re had
put forth by the aid of a country printer at Kilmarnock a little volume
of rustic poetry upon the most unambitious subjects, in Westland Scotch,
the record of a ploughman's loves and frolics and thoughts. It is
something to know that these credentials were enough to rouse the whole
of that witty, learned, clever, and all-discerning community, and that
this visitor from the hills and fields in a moment found every door
opened to him, and Modern Athens, never unconscious of its own
superiority and at this moment more deeply aware than usual that it was
one of the lights of the earth, at his feet.

[Illustration: LADY STAIR'S CLOSE]

Burns was but a visitor, the lion of a season, and therefore we are not
called upon to associate with Edinburgh the whole tragic story of his
life. And yet his appearance was one of the most remarkable that has
distinguished the ancient town. He arrived among all the professors, the
men of letters, the cultured classes who held an almost ideal
pre-eminence, more like what a young author hopes than is generally to
be met with among men--his heart beating with a sense of the great
venture on which he was bound, and a proud determination to quit himself
like a man whatever were the magnitudes among which he should have to
stand. Mere Society so called, with all its bustle of gaiety and endless
occupation about nothing, might have exercised upon him something of the
fascination which fine names and fine houses and the sweep and whirl of
hurried life certainly possess; but he who expresses almost with
bitterness his disgust to see a blockhead of rank received by one of his
noble patrons with as much, nay more, consideration than is given to
himself, would probably have had very little toleration for the
butterflies of fashion: whereas Edinburgh society impressed him greatly,
as of that ideal kind of which the young and inexperienced dream, where
the best and brightest are at the head of everything, where poetry is a
passport to the innermost sanctuary and conversation is like the talk of
the gods. They were all distinguished for one literary gift or grace or
another, philosophers golden-mouthed, poets of the most polished sort:
their knowledge, their culture, their intellectual powers, were the
foundation upon which their little world was built. The great people who
were to be found among them were proud to know these scholars and
sages--it was they, and not an occasional family of rank, or