was a
native not of Ayrshire, but of Kincardineshire, where he had been
reared on a farm belonging to the forfeited estate of the noble (p. 003)
but attainted house of Keith-Marischal. Forced to migrate thence at
the age of nineteen, he had travelled to Edinburgh, and finally settled
in Ayrshire, and at the time when Robert, his eldest child, was born,
he rented seven acres of land, near the Brig o' Doon, which he
cultivated as a nursery-garden. He was a man of strict, even stubborn
integrity, and of strong temper--a combination which, as his son remarks,
does not usually lead to worldly success. But his chief characteristic
was his deep-seated and thoughtful piety. A peasant-saint of the old
Scottish stamp, he yet tempered the stern Calvinism of the West with
the milder Arminianism more common in his northern birthplace. Robert,
who, amid all his after-errors, never ceased to revere his father's
memory, has left an immortal portrait of him in _The Cotter's Saturday
Night_, when he describes how

The saint, the father, and the husband prays.

William Burness was advanced in years before he married, and his wife,
Agnes Brown, was much younger than himself. She is described as an
Ayrshire lass, of humble birth, very sagacious, with bright eyes and
intelligent looks, but not beautiful, of good manners and easy
address. Like her husband, she was sincerely religious, but of a more
equable temper, quick to perceive character, and with a memory stored
with old traditions, songs, and ballads, which she told or sang to
amuse her children. In his outer man the poet resembled his mother,
but his great mental gifts, if inherited at all, must be traced to his
father.

Three places in Ayrshire, besides his birthplace, will always be
remembered as the successive homes of Burns. These were Mount (p. 004)
Oliphant, Lochlea (pronounced Lochly), and Mossgiel.

MOUNT OLIPHANT.--This was a small upland farm, about two miles from
the Brig o' Doon, of a poor and hungry soil, belonging to Mr.
Ferguson, of Doon-holm, who was also the landlord of William Burness'
previous holding. Robert was in his seventh year when his father
entered on this farm at Whitsuntide, 1766, and he had reached his
eighteenth when the lease came to a close in 1777. All the years
between these two dates were to the family of Burness one long sore
battle with untoward circumstances, ending in defeat. If the hardest
toil and severe self-denial