'twas our last!

The well-known plaintive song, "The Banks o' Doon," was suggested by an unhappy love affair which, however, was not one of the poet's own.

Ye banks and braes o' bonie Doon,

How can ye bloom sae fresh and fair?
How can ye chant, ye little birds,

And I sae weary, fu' o' care!

Thou❜lt break my heart, thou warbling bird,
That wanton thro' the flowering thorn:
Thou mindst me o' departed joys,

Departed never to return.

Aft hae I rov'd by bonie Doon,

To see the rose and woodbine twine;

And ilka bird sang o' its Luve,

And fondly sae did I o' mine;
Wi' lightsome heart I pu'd a rose,
Fu' sweet upon its thorny tree!
And my fause Luver staw my rose,

But ah! he left the thorn wi' me.

His local renown, however, began with no love-lyrics, naturally not for general circulation, but with satirical on