ADDRESS DELIVERED BEFORE THE BURNS ME. MORIAL ASSOCIATION, AT BOSTON, MASSA CHUSETTS, THURSDAY EVENING, MARCH 28. 1901, BY HON. GEORGE F. HOAR.

You would not have bidden me here to-night, at any rate you would not have done well to bid me here to-night if you had thought I should try to say much that is original. Robert Burns is perhaps the best known character in history or literature. If we do not say, as Emerson did, that the pigeons or the eaves of King's Chapel know something about him, yet certainly there is no man, woman or child where the Scotch or the English tongue is spoken, the round world over, to whom the tones of Burns do not seem familiar as his mother's voice. When Scotsmen meet on his birthday they meet as children meet at a Thanksgiving table, only to recall old memories, to think again old thoughts, and to utter common words. If I have no title to speak of Burns as a Scotsman to Scots men, I have at least the touch of that nature which, whenever men are thinking of him, makes the whole world kin.

There is no doubt that Robert Burns is the hero of Scotland. Wherever on the face of the earth there is a Scotsman, and they are everywhere on the face of the earth, that name will quicken his pulse as no other will even if it be the Bruce or Wallace or Walter Scott.

Now surely it is no slight thing to be the hero of the Scotsman's heart. The Scottish is one of the great races. I do not know that it has or ever has had a superior. Wherever you find a Scotsman, whether on land or sea, whether in peace or in battle, whether in business or on the farm, in public life or in family life, on the frontier or in the crowded city, whether governing subject races in the East or a freeman among freemen in republican liberty, whether governing empires or managing great business institutions, sometimes harder to govern than empires, thinking or acting, discoursing of metaphysics or theology or law or science, writing prose or writing poetry, there you may hope to find a born leader of men sitting on the foremost seat and, whatever may be the undertaking, conducting it to success.

We Yankees do not undervalue ourselves. We lay claim also to the quality I have just described. I think that I, a born New Englander, esteem the New England character even more highly than do most New Englanders. I like to believe that these two peoples resemble each other in mental quality, as their rocky mountains and their rocky shores are like each other, and as, in general, they have had in common the same stern Calvinistic faith. I never feel more at home than when I am reading the novels of the great magician or the collections

of Scotch humor by Dean Ramsay. Dominie Sampson must have been the grandfather of Parson Wilbur. Baillie Nicol Jarvie was surely born in old Concord. The Scotch Elder and the New England Deacon are twin brothers. Both are good men, Godward, and if sometimes "a little twistical manward," it is much more rarely than is commonly supposed. If either of them love to get money, he knows how to give it away. If the Scotchinen, like their Yankee cousins, think it a shame to live poor if they can honestly help it, they have at least given one noble example of a man who thinks it a disgrace to die rich. What a great English writer says of the Scotch would answer for the New England Puritan and Revolutionary Fathers. "Every Scotsman," says Charles Reade, "is an iceberg with a volcano underneath. Thaw the

Scotch ice and you will come to the Scotch fire.”

So Robert Burns, sprung of a great race, will always have at least two great races for his loving audience.

He was fortunate also in a fit parentage for a great manhood and a great poet. His mother knew by heart the ancient lyrics, many of them never written or printed, of the mountain and the moor. They were the cradle hymns of the child. His father was a Scotch Puritan. Upon the plain gray stone in the churchyard at Ayr the poet carved the undying lines:

"O ye whose cheek the tear of pity stains,

Draw near with pious rev'rence, and attend:
Here lie the loving husband's dear remains
The tender father, and the generous friend;

"The pitying heart that felt for human woe;

The dauntless heart that feared no human pride;
The friend of man-to vice alone a foe;

For ev'n his failings lean'd to virtue's side."

This epitaph has one fault. The poet has borrowed for it one of the best lines of one of the greatest English poets. Surely no other man ever lived of whom it could be said in criticism that instead of taking a line from Goldsmith, he might have given us a better one of his own.

Now what was this man whose fame circles the earth like a parallel of latitude, whose words are known by heart to countless millions of men and are to be known by heart, as we believe, to countless generations? He was the child of two peasants, native of a bleak northern clime. He was born in a clay cottage roofed with straw, which his father had built with his own hands. Just after he was born, part of the dwelling gave way in a storm, and mother and child were carried at midright to a neighbor's house for shelter. He got a little teaching from his father at night, by the light of the solitary cottage candle, and a little at a Parish school. But Carlyle tells us that poverty sunk his whole family below the level even of their cheap school system. He was born and bred in poverty in a sense in which poverty has always been unknown in New

England. Among our ancestors the hardships of the humblest life were but like the hardships of camping out of a hunting party or an army on a difficult march serving only to stimulate and strengthen the rugged moral nature. It was like practising in a gymnasium. The man came out of them cheerful and brave, with a quality fitted for the loftiest employment. Campbell tells us Burns was the eldest of a family buffeting with misfortunes, toiling beyond their strength and living without the support of animal food. At thirteen he threshed in the barn, and at fifteen was the principal laborer on the farm. Wearied with the toils of the day, he sank in the evening into dejection of spirits and dull headaches, the joint result of anxiety, low diet and fatigue. He saw his father broken by age and misfortunes approaching to that period when, to use the words of the son, “he escaped a prison only by sinking into the grave."

This kind of life-"the cheerless gloom of a hermit and the toil of a galley slave brought him to his sixteenth year, when love made him a poet." His first love, it is said, was his fellow reaper in the same harvest field. He has given an immortality to all his humble goddesses that no royal champion ever gave to high-born beauty. His Mary still looks down from heaven on all lovers. The star that rose on the anniver-⚫ sary of her death has received a new splendor from his muse. No Italian sky, no Arcadian landscape ever smiled with—

66 a gleam,

A light that never was on sea or land,
The consecration and the poet's dream,"

like that which his genius has spread over the scene where the two young lovers met to pass a single day.

Walter Scott tells us that Burns looked forward, the great part of his life, to ending his days as a licensed beggar, like Andrew Gemmels or Edie Ochiltree. Yet this man brought to the world the best message ever brought to the world since Bethlehem, of love and hope and reverence for God and man. Humanity the round world over walks more erect for what Robert Burns said and sung. The meanest flower that grows has an added beauty and an added fragrance because of the song of Burns. The humblest task to which man can turn his hand has an added dignity because of him. The peasant loves his wife, and the mother loves her child, the son loves his father better because of the living words in which Burns has clothed the undying affections of the human heart. He has taught us as no other man has taught us, as was never taught us outside of the Holy Scriptures, the beauty and the glory of the worship of the soul to its Creator. The whole secret of Scottish history, the whole secret of New England history, is told in the Cotter's Saturday Night: