They had recognised the voice of a human being, and heard it gladly.
This gathering was convincing testimony, if such were needed, of the
truthfulness and sincerity of his writings. No doubt Burns, with his
great force of understanding, appreciated the welcome of those
brother-farmers, and valued it above the adulation he afterwards
received in Edinburgh. The Kilmarnock Edition was but a few months old,
yet here was a gathering of hard-working men, who had read his poems, we
may be sure, from cover to cover, and now they were eager to thank him
who had sung the joys and sorrows of their workaday lives. Of course
there was a great banquet, and night wore into morning before the
company dispersed. They had seen the poet face to face, and the man was
greater than his poems.

Next morning he resumed his journey, breakfasting at Carnwath, and
reaching Edinburgh in the evening. He had come, as he tells us, without
a letter of introduction in his pocket, and he took up his abode with
John Richmond in Baxter's Close, off the Lawnmarket. He had known
Richmond when he was a clerk with Gavin Hamilton, and had kept up a
correspondence with him ever since he had left Mauchline. The lodging
was a humble enough one, the rent being only three shillings a week;
but here Burns lodged all the time he was in Edinburgh, and it was
hither he returned from visiting the houses of the rich and great, to
share a bed with his friend and companion of many a merry meeting at
Mauchline.

It would be vain to attempt to describe Burns's feelings during those
first few days in Edinburgh. He had never before been in a larger town
than Kilmarnock or Ayr; and now he walked the streets of Scotland's
capital, to him full of history and instinct with the associations of
centuries. This was really the heart of Scotland, the home of heroes who
fought and fell for their country, 'the abode of kings of other years.'
His sentimental attachment to Jacobitism became more pronounced as he
looked on Holyrood. For Burns, a representative of the strength and
weakness of his countrymen, was no less representative of Scotland's
sons in his chivalrous pity for the fate of Queen Mary and his romantic
loyalty to the gallant Prince Charlie. His poetical espousal of the
cause of the luckless Stuarts was purely a matter of sentiment, a kind
of pious pity that had little to do with reason; and in this he was
typical of his countrymen even of the present day, who are loyal to t