His funeral was unostentatious but the attendance was very great.  He was laid in the Abbey of Dryburgh, by the side of his wife, in the sepulchre of his ancestors.

* * * * *

The Life of Robert Burns

John Gibson Lockhart was born, a son of the manse, at Cambusnethan, Lanarkshire, on July 14, 1794.  Receiving his early education in Glasgow, he went, at sixteen, with a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford.  In 1816 he was called to the Scottish Bar; but literature occupied him more than law, and as early as 1819 he wrote the once popular “Peter’s Letters to his Kinsfolk.”  Next year he married Scott’s eldest daughter, Sophia.  Lockhart was a leading contributor to the early “Blackwood,” where his fine translations of Spanish ballads first appeared, and he edited the “Quarterly Review” from 1825 to 1853.  He died at Abbotsford on November 25, 1854, and was buried at Scott’s feet in Dryburgh Abbey.  Lockhart’s forte was biography, and his “Life of Scott” ranks beside Boswell’s “Johnson.”  The “Life of Burns” was published first in Constable’s “Miscellany” in 1828, when the whole impression was exhausted in six weeks.  It passed through five editions before the author’s death.  Though many lives of Burns have appeared since, with details unknown to Lockhart, his biography is in many respects the best we possess, and is never likely to be superseded.  Even Mr. Henley is “glad to agree with Lockhart.”  It is this book that is the subject of Carlyle’s famous essay on Burns.

I.—­The Poet in the Making

Robert Burns was born on January 25, 1759, in a clay cottage at Alloway, two miles south of Ayr, and near the “auld brig o’ Doon.”  His father, William Burnes, or Burness—­for so he spelt his name—­was from Kincardineshire.  When Robert was born he had the lease of a seven-acre croft, and had intended to establish himself as a nurseryman.  He was a man of notable character and individuality, immortalised by his son as “the saint, the father, and the husband” of “The Cottar’s Saturday Night.”  “I have met with few,” said Burns, “who understood men, their manners, and their ways, equal to my father.”  Agnes Brown, the poet’s mother, is described as a very sagacious woman, with an inexhaustible store of ballads and traditionary tales, upon which she nourished Robert’s infant imagination, while her husband attended to “the weightier matters of the law.”

When Burns was between six and seven, his father removed to the farm of Mount Oliphant, two miles from the Brig o’ Doon.  But the soil was poor, and the factor—­afterwards pictured in “The Twa Dogs”—­so harsh and unreasonable, that the tenant was glad to quit.  In 1777 he removed about ten miles to the larger and better farm of Lochlea, in the parish of Tarbolton.  Here, after a short interval of prosperity, some trouble arose about the conditions of the lease.  The dispute involved William Burnes in ruin, and he died broken-hearted in February, 1784.