John Rutherfurd, Esq. Alexr. Cunningham, Esq. Andrew Houston, Calder- "A motion being made by the Earl of Glencairn, and seconded by Sir John Whitefoord, in favor of Mr. Burns, of Ayrshire, who had dedicated the new edition of his poems to the Caledonian Hunt "The meeting were of opinion that, in consideration of his superior merit, as well as of the compliment paid to them, Mr. Hagart should be directed to subscribe for one hundred copies, in their name, for which he should pay to Mr. Burns, twenty-five pounds, upon the publication of his book." Mrs. Begg has noted the fact that, so very scarce did copies become within a few weeks after publication, the inmates at Mossgiel had to wait till the appearance of the Edinburgh edition before they had an opportunity of read ing their brother's poems in print. The poet, in his autobiography, says that he cleared nearly £20 by the adventure, after paying outlays; but, from the account between the poet and the printer, Burns's profits ought to have exceeded fifty pounds. BY THEODORE F. WOLFE, A. M., M. D. THERE is no stronger proof of the transcending power of the genius of Burns than is found in the fact that, by a bare half dozen of his stanzas, an humble dairy servant,else unheard of outside her parish, and forgotten at her death-is immortalized as a peeress of Petrarch's Laura and Dante's Beatrice, and has been, for a century, loved and mourned of all the world. We owe much of our tenderest poesy to the heroines whose charms-oft apparent only to the poets-have attuned the fine fancy and aroused the impassioned muse of enamored bards; readers have always exhibited a natural avidity to realize the personality of the beings who inspired the tender lays-prompted often by mere curiosity, but more often by a desire to appreciate the tastes and motives of the poets themselves. How little is known of Highland Mary, the most famous heroine of modern song, is shown by the brief, incoherent and often contradictory allusions to her which the biographies of the plowman-poet contain. This paper-prepared during a sojourn in "The Land o' Burns" while it adds a little to our meager knowledge of Mary Campbell, aims to present consecutively and congruously so much as may now be known of her brief life, her relations to the bard and her sad, heroic death. She first saw the light, in 1764, at Ardrossan, on the coast of Ayrshire, fifteen miles northward from the “auld town of Ayr." Her parentage was of the humblest, her father being a sailor before the mast, and the poor dwelling which sheltered her was in no way superior to the meanest of those which we find to-day on the narrow streets of her village. From her birthplace we see, across the Firth of Clyde, the beetling mountains of the West Highlands where she afterward dwelt, and, southward, the great mass of Ailsa Craig looming, a gigantic pyramid, out of the sea. Mary was named for her paternal aunt, wife of Peter McPherson, a ship-carpenter of Greenock, in whose house Mary died. In Mary's infancy her family removed to the vicinage of Dunoon-on the western shore of the Firth, eight miles below Greenock-leaving the oldest daughter at Ardrossan where she married one Anderson. Mary grew to young womanhood near Dunoon, then returned to Ayrshire and found occupation at Coilsfield near Tarbolton, where her acquaintance with Burns soon began. He once told a lady of rank that he first saw Mary while walking in the woods of Coilsfield and first spoke with her at a rustic merrymaking and, "having the luck to win her regards from other suitors," they speedily became intimate. At this period of life Burns's "eternal propensity to fall in love" was unusually active, even for him, and his passion for Mary (at this time) was one of several which engaged his heart in the interval between the reign of Ellison Begbie-the lass of" twa rogueish een "-and that of "Bonnie Jean." Mary subsequently became a servant in the house of Burns's landlord, Gavin Hamilton, a lawyer of Mauchline, who had early recognized the genius of the bard and |