Burns.

BURNS was essentially and predominantly a lyric poet. He was no innovator. He accepted the motive, the form and style of his songs from the lyric poets of his country, but he excelled them all. He felt deeply and described faithfully the sentiments of his countrymen. In his inspiration everything is true and genuine; there is no preparation, no affectation, no machinery to catch by displays of cleverness the admiration of his contemporaries. From his humble point of life he cast a discriminating glance over the whole of society, and he looked on Nature with a penetrating eye, a clear intellect and a warm heart; and what he saw he expressed not in cold rhetorical sentences, but in his own native dialect, the living language of his native country; and he did this with such force, liveliness and point that at one stroke he raised the vulgar tongue of the peasantry into the dignity of a classical dialect of the English tongue. But the Scottish people look on Burns not only as their great lyric poet; they owe to him a yet more important debt of gratitude.

This great singer appeared at a time of great national decline. After a religious struggle of more than a hundred years, and the unfortunate issue of an ill-conceived rising in favor of the exiled Stuarts, exhausted Scotland was fain to submit herself to an incorporating union with England. The country remained not only without its own King, but with

out its own national Parliament, and ran the risk of being swallowed up wholesale by its bigger and more powerful sister. The inherited pride of the Scottish people in their stout nationality rudely shaken could no more show face; and the Scottish literary men both in prose and verse using the English only as the medium of polite expression, were afraid of nothing so much as any touch of a patriotic hue in their cast of thought and expression.

In the midst of this colorless, featureless generation suddenly appeared Burns, choosing as the subject of his poems the Scottish life of the Scottish people, a subject unknown to literary Europe, and as the medium of expression the vulgar and despised dialect of his countrymen; and in doing so the force of his genius enabled him to revive in their hearts noble emotions which had died out, and to fan into flame the feebly-flickering sentiment of national self-esteem. The substance of what I have here said I have taken from a recent English biography of the poet, whose exact words I will here set down. "If at the present day," says the writer, "the Scottish people cherish the sentiment of their noble nationality more fervidly than their fathers in the last century; if they are proud of their country, and if strangers have learned to look upon it as the native land of poetry and patriotism, they owe thanks in the first place to Robert Burns, and in the second to Walter Scott."

Scotia's Bard, Robie Burns.

BY WILLIAM LYLE.

SING no classic lay, I give no sound

To place new wreaths on Homer's brow;
To Dante's fame, with all its laurels bound,
Or Virgil's verse, we bow not now.
We strike a plane in reach of every heart,

The world of men-its joys and sighs;
We speak a name that owed not much to art:
Thus the true poet lives and dies.

Brave Robie Burns! was he not brave to come
Right from behind the lowly plough,
And tell the world that he could not be dumb,
That Nature bound him with a vow-
A vow to rhyme, whatever men might say,
In spite of genius bright before,

To claim a wreath for Scotland in his day,
That shall be green for evermore?

Great Robie Burns! did he not know each heart,
And meet his weird with honest mind?
Did he not show his hate for trick and art,
And stand as brother to mankind?

Did he not speak such patriotic words

As live to-day, though years have gone? Did he not touch affection's softest chords, And sit a king on Momus' throne?

Poor Robie Burns! he owned no sounding name To lift him to a lord's degree;

Only a poet's soul the bard could claim,

While he was frail as mortals be.

Ah! then, as now, the minstrel's numbers sweet 'Twas some one's interest to damn,

And though they pelted Robin with their sleet, They have not dimmed his oriflamme!

Rich, Robie Burns! rich in a noble soul—
In that the Muse to him was kind.
Is there in gold, though millions you control,
To match true grandeur of the mind?
Down at the gate of death we lay our gold;
But mind, Death's cunning can defy

The one; we dig, and give it back all told;
The other makes us rich on high.

Dear Robie Burns! what words shall tell how dear
To every Scottish heart that beats?

He spoke a language, and he gave a cheer,

That thrills us yet with music's sweets.

On Ayr's green banks, and by the braes of Doon,
Where Ballochmyle lies bright and fair,

Our widowed souls can yet with him commune,
And mourn a loss Time cannot repair.

Dead Robie Burns! ah, yes, dead to time;
But while we meet to speak his name,
Lives he not yonder in a land sublime,

Where man no more can smirch his fame?
To-night we celebrate his mortal birth;
Years have not taught us to forget,

But Scotland still has tears for this, that earth
Is poorer since his sun has set!

Living Robie Burns! as the sun though set
Still leaves earth warmer for its rays,

So, o'er Scotia's shores there lingers yet
A mellow light from Robin's lays.

Lay low his faults, my friends, beneath the good;
The great have faults in all their urns ;

Let us esteem men in their noblest mood,

And stake our worth on ROBIE BURNS!

Discovery of a Burns Relic.

A UNIQUE and interesting "find" has been made in the shape of the well-preserved minute book of a club that met monthly in Mauchline for the purpose of mutual improvement during the decade between 1786 and 1795. This book is in the hands of a gentleman belonging to Ayrshire, who had it presented to him in South Wales by William Fisher, a native of the neighborhood of Auchinleck. The society whose record it contains was formed after the model of the Bachelors' Club in Tarbolton established by Robert Burns, and its rules, which are substantially similar, though less copiously extended, are prefixed to the minutes. The rules are subscribed to by 22 original members, the first on the list being David Sillar, a well-known name in connection with the great Scottish Bard, which is followed by the signature of the poet's brother, Gilbert Burns. The writing of these men, all intent on the pursuit of knowledge, and undoubtedly under the spell of the Burns family, is a quaint enough study in itself. But the book is rendered still more interesting by the insertion of the subject of each evening's discussion under its appropriate date, along with the names of the members present or absent, and also those excused. The fines imposed for non-attendance without excuse were collected and expended on the purchase of books and magazines of the day, and there are pregnant notes of income and expenditure