So far the education gained by Burns from his schoolmasters and his
father had been almost exclusively moral and intellectual. It was in
less formal ways that his imagination was fed. From his mother he had
heard from infancy the ballads, legends, and songs that were
traditionary among the peasantry; and the influence of these was
re-enforced by a certain Betty Davidson, an unfortunate relative of
his mother's to whom the family gave shelter for a time.

"In my infant and boyish days, too," he writes in the letter to
Doctor Moore already quoted, "I owed much to an old maid of my
mother's, remarkable for her ignorance, credulity, and
superstition. She had, I suppose, the largest collection in the
country, of tales and songs concerning devils, ghosts, fairies,
brownies, witches, warlocks, spunkies, kelpies, elf-candles,
dead-lights, wraiths, apparitions, cantraips, enchanted towers,
giants, dragons, and other trumpery. This cultivated the latent
seeds of Poesy; but had so strong an effect on my imagination,
that to this hour, in my nocturnal rambles, I sometimes keep a
sharp look-out in suspicious places; and though nobody can be more
sceptical in these matters than I, yet it often takes an effort of
philosophy to shake off these idle terrors."

His private reading also contained much that must have stimulated his
imagination and broadened his interests. It began with a _Life of
Hannibal_, and Hamilton's modernized version of the _History of Sir
William Wallace_, which last, he says, with the touch of flamboyancy
that often recurs in his style, "poured a Scottish prejudice in my
veins, which will boil along there till the flood-gates of life shut
in eternal rest." By the time he was eighteen he had, in addition to