tal
round. These hodden-gray bards furnish abundance of material for giving
even the humblest and most untrained mind a few glimpses of what is
meant by literature. Burns has a broad and brawny humanity that appeals
to all men, and, besides Burns, there are scores of major and minor
warblers that are interesting, quotable, and full of grace.

The wild and unruly manners of some mining districts, even at the
present day, may partly be explained by remembering that up to the end
of the eighteenth century, colliers were serfs and, as such, were not
allowed to leave the mines and seek work elsewhere. When a pit was sold,
the workers passed as a matter of course into the hands of the new
proprietor. The son of a miner was compelled to follow the father's
occupation.[8] Slavery fixed a brutalising mark on generation after
generation that is not yet entirely erased. In the first half of the
nineteenth century the knights of the shuttle--intellectual,
disputatious, and lyrical--looked down with infinite contempt on the
ignorant and boorish slaves of the pick. Poetry has, in consequence,
little to say about the digger for coal. The song of "The Collier
Laddie," attributed to Burns, is one of the very few pleasant pieces of
verse associated with the miner.

The Scotch mining villages of to-day contain a queer juxtaposition of
nationalities, and the proportion of native colliers is becoming less
and less. Thousands of Irish families from Ulster and Connaught are now
settled permanently in the counties of Lanark, Stirling, and Ayr. The
alien Pole, too, is to be found in the same regions uttering melodious
oaths learned on the banks of the Vistula. To complete the welter,
huckstering Orientals may be seen gliding about among the rows of
houses, fulfilling prophecy and selling highly-coloured pictures of the
Virgin Mary.

[8] In his book, _Edinburgh and its Neighbourhood_, Hugh Miller
tells the following story, on the authority of Robert
Chambers:--"Though legally only transferable with the works and
the minerals to which they were attached, cases occasionally
occurred in which miners were actually transferred _by sale_ from
one part of the country to another. During the early part of the
XIXth century, the son of an extensive coal-proprietor was
examining with a friend the pits of another proprietor, and
finding a collier whose speech resembled that of the colliers of
his own district, he