on the Revolution of France. No political work probably ever produced a greater effect upon the public mind, and it probably arrested the violent progress of the revolutionary spirit in England. The work was published in the beginning of November, and six editions were issued before the end of the year. The university of Dublin conferred upon the author the degree of Doctor of Laws, the students of Oxford presented him with an address, the expatriated French clergy thanked him in the most ardent language; but the breach between Burke and Fox was of course widened. The final rupture took place in a debate on the Quebec bill, on the 6th May 1791, when Burke said, Their friendship was at an end." This statement touched Fox to the heart, and when he rose to reply, the tears streamed from his eyes, and his emotion prevented him for some time from addressing the house. Though there was now a schism in the Whig party, Burke did not join the ministerial side, but remained in opposition. 66 Burke was, however, anxious to withdraw from public life, and made arrangements that his son, then thirty-five years of age, and a man of much promise, should succeed him in the representation of Malton. He only delayed his resignation until the conclusion of the trial of Hastings. On the 25th of June 1794, he appeared in the house for the last time, and received the thanks of the Commons for the faithful discharge of his duties previously to his accepting the Chiltern Hundreds. But his son, upon whom he had counted so much, died of consumption on the 2nd August, a few days after his election for Malton. It was intended to have bestowed upon Burke a peerage, but now he had no desire for such an honour, as he had none to whom he could transmit it. In 1795, a pension, amounting to £3700 a-year, was granted to him, at the express desire of the king. The Duke of Bedford and Lord Lauderdale took the occasion to make an attack upon him in the House of Lords. This drew from Burke his celebrated Letter to a Noble Lord, which, next to the Reflections on the French Revolution, has been the most widely read and most popularly known of all his literary productions. The last production of his pen, Thoughts on a Regicide Peace, proved that his vigorous intellect was as strong as ever. But his bodily strength was failing. On the morning of the 9th of July 1797, as he was being carried from one room to another by his servants, he faintly said, "God bless you," and died. Mr. Fox generously proposed that he should be honoured by a public funeral, and interred in Westminster Abbey; but by his own request, expressed in his will, he was buried by the side of his beloved son, in the church at Beaconsfield. ROBERT BURNS.-1759-1796. ROBERT BURNS, the Shakespeare of Scotland as he has been termed, was the son of William Burness, for so the poet's name was spelt until the publication of his little volume in 1786. William Burness was the son of a farmer in Kincardineshire, but in consequence of the reduced circumstances of his family, he had left that part of Scotland in his youth to seek employment in the south as a gardener. After serving different masters, he had, on his marriage, taken a lease of seven acres of land, on the banks of the Doon, in Ayrshire, with the view of commencing nurseryman on his own account. With his own hands he had built the cottage in which he resided, and here his eldest son Robert was 25th January 1759. Before the child was a week old, the frail tenement in which he first saw the light gave way, at midnight, and the infant and its mother had to be conveyed, in the midst of a storm, to a neighbouring cottage. and his wife born on the The life of William Burness was one continued struggle with poverty, but he carried on the contest with sturdy pride and unblemished integrity. He seems to have been a man of strictly religious principles, and his character has been sketched with reverence and affection in the Cottar's Saturday Night. When Robert was in his sixth year, he was sent to a little school at Alloway Mill, about a mile from his home. Shortly afterwards the family moved to the farm of Mount Oliphant, and Burns and his brother Gilbert were placed under the care of John Murdoch, who undertook to teach the children of the farmers, his employers boarding him in turns. According to Murdoch's statement, Robert's countenance was generally grave and expressive of a serious, contemplative, and thoughtful mind. Gilbert, on the other hand, had a merry, laughing face, and seemed to possess more wit and imagination than his brother. Murdoch having been appointed to the grammar school at Ayr, the two brothers were sent to him "week about," and in the winter evenings their father instructed them in arithmetic and such other knowledge as he possessed. Robert received a little more instruction by snatches, but the amount altogether was very inconsiderable. By his own exertions he afterwards made some acquaintance with French, which he had a weakness for parading on every occasion, and he had one summer quarter at landsurveying. But, according to his own account, there was another agent in his education that had no doubt a great influence in the development of his poetical faculty: "In my infant and boyish days, too, I owed much to an old woman who resided in the family, remarkable for her ignorance, credulity, and superstition. She had, I suppose, the largest collection in the country of tales and songs concerning devils, ghosts, fairies, brownies, witches, warlocks, spunkies, kelpies, elf-candles, dead-lights, wraiths, apparitions, cantraips, giants, enchanted towers, dragons, and other trumpery. This cultivated the latent seeds of poetry; but had so strong an effect upon my imagination, that to this hour, in my nocturnal rambles, I sometimes keep a sharp look out in suspicious places; and though no body can be more sceptical than I am in such matters, yet it often takes an effort of philosophy to shake off these idle terrors." The earliest composition in which he took great delight was Addison's "Vision of Mirza," and the two first books he ever read in private, and which gave him more pleasure than any he ever read afterwards, were the "Life of Hannibal," and the "History of Sir William Wallace:" the first roused his military ardour, the second stirred up his patriotism. It was in his fifteenth year that he commenced to write poetry, and he tells us that he never had the least thought of turning poet until his muse was inspired by a "sweet, sonsie lass" with whom he had to work in the harvest field, and to whom he addressed the verses commencing, O, once I loved a bonnie lass. The kind of life which Burns had hitherto led, combined, to use his own expression, "the cheerless gloom of a hermit with the unceasing moil of a galley-slave;" and we are told by his brother Gilbert, that for several years butchers' meat was a stranger to the house, while all the family exerted themselves to their utmost strength in the labours of the farm. At thirteen Robert assisted in threshing the crop of corn, and at fifteen he was the principal labourer on the farm, and did the work of a man. Burns had a strong and robust frame, but there is little doubt that the hard labour and sorrow which he had to undergo early in life were the cause of those fits of depression to which he was afterwards subject. In 1777, the family removed to the farm of Lochlea, in the parish of Tarbolton, and Burns now began to throw off the restraints of parental authority. In opposition to his father's wishes he attended a country dancing school, and he now began to have a taste for convivial society, which gradually grew stronger. Some portion of his nineteenth year was spent at a school at Kirkoswald, where he learned something of mensuration and surveying. The prospects and feelings of the young poet at this time are expressed in the poem commencing, My father was a farmer upon the Carrick border. Burns had grown discontented with his lot of perpetual labour without the prospect of competence, and he sought to forget his troubles in the pleasures of society. He had no difficulty in forming acquaintances among young men of his own age in Ayr and other neighbouring towns. The charm of his conversation, his exuberant humour, and the reputation he was gaining as a poet, made his presence always welcome. But these social gatherings were full of danger to one with such strong passions and so excitable a nature. Still up to the age of twenty-three he lived, upon the whole, an irreproachable life of homely industry. Burns was desirous of marrying, and he cast about for some means of improving his position in life, in order that he might be able to support a wife. His brother Gilbert and he had for several years held a small portion of land from their father on which they chiefly raised flax; and in disposing of the produce of their labour, it occurred to Burns that it might be well to cominence business as a flax-dresser. He accordingly took a share in a shop at Irvine in June 1781; but the speculation was unfortunate. After being in business a few months, the shop caught fire, was burned to the ground, and the poet was penniless. Burn's father died at Lochlea in the beginning of 1784. On his deathbed the old man stated that there was one of his family about whose future he had some anxiety. Robert turned to the window, and his stifled sob showed that he knew for whom the reproof was meant. He seems at this time to have made some serious resolutions of amendment, which, however, were not long kept. The old man was buried in Alloway kirkyard, and the poet wrote the following epitaph which is inscribed on the headstone: "O ye whose cheek the tear of pity stains, Draw near with pious reverence and attend! The pitying heart that felt for human woe; 'For ev'n his failings lean'd to virtue's side."" After the father's death the family removed to Mossgiel, and stocked a farm with their individual savings. Burns attended to his agricultural labours for a time with great diligence; but the first year they bought bad |