Produced by Charles Aldarondo, Christine P. Travers and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net [Transcriber's note: Obvious printer's errors have been corrected, all other inconsistencies are as in the original. Author's spelling has been maintained. Missing page numbers correspond to blank pages.] ROBERT BURNS BY PRINCIPAL SHAIRP, PROFESSOR OF POETRY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD London MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1906 _All rights reserved_ _First Edition April 1879_ _Reprinted December 1879, 1883, 1887, 1895, 1902, 1906_ CONTENTS. Page CHAPTER I. Youth in Ayrshire 1 CHAPTER II. First Winter in Edinburgh 42 CHAPTER III. Border and Highland Tours 60 CHAPTER IV. Second Winter in Edinburgh 79 CHAPTER V. Life at Ellisland 94 CHAPTER VI. Migration To Dumfries 135 CHAPTER VII. Last Years 155 CHAPTER VIII. Character, Poems, Songs 188 INDEX 209 ROBERT BURNS. (p. 001) CHAPTER I. YOUTH IN AYRSHIRE. Great men, great events, great epochs, it has been said, grow as we recede from them; and the rate at which they grow in the estimation of men is in some sort a measure of their greatness. Tried by this standard, Burns must be great indeed, for during the eighty years that have passed since his death, men's interest in the man himself and their estimate of his genius have been steadily increasing. Each decade since he died has produced at least two biographies of him. When Mr. Carlyle wrote his well-known essay on Burns in 1828, he could already number six biographies of the Poet, which had been given to the world during the previous thirty years; and the interval between 1828 and the present day has added, in at least the same proportion, to their number. What it was in the man and in his circumstances that has attracted so much of the world's interest to Burns, I must make one more attempt to describe. If success were that which most secures men's sympathy, Burns would have won but little regard; for in all but his poetry his was a (p. 002) defeated life--sad and heart-depressing to contemplate beyond the lives even of most poets.