built.  Stuck against the surrounding wall is a marble statue of Burns at the plough, with the Genius of Caledonia summoning the ploughman to turn poet.  Methought it was not a very successful piece of work; for the plough was better sculptured than the man, and the man, though heavy and cloddish, was more effective than the goddess.  Our guide informed us that an old man of ninety, who knew Burns, certifies, this statue to be very like the original.

The bones of the poet, and of Jean Armour, and of some of their children, lie in the vault over which we stood.  Our guide (who was intelligent, in her own plain way, and very agreeable to talk withal) said that the vault was opened about three weeks ago, on occasion of the burial of the eldest son of Burns.  The poet’s bones were disturbed, and the dry skull, once so brimming over with powerful thought and bright and tender fantasies, was taken away, and kept for several days by a Dumfries doctor.  It has since been deposited in a new leaden coffin, and restored to the vault.  We learned that there is a surviving daughter of Burns’s eldest son, and daughters likewise of the two younger sons,—­and, besides these, an illegitimate posterity by the eldest son, who appears to have been of disreputable life in his younger days.  He inherited his father’s failings, with some faint shadow, I have also understood, of the great qualities which have made the world tender of his father’s vices and weaknesses.

We listened readily enough to this paltry gossip, but found that it robbed the poet’s memory of some of the reverence that was its due.  Indeed, this talk over his grave had very much the same tendency and effect as the home-scene of his life, which we had been visiting just previously.  Beholding his poor, mean dwelling and its surroundings, and picturing his outward life and earthly manifestations from these, one does not so much wonder that the people of that day should have failed to recognize all that was admirable and immortal in a disreputable, drunken, shabbily clothed, and shabbily housed man, consorting with associates of damaged character, and, as his only ostensible occupation, gauging the whiskey which he too often tasted.  Siding with Burns, as we needs must, in his plea against the world, let us try to do the world a little justice too.  It is far easier to know and honor a poet when his fame has taken shape in the spotlessness of marble than when the actual man comes staggering before you, besmeared with the sordid stains of his daily life.  For my part, I chiefly wonder that his recognition dawned so brightly while he was still living.  There must have been something very grand in his immediate presence, some strangely impressive characteristic in his natural behavior, to have caused him to seem like a demigod so soon.

As we went back through the churchyard, we saw a spot where nearly four hundred inhabitants of Dumfries were buried during the cholera year; and also some curious old monuments, with raised letters, the inscriptions on which were not sufficiently legible to induce us to puzzle them out; but, I believe, they mark the resting-places of old Covenanters, some of whom were killed by Claverhouse and his fellow-ruffians.