ny of his own Thoughts and Necessities
there; driven from post to pillar; fretted, exasperated till the heart
of him went mad, he had grown to feel deeply that the world was not his
friend nor the world's law. It was expedient, if any way possible, that
such a man should _not_ have been set in flat hostility with the world.
He could be cooped into garrets, laughed at as a maniac, left to starve
like a wild beast in his cage;--but he could not be hindered from
setting the world on fire. The French Revolution found its Evangelist in
Rousseau. His semi-delirious speculations on the miseries of civilized
life, the preferability of the savage to the civilized, and such like,
helped well to produce a whole delirium in France generally. True, you
may well ask, What could the world, the governors of the world, do with
such a man? Difficult to say what the governors of the world could
do with him! What he could do with them is unhappily clear
enough,--_guillotine_ a great many of them! Enough now of Rousseau.

It was a curious phenomenon, in the withered, unbelieving second-hand
Eighteenth Century, that of a Hero starting up, among the artificial
pasteboard figures and productions, in the guise of a Robert Burns. Like
a little well in the rocky desert places,--like a sudden splendor of
Heaven in the artificial Vauxhall! People knew not what to make of
it. They took it for a piece of the Vauxhall fire-work; alas, it _let_
itself be so taken, though struggling half-blindly, as in bitterness of
death, against that! Perhaps no man had such a false reception from his
fellow-men. Once more a very wasteful life-drama was enacted under the
sun.

The tragedy of Burns's life is known to all of you. Surely we may
say, if discrepancy between place held and place merited constitute
perverseness of lot for a man, no lot could be more perverse then
Burns's. Among those second-hand acting-figures, _mimes_ for most part,
of the Eighteenth Century, once more a giant Original Man; one of those
men who reach down to the perennial Deeps, who take rank with the Heroic
among men: and he was born in a poor Ayrshire hut. The largest soul
of all the British lands came among us in the shape of a hard-handed
Scottish Peasant.

His Father, a poor toiling man, tried various things; did not succeed in
any; was involved in continual difficulties. The Steward, Factor as
the Scotch call him, used to send letters and threatenings, Burns says,
"which threw us