Above all, Burns disliked to be tutored in matters of taste. He could not endure that one should run shouting before him whenever any fine objects appeared. On one occasion, a lady at the poet’s side said, “Burns, have you anything to say to this?” He answered, “Nothing, madam,” as he glanced at the leader of the party, “for an ass is braying over it.” Since the ploughman-poet of Ayr was so generous in confessing inspiration and indebtedness to his greatest teacher, it is not meet that we should ignore this man and name in any real view of the forces making intellectual Scotland. Robert Fergusson, though less known in countries abroad than in Scotland, was the spiritual father of Robert Burns and none acknowledged this more than Burns himself. When the man from Ayr visited Edinburgh, in 1787, he sought out the poet’s grave and erected the memorial stone which is still preserved in the larger and finer monument. Fergusson, born in 1751, was a graduate of St. Andrews. In Edinburgh, he contributed poems to Ruddiman’s “Weekly Magazine,” which gained him considerable local reputation. His society was eagerly sought and he was made a member of the Cape Club. Unfortunately, Fergusson fell a victim to his convivial habits, and was led into excesses which permanently injured his health. Alcohol probably helped to develop that brain disease usually called insanity. It was while in this condition that he met with Dr. John Brown, of Haddington, whose name is a household word in Scotland. The good man, a sound Presbyterian and Calvinist, was much more. He made “the love of the Lord” the real and ultimate test of a man’s orthodoxy. Brown’s “Self-Interpreting Bible” has been amazingly popular throughout heather land. The John Brown, whom some of us knew, who wrote “Rab and His Friends,” and “Pet Marjorie,” was the grandson of Fergusson’s friend. After meeting with Dr. Brown, Fergusson became so very serious that he would read nothing but his Bible. A fall, by which his head was seriously injured, aggravated the symptoms of insanity, which had already shown themselves. After two months’ confinement in the only public asylum then known in Edinburgh, he died in 1774. His poems had been collected the year before his death.