The poor inhabitant below Was quick to learn and wise to know, And keenly felt the friendly glow, And softer flame; But thoughtless follies laid him low, And stained his name. Scotland’s heart warms to the memory of Robbie Burns, over whose sayings and doings in lifetime big wigs about Dumfries were shaken and grave eyes upturned. As if in repentance for his hard life and troubled death, his countrymen will now hear no word against the poet, who could be severe enough on his own frailties. And if mortal ever deserved kindly judgment, it was he whose heart went out not only to his Jeans and Annies, but to his “auld mare Maggie,” to a hare wounded by [Illustration: ON THE RIVER AYR, AYRSHIRE] “barb’rous art,” to dumb cattle left out in a storm, even to such a “poor earth-companion and fellow-mortal” as a field-mouse; he who would not willingly have crushed with his ploughshare a “wee, modest, crimson-tippit flower”; who had no hatred for the very enemy of mankind--“Wad ye take a thought and mend!” It is vain to deny or conceal that “he had twa faults, or maybe three,” but fate indeed gave him hard measure. Had his sphere been a higher one, he would not have been the man he was; yet with a little ease, with wise friends to counsel “prudent, cautious self-control,” with Pitt’s port or even Byron’s hock and soda-water instead of tippenny and usquebaugh among spell-bound tavern cronies, might he not have lived to draw as good an income from the Civil Service as Wordsworth, to become a douce elder of the Kirk, and to take a seat among the orthodox _bon vivants_ of the _Noctes_? As it is, his humble birthplace draws more pilgrims than come to Stratford-on-Avon from all over the world, for-- Who his human heart has laid To Nature’s bosom nearer? Who sweetened toil like him, or paid To love a tribute dearer? Through all his tuneful art, how strong The human feeling gushes! The very moonlight of his song Is warm with smiles and blushes!