still more
rare man of wealth, who gave character and meaning to Edinburgh. To be
received in such society was the highest privilege which a young poet
could desire; and it was worthy to receive and foster and encourage that
new light that came from heaven.

On their side the heads of society in Edinburgh were much interested in
this young man. There had been an article in the _Lounger_, fondly
deemed a Scotch _Spectator_, an elegant literary paper widely read not
only in Scotland but even beyond the Border, upon him and his works.
"The Ayrshire Ploughman" was the title of the article, and it set forth
all the imperfections of his breeding, his want of education, his
ignorance both of books and of the world, and yet the amazing verses he
had produced, which, though disguised in a dialect supposed to be
unknown to the elegant reader, and for which Henry Mackenzie, the Man of
Feeling, supplied a glossary--living, he himself, in an old-fashioned
house in the South Back of the Canongate and within the easiest reach of
those wonderful old ladies who spoke broad Scotch, and left no one in
any doubt as to the strong opinions expressed therein--were certified to
be worthy the perusal of the most fastidious critic. Lord Monboddo, who
was the author of speculations which forestalled Darwin and who
considered a tail to be an appendage of which men had not long got rid,
on the one side, and the metaphysicians and philosophers on the other,
would no doubt prick up their ears to hear of this absolutely new being
in whom there might be seen some traces of primeval man. We forget which
of the early Jameses it was who is said to have shut up two infants with
a dumb nurse in one of the islands of the Firth to ascertain what kind
of language they would speak when thus left to the teaching of nature.
The experiment was triumphantly successful, for the heaven-taught babies
babbled, the chroniclers tell us, a kind of Hebrew, thus proving beyond
doubt that the language of the Old Testament was the original tongue of
man. The Edinburgh savants must have received Burns with something of
the same feeling: for here was a new soul which had been shut up amid
the primeval elements, and the language it spoke was Poetry! yet poetry
disguised in imperfect dialect which might yet be trained and educated
into elegance. They asked him to dinner as a first step, and gathered
round him to hear what he would have to say; to observe the effect
produced by t