It's no in books, it's no in lear, [learning]
To make us truly blest:
If happiness hae not her seat
An' centre in the breast,
We may be wise, or rich, or great,
But never can be blest!
Nae treasures nor pleasures
Could make us happy lang;
The heart aye's the part aye
That makes us right or wrang.

_The Piper of Kilbarchan_, by Sir Robert Sempill of Beltrees
(1595?-1661?), set a model for the humorous elegy on the living which
reached Burns through Ramsay and Fergusson, and was followed by him in
those on Poor Mailie and Tam Samson. The stanza in which it is written
is far older than Sempill, having been traced as far back as the
troubadours in the twelfth century, and being found frequently in both
English and French through the Middle Ages; but from the time of
Sempill on, it was cultivated with peculiar intensity in Scotland, and
is the medium of so many of Burns's best-known pieces that it is often
called Burns's stanza.

Lament in rhyme, lament in prose,
Wi' saut tears tricklin' down your nose;
Our Bardie's fate is at a close,
Past a' remead;
The last, sad cape-stane o' his woe's--
Poor Mailie's dead!

The seventeenth century was a barren one for Scottish literature. The