mes_ for most part,
of the Eighteenth Century, once more a giant 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; without whom the son
had never been a speaking one! Burns's Schoolmaster 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 paragraphs
about his nobleness; voting pieces of plate to him! However, he was not
lost: nothing is lost. Robert is there; the outcome of him,--and indeed
of many generations of such as him.

This Burns appears 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: wheresoever a Saxon
dialect is spoken, it begins to be understood, by personal inspection
of this and the other, t