When Robert was in his seventh year, his father quitted the birth-place of the poet, and took a lease of a small farm on the estate of Mr. Fergusson, called Mount Oliphant. He had been, for a year or two previous to this event, a pupil of Dr. Murdoch, who is represented as being a very worthy and acute man, and who took much pains with the education of the future poet. In fact, his _father_ had previously taught him arithmetic, and whatever of lore could be gathered from the "big ha' bible," as they sat by their solitary candle; and he had been sent, alternately with his brother, a week at a time during a summer's quarter, to a writing master at the parish school at Dalrymple. But Dr. Murdoch, his faithful friend in youth and age, instructed him in English Grammar, and aided him in the acquisition of a little French. After a fortnight's instruction in the latter language, he was able to translate it into English prose, but, farther than this, his new attainment was never of much advantage to him. Indeed, his attempts to speak the language were ridiculously futile at times. On one occasion, when he called in Edinborough at the house of an accomplished friend, a lady who had been educated in France, he found her conversing with a French lady, to whom he was introduced. The French woman understood English; but Burns must need try his powers. His first sentence was intended to compliment the lady on her apparent eloquence in conversation; but by mistaking some idiom, he made the lady understand that she was too fond of hearing herself speak. The French woman, highly incensed, replied, that there were more instances of vain poets than of talkative women; and Burns was obliged to use his own language in appeasing her. He attempted the Latin, but his success did not encourage him to persevere. And, in fine, with the addition of a quarter's attendance to Geometry and Surveying, at the age of nineteen, and a few lessons at a country dancing school, I have now mentioned all his opportunities of acquiring a scholastic education. He says of himself, in allusion to his boyish days, "though it cost the schoolmaster many _thrashings_, I made an excellent English scholar; and by the time I was ten or eleven years of age, I was a critic in substantives, verbs and particles."