disturbed, and the dry skull, once so brimming over with powerful
thought and bright and tender fantasies, was taken away, and kept for
several days by a Dumfries doctor. It has since been deposited in a
new leaden coffin, and restored to the vault. We learned that there is
a surviving daughter of Burns's eldest son, and daughters likewise of
the two younger sons,--and, besides these, an illegitimate posterity
by the eldest son, who appears to have been of disreputable life in
his younger days. He inherited his father's failings, with some faint
shadow, I have also understood, of the great qualities which have made
the world tender of his father's vices and weaknesses.

We listened readily enough to this paltry gossip, but found that it
robbed the poet's memory of some of the reverence that was its due.
Indeed, this talk over his grave had very much the same tendency and
effect as the home-scene of his life, which we had been visiting just
previously. Beholding his poor, mean dwelling and its surroundings,
and picturing his outward life and earthly manifestations from these,
one does not so much wonder that the people of that day should have
failed to recognize all that was admirable and immortal in a
disreputable, drunken, shabbily clothed, and shabbily housed man,
consorting with associates of damaged character, and, as his only
ostensible occupation, gauging the whiskey which he too often tasted.
Siding with Burns, as we needs must, in his plea against the world,
let us try to do the world a little justice too. It is far easier to
know and honor a poet when his fame has taken shape in the
spotlessness of marble than when the actual man comes staggering
before you, besmeared with the sordid stains of his daily life. For my
part, I chiefly wonder that his recognition dawned so brightly while
he was still living. There must have been something very grand in his
immediate presence, some strangely impressive characteristic in his