In a cottage on the banks of Doon, near the town of Ayr, in Scotland, in 1759, Robert Burns, one of the world’s sweetest poets, first saw the light of life. The peasant-child soon learned to know existence in toil and sorrow; torn at an early age from study to labor, grief went hand in hand with glory through his remaining years. We find him amidst the wild eccentricities of an irregular youth, without any settled aim, as he himself declares, but with some stirrings of ambition, that were only as the blind gropings of Homer’s Cyclops around the walls of his cave. With characteristic ardor, and with more zeal than wisdom, he mingled in the theological and political squabbles of the times, and by the destructive boldness of his satire, and the shafted power of his ridicule, he created many enemies whom it was easier to provoke than to propitiate. Nor must we hold him blameless. In the prodigality of wit, and the wildness of laughter; in the madness of merriment, and the pride of genius, he treated opinions and persons with an unsparing levity which a more thoughtful experience would have taught him to regard with reverence or forbearance. That his genius went too frequently in company with his passions, and that the glory of the one was sometimes wrecked in the delirium of the other, it is not allowed us to deny; but these follies had their penalties; and if it were possible, they were better now forgotten in the ashes of his early grave. Burns was a man that sinned, and one that suffered; but he was not a man that sinned callously, or that suffered meanly; and it is not for the living to write in marble errors which the departed repented in tears.