he
miracles of Rome.... In my pilgrimage from Rome to Loretto I again
crossed the Apennine; from the coast of the Adriatic I traversed a
fruitful and populous country, which could alone disprove the paradox
of Montesquieu, that modern Italy is a desert....

"The use of foreign travel has been often debated as a general
question; but the conclusion must be finally applied to the character
and circumstances of each individual. With the education of boys,
where or how they may pass over some juvenile years with the least
mischief to themselves or others, I have no concern. But after
supposing the previous and indispensable requisites of age, judgment,
a competent knowledge of men and books, and a freedom from domestic
prejudices, I will briefly describe the qualifications which I deem
most essential to a traveler. He should be endowed with an active,
indefatigable vigor of mind and body, which can seize every mode of
conveyance, and support, with a careless smile, every hardship of the
road, the weather, or the inn. The benefits of foreign travel will
correspond with the degrees of these qualifications; but, in this
sketch, those to whom I am known will not accuse me of framing my own
panegyric. It was at Rome, on the 15th of October, 1764, as I sat
musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the bare-footed friars
were singing vespers in the temple of Jupiter, that the idea of
writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind."

XI

BURNS FALLS IN LOVE

When Robert Burns and his brother were working hard on the Mount
Oliphant farm, Robert fell in love. This experience, alas, in after
years became too frequent an occurrence to occasion much comment, for
the ease with which the poet fell in and out of love was the chief
fault in a faulty life. But when this episode occurred the boy was
still an innocent country lad in his fifteenth year, a lad perhaps
somewhat rude and clownish, at least such is an unfounded tradition.
Out of the monotony of this life of prosaic toil and drudgery, Burns
is lifted by the romance which fortunately he has himself described.

"You know," he says, "our country custom of coupling a man and woman
together as partners in the labors of the harvest. In my fifteenth
summer my partner was a bewitching creature, a year younger than
myself. My scarcity of English denies me the power of doing her
justice in that language, but you know the Scottish idiom. She was a
bonnie,