ound about
him. For that reason it is, perhaps, that he has been called the
satirist and singer of a parish. Had he lived nowadays, he would have
been relegated to the kailyard, there to cultivate his hardy annuals
and indigenous daisies. For Burns did not affect exotics, and it
requires a specialist in manure to produce blue dandelions or sexless
ferns. In the narrow sense of the word he was not parochial. Whilst true
to class and country, he reached out a hand to universal man. A Scotsman
of Scotsmen, he endeared himself to the hearts of a people; but he was
from first to last a man, and so has found entrance to the hearts of all
men. Although local in subject, he was artistic in treatment; he might
address the men and women of Mauchline, but he spoke with the voice of
humanity, and his message was for mankind.

Besides interpreting the lives of the Scottish peasantry, he revived for
them their nationality. For he was but the last of the great bards that
sang the Iliad of Scotland; and in him, when patriotism was all but
dead, and a hybrid culture was making men ashamed of their land and
their language, the voices of nameless ballad-makers and forgotten
singers blended again into one great voice that sang of the love of
country, till men remembered their fathers, and gloried in the name of
Scotsmen. His patriotism, however, was not parochial. It was no mere
prejudice which bound him hand and foot to Scottish theme and Scottish
song. He knew that there were lands beyond the Cheviots, and that men of
other countries and other tongues joyed and sorrowed, toiled and sweated
and struggled and hoped even as he did. He was attached to the people of
his own rank in life, the farmers and ploughmen amongst whom he had been
born and bred; but his sympathies went out to all men, prince or
peasant, beggar or king, if they were worthy of the name of men he
recognised them as brothers. It is this sympathy which gives him his
intimate knowledge of mankind. He sees into the souls of his fellows;
the thoughts of their hearts are visible to his piercing eye. He who had
mixed only with hard-working men, and scarcely ever been beyond the
boundary of his parish, wrote of court and parliament as if he had known
princes and politicians from his boyhood. The goodwife of Wauchope House
would hardly credit that he had come straight from the plough-stilts--

'And then sae slee ye crack your jokes
O' Willie Pitt and Charlie Fox;
Our