It soon became known that he was dying, and the anxiety, not of the rich and the learned only, but of the mechanics and peasants, exceeded all belief.  Wherever two or three people stood together their talk was solely of Burns.  His good humour was unruffled, and his wit never forsook him; but he repressed with a smile the hopes of his friends, and told them he had lived long enough.  The fever increased, and his strength diminished, and he died on July 21, 1796.  His funeral, attended by ten or twelve thousand people, was an impressive and mournful sight.  The grave was at first covered by a plain tombstone; but a costly mausoleum was subsequently erected on the most elevated site which the churchyard presented.  Thither the remains of the poet were solemnly transferred on June 5, 1815.

It requires a graver audacity of hypocrisy than falls to the share of most men to declaim against Burns’s sensibility to the tangible cares and toils of his earthly condition; there are more who venture on broad denunciations of his sympathy with the joys of sense and passion.

That some men in every age will comfort themselves in the practice of certain vices, by reference to particular passages both in the history and in the poetry of Burns, there is all reason to fear; but surely the general influence of both is calculated, and has been found, to produce far different effects.  The universal popularity which his writings have all along enjoyed among one of the most virtuous of nations is of itself a decisive circumstance.

On one point there can be no controversy; the poetry of Burns has had most powerful influence in reviving and strengthening the national feelings of his countrymen.  Amidst penury and labour his youth fed on the old minstrelsy and traditional glories of his nation, and his genius divined that what he felt so deeply must belong to a spirit that might lie smothered around him, but could not be extinguished.  Burns “knew his own worth, and reverenced the lyre.”  But he ever announced himself, as a peasant, the representative of his class, the painter of their manners, inspired by the same influences which ruled their bosoms; and whosoever sympathised with his verse had his soul opened for the moment to the whole family of man.

Short and painful as were his years, Burns has left behind him a volume in which there is inspiration for every fancy and music for every mood; which lives, and will live in strength and vigour, “to soothe,” as a generous lover of genius has said, “the sorrows of how many a lover, to inflame the patriotism of how many a soldier, to fan the fires of how many a genius, to disperse the gloom of solitude, appease the agonies of pain, encourage virtue, and show vice its ugliness.”  In this volume, centuries hence as now, wherever a Scotsman may wander he will find the dearest consolation of his exile.

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MARTIN LUTHER