From this era of light in his course; from this day, bright with fame and conscious virtue, we trace him along a path devious and clouded. We follow him through the toil of a profitless farm, to the struggles of a country gauger, and from these to a destitute death-bed. In all his follies and his sufferings, we behold him true to a manly nature, loyal to noble principles; and however seamed and deformed may have been the surface of his life, virtue remained unshaken in the centre of his soul. With a large family, and only seventy pounds a year, he had an open hand for the poor, and a hospitable roof for stranger and for friend; and although he died owing no man any thing, yet he has been stigmatized as a prodigal and a spendthrift. He gave the world his immortal songs without money and without price; and with the generosity of benignant genius, he sympathized with every effort of the humble men around him for a nobler life, he ministered to their intellectual wants, and he aided their intellectual struggles. Accordingly, we observe him at a time when he was harassed with cares and overcome with toil on a barren farm, establishing a book club in his neighborhood, forming its rules, and directing its operations. To estimate this in the true spirit, we must remember that it was sixty years ago, when as yet there had been no “Mechanics’ Institutions” in the land, and when Lyceums were not; when cheap editions of standard works had not arisen even on a printer’s dream, and “Societies for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge” were enfolded, as the poets say, in the mighty womb of futurity. Dr. Currie, of Liverpool, a genial and eloquent (though patronizing) biographer of Burns, in narrating this portion of his life, questions the utility of literary studies for the great masses of the people. Strange questioning this, in a life of Burns—the cottage-boy, whom the little knowledge of a rustic school awakened for eternity; raised from the clods of the valley to a place among the stars, a burning and imperishable light; and who, but for that little knowledge, might have been as nameless clay as any that nurtures the grass of a village church-yard.