worked at first as a gardener before taking a lease of some
seven acres of land near the Bridge of Doon, and beginning business as
a nurseryman. It was to a clay cottage which he built on this land that
he brought his wife, Agnes Broun, in December 1757; and here the poet
was born in 1759. The date of his birth is not likely to be forgotten.

'Our monarch's hindmost year but ane
Was five-and-twenty days begun,
'Twas then a blast o' Jan'war' win'
Blew hansel in on Robin.'

To his father Burns owed much; and if there be anything in heredity in
the matter of genius, it was from him that he inherited his marvellous
mental powers. His mother is spoken of as a shrewd and sagacious woman,
with education enough to enable her to read her Bible, but unable to
write her own name. She had a great love for old ballads, and Robert as
a boy must often have listened to her chanting the quaint old songs with
which her retentive memory was stored. The poet resembled his mother in
feature, although he had the swarthy complexion of his father. Attempts
have been made now and again to trace his ancestry on the father's side,
and to give to the world a kind of genealogy of genius. Writers have
demonstrated to their own satisfaction that it was perfectly natural
that Burns should have been the man he was. But the other children of
William Burness were not great poets. It has even been discovered that
his genius was Celtic, whatever that may mean! Excursions and
speculations of this kind are vain and unprofitable, hardly more
reputable than the profanities of the Dumfries craniologists who, in
1834, in the early hours of April 1st,--a day well chosen,--desecrated
the poet's dust. They fingered his skull, 'applied their compasses to
it, and satisfied themselves that Burns had capacity enough to write
_Tam o' Shanter_, _The Cotter's Saturday Night_, and _To Mary in
Heaven_.' Let us take the poet as he comes to us, a gift of the gods,
and be thankful. As La Bruyere puts it, 'Ces hommes n'ont ni ancetres ni
posterites; ils forment eux seuls toute une descendance.'

What Burns owed particularly to his father he has told us himself both
in prose and verse. The exquisite and beautiful picture of the father
and his family at their evening devotions is taken from life; and
William Burness is the sire who

'turns o'er with patriarchal grace
The big ha'-bible ance his father's pride';

and in his fragment of autobi