John Murdoch the schoolmaster had got a better post, and was paying a farewell visit to the parents of two of his promising pupils. As a parting gift, he brought a copy of _Titus Andronicus_. Beginning to read the play aloud, he soon came to the scene where her ravishers taunt the mutilated Lavinia. The children, in an agony of tears, implored him to read no more; whereupon their father dryly remarked that in that case there was no use in Murdoch’s leaving the book. Robert exclaimed fiercely that if it was left, he would burn it. Murdoch warded off the father’s rebuke by commending the display of so much sensibility, though he failed, then or later, to explain why he considered _Titus Andronicus_ suitable reading for children. _The Man of Feeling_ was not yet written, but ‘sensibility’ was already a word of power, and Robert Burns was already displaying the stormy emotions which were his to the grave. Murdoch’s farewell marked the end of Burns’s elementary schooling, but the education of a boy reared as he was cannot be appraised in terms of mere schooling. If it could, the whole story might be told in a few paragraphs. Burns’s real education came from his family, from what the world taught him, and from what he taught himself. His schooling was incidental. The poet once had the curiosity to visit the Herald’s Office in Edinburgh, only to discover that ‘Gules, Purpure, Argent, &c., quite disowned’ him--no man of his name had ever borne coat armour. The nearest he could come to it was ‘Burn’. Inquiry into his ancestry is fruitless, because nothing in his ancestry explains Burns, any more than the dull line of squires into which he was born can explain Shelley, or a London livery-stable Keats. Burns’s family produced no genius before him; it produced none after him. It is enough to record that William Burnes, the poet’s father, came of peasant stock from the eastern Lowlands of Scotland. The poet cherished the belief that some of his forebears had been out in the ’Fifteen in the train of George Keith, tenth Earl Marischal, but documentary proof is lacking. The poet’s grandfather, Robert Burnes, farmed, apparently with indifferent success, in Kincardineshire, first on the farm of Kinmonth, in Glenbervie, and later at Clochnahill, Dunnottar. Robert Burnes’s second farming venture having failed in 1747, his son William (born 1721) set out in the following year with his younger brother, Robert, to seek work.