he sight of learning, criticism, knowledge; to enjoy his
awe, and note the improvement that could not but ensue. This curiosity
was full of kindness; their hearts were a little touched by the
ploughman, by his glowing eyes, and by the strange sight of him there
among them in the midst of their high civilisation, a rustic clown who
knew nothing better than a thatched cottage and a clay floor. No doubt
they had the sincerest desire that he should be made to understand how
much he was deficient, what a great deal he had to learn, and be taught
to use fine language, and turn his attention to higher subjects, and be
altogether elevated and brought on in the world. The situation is very
curious and full of human interest, even had the stranger been less in
importance than he was. It is wonderfully enlightening in any
circumstances to see such an encounter from both sides, to perceive the
light in which it appears to them, and the very different light in which
it is seen by _him_. There was the usual great divergence between the
views of the visitor and the highly-cultured community to which he came.
For he indeed did not come there at all to be enlightened and trained
and put in the way he should go. He came full of delightful hope that he
was coming among his own kind, that he was for the first time to meet
his own species, and recognise in other human faces the light that shone
about his own path, but in none of the other muddy ways of the
country-side; to make friends with his natural brethren, and be
understood of them as no one yet had been found to understand him. In
his high anticipations, in his warm enthusiasm of hope, he himself
figured dimly as a sort of noble exile coming back to his father's
house. So does every child of fancy regard the world of which he knows
nothing, the world of the great and famous, where to dazzled fancy all
the beautiful things, words, and thoughts for which he has been sighing
all his life are to be found.

They met, and they were, if not mutually disappointed, yet strangely
astonished and perplexed. Burns would seem to have been always on his
guard, too much on his guard we should be disposed to say, suspicious of
the intention to guide, to chasten, to educate and refine, which was
indeed in the kindest way at the bottom of everybody's thoughts. He was
determined to be astonished by nothing, to keep his head so that no one
should ever be able to say that it was turned by his new experienc