One glittering Bohemian figure, though he was much greater and much else, lights up for us those Edinburgh taverns, Johnnie Dowie’s and the rest, those Edinburgh clubs, the Crochallan Fencibles and the others, that figure is Robert Burns. His winter of 1786-1787 in the Scots capital is famous. To us, more than a century after, it still satisfies the imagination, a striking, dramatic, picturesque appearance. On the whole, Edinburgh, not merely her great but common men, received him fitly. One day in that winter Jeffrey was standing in the High Street staring at a man whose appearance struck him, he could scarce tell why. A person standing at a shop door tapped him on the shoulder and said: “Ay, laddie, ye may weel look at that man; that’s Robert Burns.” He never saw him again. His experience in this was like that of Scott; but you are glad at any rate that Burns and Scott did meet, else had that Edinburgh visit wanted its crowning glory. Scott was then fifteen. He saw Robin in Professor Fergusson’s house at Sciennes. It was a distinguished company, and Scott, always modest, held his tongue. There was a picture in the room of a soldier lying dead in the snow, by him his dog and his widow with his child in her arms. Burns was so affected at the idea suggested by the picture that “he actually shed tears,” like the men of the heroic age, says Andrew Lang; he asked who wrote the lines which were printed underneath, and Scott alone remembered that they were from the obscure Langhorne. “Burns rewarded me with a look and a word which, though a mere civility, I then received, and still recollect, with very great pleasure.” Scott goes on to describe Burns as like the “douce guid man who held his own plough.” Most striking was his eye: “It was large and of a dark cast and glowed (I say literally _glowed_) when he spoke with feeling or interest. I never saw such another eye in a human head, though I have seen the most distinguished men in my time.” Whether Scott was right in thinking that Burns talked with “too much humility,” I will not discuss. We know what Robin thought of the “writer chiel.” The most pleasing result of his Edinburgh visit, as it is to-day still the most tangible, was the monument, tasteful and sufficient, which he put over Fergusson’s grave in the Canongate Churchyard. R.L.S., by the way, from his distant home in the South Seas, was anxious that if neglected it should be put in order. I do not think it has ever been neglected. I have seen it often and it was always curiously spick and span: these _vates_ have not lacked pious services at the hands of their followers. Scott was not so enthusiastic an admirer, but he knew his Fergusson well and quotes him with reasonable frequency. When Fergusson died Scott was only three years old. Edinburgh was then a town of little space, and the unfortunate poet may have seen the child, but he could not have noticed him, and we have no record.