truly say, '_Virgilium vidi tantum_.'
I was a lad of fifteen when he came to Edinburgh. I saw him one day at
the late venerable Professor Adam Fergusson's. Of course we youngsters
sat silent, looked and listened. The only thing I remember which was
remarkable in Burns's manner, was the effect produced upon him by a
print of Bunbury's, representing a soldier lying dead on the snow, his
dog sitting in misery on one side,--on the other, his widow, with a
child in her arms. These lines were written beneath:--

Cold on Canadian hills, or Minden's plain,
Perhaps that parent wept her soldier slain,--
Bent o'er the babe, her eye dissolved in dew,
The big drops mingling with the milk he drew,
Gave the sad presage of his future years,
The child of misery baptized in tears.

"Burns seemed much affected by the print: he actually shed tears. He
asked whose the lines were, and it chanced that nobody but myself
remembered that they occur in a half-forgotten poem of Langhorne's,
called by the unpromising title of The Justice of Peace. I whispered
my information to a friend present, who mentioned it to Burns, who
rewarded me with a look and a word, which though of mere civility, I
then received with very great pleasure. His person was strong and
robust; his manner rustic, not clownish; a sort of dignified plainness
and simplicity. His countenance was more massive than it looks in any
of the portraits. I would have taken the poet, had I not known who he
was, for a very sagacious country farmer of the old Scotch school,--the
_douce gudeman_ who held his own plough. There was a strong expression
of sense and shrewdness in all his lineaments; the eye alone, I think,
indicated the poetical character and temperament. It was large, (p. 054)
and of a dark cast, which glowed (I say literally glowed) when he
spoke with feeling or interest. I never saw such another eye in a
human head, though I have seen the most distinguished men of my time."

While men of the upper ranks, old and young, were thus receiving their
impressions, and forming their various estimates of Burns, he, we may
be sure, was not behind-hand in his reflections on them, and on himself.
He had by nature his full share of that gnawing self-consciousness
which haunts the irritable tribe, from which no modern poet but Walter
Scott has been able wholly to escape. While he was bearing himself
thus manfully t