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SELECT BIOGRAPHY.

No. LVI.

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GILBERT BURNS.


Gilbert Burns was born about the year 1760. He was eighteen months
younger than his brother Robert, Scotland's most gifted bard. With him
he was early inured to toil, and rendered familiar with the hardships of
the peasant's lot; like him, too, he was much subject to occasional
depression of spirits, and from whatever cause, he had contracted a
similar bend or stoop in the shoulders; his frame, like that of Robert,
was cast in a manly and symmetrical mould. The profile of his
countenance resembled that of his brother, and their phrenological
developments are said to have been not dissimilar; the principal
disparity lay in the form and expression of the eye, which in Gilbert
was fixed, sagacious, and steady--in Robert, almost "in a fine
frenzy rolling."

Gibert Burns was the archetype of his father, a very remarkable man; his
piety was equally warm and sincere; and, in all the private relations of
life, as an elder of the church, a husband, a father, a master, and a