popular English for many forms of thought.

Perhaps the young peasant who most expressly stands out as the pupil
and successor of Burns, is Robert Nicoll. He is a lesser poet,
doubtless, than his master, and a lesser man, if the size and number
of his capabilities be looked at; but he is a greater man, in that,
from the beginning to the end of his career, he seems to have kept
that very wholeness of heart and head which poor Burns lost.
Nicoll's story is, mutatis mutandis, that of the Bethunes, and many a
noble young Scotsman more. Parents holding a farm between Perth and
Dunkeld, they and theirs before them for generations inhabitants of
the neighbourhood, "decent, honest, God-fearing people." The farm is
lost by reverses, and manfully Robert Nicoll's father becomes a day-
labourer on the fields which he lately rented: and there begins, for
the boy, from his earliest recollections, a life of steady sturdy
drudgery. But they must have been grand old folk, these parents, and
in no wise addicted to wringing their hands over "the great might-
have-been." Like true Scots Bible lovers, they do believe in a God,
and in a will of God, underlying, absolute, loving, and believe that
the might-have-been ought not to have been, simply because it has not
been; and so they put their shoulders to the new collar patiently,
cheerfully, hopefully, and teach the boys to do the same. The mother
especially, as so many great men's mothers do, stands out large and
heroic, from the time when, the farm being gone, she, "the ardent
book-woman," finds her time too precious to be spent in reading, and
sets little Robert to read to her as she works--what a picture!--to
the last sad day, when, wanting money to come up to Leeds to see her
dying darling, she "shore for the siller," rather than borrow it.
And her son's life is like her own--a most pure, joyous, valiant
little epic. Robert does not even take to work as something beyond
himself, uninteresting and painful, which, however, must be done
courageously: he lives in it, enjoys it as his proper element, one
which is no more a burden and an exertion to him than the rush of the
strid is to the trout who plays and feels in it day and night,
unconscious of the amount of muscular strength which he puts forth in
merely keeping his place in the stream. Whether carrying
"Kenilworth" in his plaid to the woods, to read while herding, or
selling currants and whisky as the Perth storekeeper's app