Shakespeare, Pope (his Homer
included), Locke on the Human Understanding, Boyle's Lectures,
Taylor's Scripture Doctrine of Original Sin, Allan Ramsay's works,
formed the staple of their reading. Above all there was a collection
of songs, of which Burns says, "This was my _vade mecum_. I pored over
them driving my cart, or walking to labour, song by song, verse by
verse; carefully noting the true tender or sublime, from affectation
and fustian, I am convinced I owe to this practice much of my
critic-craft, such as it is!" And he could not have learnt it in a
better way.

There are few countries in the world which could at that time have
produced in humble life such a teacher as Murdoch and such a father as
William Burness. It seems fitting, then, that a country which could
rear such men among its peasantry should give birth to such a poet as
Robert Burns to represent them. The books which fed his young
intellect were devoured only during intervals snatched from hard toil.
That toil was no doubt excessive. And this early over-strain showed
itself soon in the stoop of his shoulders, in nervous disorder about
the heart, and in frequent fits of despondency. Yet perhaps too much
has sometimes been made of these bodily hardships, as though Burns's
boyhood had been one long misery. But the youth which grew up in so
kindly an atmosphere of wisdom and home affection, under the eye of
such a father and mother, cannot be called unblest.

Under the pressure of toil and the entire want of society, Burns might
have grown up the rude and clownish and unpopular lad that he has been
pictured in his early teens. But in his fifteenth summer there came to
him a new influence, which at one touch unlocked the springs of (p. 008)
new emotions. This incident must be given in his own words:--"You
know," he says, "our country custom of coupling a man and woman
together as partners in the labours 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, sweet, sonsie lass. In short, she, altogether unwittingly to
herself, initiated me in that delicious passion, which, in spite of
acid disappointment, gin-horse prudence, and book-worm philosophy, I
hold to be the first of human joys here below! How she caught the
contagion I cannot tell.... Indeed I did not know mys