e was seen to be dying. On the 12th he wrote to his
cousin for the loan of L10 to save him from passing his last days in jail.
On the 21st he was no more. On the 25th, when his last son came into the
world, he was buried with local honours, the volunteers of the company to
which he belonged firing three volleys over his grave.

It has been said that "Lowland Scotland as a distinct nationality came in
with two warriors and went out with two bards. It came in with William
Wallace and Robert Bruce and went out with Robert Burns and Walter Scott.
The first two made the history, the last two told the story and sung the
song." But what in the minstrel's lay was mainly a requiem was in the
people's poet also a prophecy. The position of Burns in the progress of
British literature may be shortly defined; he was a link between two eras,
like Chaucer, the last of the old and the first of the new--the inheritor
of the traditions and the music of the past, in some respects the herald of
the future.

The volumes of our lyrist owe part of their popularity to the fact of their
being an epitome of melodies, moods and memories that had belonged for
centuries to the national life, the best [v.04 p.0858] inspirations of
which have passed into them. But in gathering from his ancestors Burns has
exalted their work by asserting a new dignity for their simplest themes. He
is the heir of Barbour, distilling the spirit of the old poet's epic into a
battle chant, and of Dunbar, reproducing the various humours of a
half-sceptical, half-religious philosophy of life. He is the pupil of
Ramsay, but he leaves his master, to make a social protest and to lead a
literary revolt. _The Gentle Shepherd_, still largely a court pastoral, in
which "a man's a man" if born a gentleman, may be contrasted with "The
Jolly Beggars"--the one is like a minuet of the ladies of Versailles on the
sward of the Swiss village near the Trianon, the other like the march of
the maenads with Theroigne de Mericourt. Ramsay adds to the rough tunes and
words of the ballads the refinement of the wits who in the "Easy" and
"Johnstone" clubs talked over their cups of Prior and Pope, Addison and
Gay. Burns inspires them with a fervour that thrills the most wooden of his
race. We may clench the contrast by a representative example. This is from
Ramsay's version of perhaps the best-known of Scottish songs,--

"Methinks around us on each bough
A thousand Cupids play;
Whilst thro