As a creator of poetry, as one who took the genius of Scotland by the hand, as it were, and led her out of the old paths, Burns will ever awaken undying gratitude among Scotsmen. He drew his inspiration from living nature and not from dead antiquity, or from books, old or new. To him, indeed, there was an antiquity that was living, and that part of the past which was its true and deathless soul, he clothed in new beauty. There is no nobler vindication of John Knox of the Reformers, who, with all their shortcomings and human infirmities, demanded reality and the uplift of the common man. They gave Scotland public schools, and the result was a sturdy, independent, and educated peasantry. It was from that class that Burns sprang. John Knox and the Reformers made a Robert Burns possible. Burns had the virtues and defects of his class. He had vices that were not peculiar to the common people, but were shared in by the lordly and those high in office. Apart from his wonder-working power in the witchery of language, Burns, though called “the illegitimate child of Calvinism,” has wrought a moral influence for good in Scotland such as can be attributed to very few men who possess the reputation of higher sanctity. For besides Burns’s strong common sense, lively imagination, keen sympathy with what was beautiful in nature and noblest in man,--withal, in love with his native land and ever susceptible to fair women,--Burns purified and uplifted popular song. Out of the black mire of the obscene and indelicate, he called forth to bloom and glory deathless flowers of song. Burns seemed to be the very incarnation of all that was necessary to be a true poet of the people. He illustrated the saying, ascribed to more than one man, that others might make the laws, but he would make the songs of the people--and he did. Many an old snatch of song, bit of sentiment, or scrap of poetry, which in form was vulgar and even indecent, he made clean. Purifying what was dear to the people, he set the substance in new shape and gave it wings of song. Some of the ancient ditties, now in happy oblivion, are too obscene to be sung to-day in their old form by refined society, but after their new baptism by Burns, they have become teachers of piety that excel in lasting power preachers or sermons. Such, for example, is “John Anderson, my Jo, John,” now so sweet and pathetic. In fact, Burns’s transformation of certain specimens of Scottish song is like that which we have seen when a handful of jewelry, of fashions outworn, was cast into the crucible made white hot and salted with nitre. The dross went off into vapor and fumes and the old forms and defects were lost in oblivion. What was of value remained. The pure gold was not lost, rather set free and regained. Poured forth into an ingot, that would become coin or jewels, it entered upon new life and unto a resurrection of fresh beauty.