It is not, of course, because William stuck the calves and stole the deer, because he wrote the lampoon or the epitaph, nor because he was son (or apprentice, as some lay), to a butcher or a glover, a tallow-chandler or a seedsman, that he is conceived to have been unequal to the Shakespearean authorship. There never yet was cradle too lowly to be the cradle of genius, or line too ignoble for its genesis. George Stephenson was a colliery-stoker, Turner was the son of a barber, and Faraday the son of a horseshoer. Coleridge was a charity-lad, and the number of tanners' and tallow-chandlers' offspring, without whose names history could not be written, is something amazing. We may trace the genius of Turner from the first impulse of his pencil to its latest masterpiece, but we can not find that he discovered the solar spectrum or described the Edison phonograph. He knew and practiced what he was _taught_ (albeit he taught himself), and died quite contented to leave his own works behind him. Robert Burns was fully as unlettered and as rustic a plowboy as could be desired to prove the mighty miracle of genius. His history, up to a certain point, is the very duplicate of the history of William Shakespeare, the butcher's boy and prodigy of Stratford village. Both were obscure, schoolless, and grammarless. But, in the case of Robert Burns, this heaven-born genius did not set him straightway on so lofty a pinnacle that he could circumspect the past, and forecast the future, or guide his untaught pen to write of Troy and Egypt, of Athens and Cyprus, or to reproduce the very counterfeit civiliza{163}tions and manners of nations born and buried and passed into history a thousand years before he had been begotten, the very names of which were not dreamed of anywhere in the neighborhood of his philosophy; of the most unusual and hidden details of forgotten polities and commercial customs, such as, for instance, the exceptional usage of a certain trade in Mitylene, the anomalous status of a Moorish mercenary in command of a Venetian army, of a savage queen of Britain led captive by Rome, or a thane of Scotland under one of its primitive kings--matters of curious and occult research for antiquaries or dilettanti to dig out of old romances or treatises or statutes, rather than for historians to treat of or schools to teach! In the case of Robert Burns we are content not to ask too much, even of genius. Let us be content if the genius of Bobert Burns could glorify the goodwives' fables of his wonted firesides and set in aureole the homeliest cipher in his vicinage, until a field-mouse became a poem or a milkmaid a Venus! It were unreasonable to demand that this genius, this fire from heaven, at once and on the instant invest a letterless peasant-lad with all the lore and law which the ages behind him had shut up in clasped books and buried and forgotten--with all the learning that the past had gathered into great tomes and piled away in libraries. And yet, if