as most completely to certify that the powers which slumber in the human bosom, are far beyond those which are called into activity. The fertility of the soil of the earth is there in winter, but it lies unnoticed. The sun breaks out, and, like a giant alarmist thundering at the doors of the world, he awakens a thousand hidden powers. Life, universal as the earth itself, starts forth in its thousand shapes, and all is movement, beauty, sweetness, hurrying on through a charmed being into an exuberant fruit. Those men, then, who have risen through the medium of a finished education to literary, artistic, or scientific eminence, have, I repeat, vindicated the universality of intellectual endowment; but there is still another class, and that, as I have said, peculiar to these islands, who have shown that a finished or academical education is not abso lutely necessary to the display of the highest order of genius. Circumstances, again, have been at work here. The circumstances of this country are different to those of any other. We have preserved our liberties more entire. The British people have disdained from age to age to suffer the curb and the bit that have been put upon the neck, and into the mouth, of the more pliant nations of the Continent. Whether these circumstances are to be looked for in the peculiar mixture of races, or in this particular mixture coexisting with peculiarities of climate and insular position, might afford scope to much argument; enough, these circumstances have existed, and their results do exist in a race, proud, active, free, and indomitable. "Pride in their port, defiance in their eye, I see the lords of human kind pass by; While e'en the peasant boasts these rights to scan, GOLDSMITH, The Traveller.. The mass Thus it is that this free constitution of the British empire; this spirit of general independence; this habit of the peasant and the artizan of venerating themselves as men, has led to an universal awakening of mind in the people. In other countries few think; it is a few who are regularly educated, and arrogate the right to think, and write, and govern. If the poor man become an acknowledged genius, it is only through the passage of the high school. is an inert mass; it is a labouring, or at best a singing and dancing multitude. But in Great Britain, there is not a man who does not feel that he is a member of the great thinking, acting, and governing whole. Without books he has often caught the spark of inspiration from his neighbour. In the field, the workshop, the alehouse, the chartist gathering, he has come to the discussion of his rights, and in that discussion all the powers of his spirit have felt the arousing influence of the sea of mind around, that has boiled and heaved from its lowest depths in billows of fire. Under the operation of this oral and, as it were, forensic education, which has been going on for generations in the British empire, the whole man with all his powers has become wide awake; and it required only the simple powers of writing and reading to enable the peasant or artizan to gather all the knowledge that he needed, and to stand forth a poet, an orator, a scientific inventor, a teacher himself of the nation. To these circumstances we owe our Burns, Hogg, Bloomfield, Clare, Elliott, Allan Cunningham, Bamford, Nicoll, Thom, Massey; our Thomas Miller, and Thomas Cooper. To these circumstances we owe, however, not merely poets, but philosophers, artists, and men of practical science. Such were Drew, Opie, Smeaton, Brindley, Arkwright, Strutt, Crompton, Watt, Hugh Miller; such men are William Fairbairn, one of the greatest civil engineers in the world, Sir Joseph Paxton, the architect of the Crystal Palace, Joseph Barker, the religious reformer of the people, and Carlton, the vigorous delineator of Irish actual life. For such men we look in vain abroad; and at home they constitute themselves a constellation of genius, such as more than one country of continental Europe cannot muster from all the gathered lights of all its ages. It is with pride, and more than pride, that I call the attention of my countrymen to this great and unique section of their country's glorious literature. I look to the future, and see in these men but the forerunners of a numerous race springing from the same soil. They are evidences of the awakened mind of the common people of England. They are pledges that out of that awakened mind there will, as general education advances, spring whole hosts of writers, thinkers, and actors, who shall not merely represent the working classes of our society, but shall point out the people as the grand future source of the enrichment of our literature. They are luminous proofs, and the forerunners of multitudinous proofs of the same kind, that genius is not entirely dependent upon art; but can, having once the simple machinery of reading and writing, seize on sufficient art to enable it to exhibit all the nobler forms of intellectual life, and to speak from heart to heart the living language of those passions and emotions, which are the elements of all human exertion after the good and the great, which console in distress, harden to necessary endurance, or fire to the generous rage of conquest over difficulties, and over the enemies of their just rights. These men are the starry lights that glitter on the verge of that dawn in which mankind shall emerge to its true position,the many being the enlightened spirits, and the few the weak exceptions, shrinking like shadows from the noonday of human progress. At the head of this great class stands, first in stature as in era, Robert Burns. True, before him there had been a Stephen Duck, and a Robert Dodsley,-glow-worms preceding the morning star; wonders, because the day of genuine minds had not yet come; respectable men, but not geniuses of that Titanic stamp which, by its very appearance, puts an end to every question as to its rank or nature in the utter astonishment at its colossal presence. There have been many small geniuses paraded before the public as curio sities, because they were uneducated; but when Burns came forth from the crowd of his fellow-men, it was as the poet of the people; issuing like Moses from the cloud of God's presence, with a face so radiant with divine light, that the greatest prophets of the schools were dazzled at the apparition. He needed no apologies of want of academic discipline; he was a man with all the gifts and powers of a man, fresh and instinctive in their strength, as if direct from the Creator's hand. Burns was the representative of the common man in representative perfection. He was a combination of all the powers and the failings, the strength and the weakness, of human nature. He had the great intellect of such a specimen man, awakened to its full consciousness, but not polished to the loss of any of its prominences. He was manly, blunt, daring, independent; full of passion and the thirst of pleasure; yet still, tender as a woman, sensitive as a child, and capable of sinking to the humblest penitent at the suggestions of his conscience, or rising to the dignity of a prophet or the sanctity of an apostle, as the oppressions of man or the sublimity of God aroused or exalted his spirit. He had the thrilling nerves and the changing moods of the poet; quick, versatile, melancholy or humorous, he reflected all the changes of the social sky. His sensations were too acute to obey the sole dictates of mere reason, they carried him to every extreme. He was now bursting with merriment in the midst of his convivial comrades, singing like the lark or the nightingale in the joy of his heart; now thundering against the outrages of the strong and arbitrary, or weeping in convulsive grief over his follies or his wounded affections. But if his sensations were too acute to obey reason at all times, his moral nature was too noble not to obey the clear voice of a conscience, which he often outraged, but never strove systematically to destroy. There are numbers who have wondered that David should be called "a man after God's own heart;" but to me there is nothing wonderful in such an appellation. God knows that we are weak and imperfect, that in proportion to the strength of our passions are we liable to go wrong, and he does not expect miracles from us. What he expects is, that errors committed in the hurricane of passion shall be abhorred and repented of, as soon as they are fully displayed tc our consciences. To endeavour to do right, yet, if overtaken with error, to abhor our crime, and to repent in the dust and ashes of prostrate remorse, marks a heart frail, yet noble,-and such is human nature at best. The evidence of a corrupt spirit, of a truly criminal nature, is that leaven of malignity, which goes doggedly wrong, substituting the base purposes of its selfishness for the broad commands of God, and finding a satanic pleasure in working evil against its fellow-men. Such was not Robert Burns. He was no faultless monster, nor yet a monster with all his faults. His vivid sensibilities, those sensibilities which gave him the capacity for poetry, those qualities which were the necessary requisites for his vocation, -often led him astray, often stained the purity of his mind; but they never succeeded in debasing his moral nature. That was too generous, too noble, too true to the godlike gift of a great human heart, which was to feel for all mankind, and to become the inspirer of the general mass with truer and higher ideas of themselves, and of their rank in creation. Woefully fell David of old,-the poet taken from the sheepfold and the solitude of the wilderness to sit on the throne of a great people,-and bitterly in the sight of that people did he lie in the dust and deplore his errors. Greatly went Robert Burns astray, the poet taken from the plough to sit on the throne of the realm of poetry,-and bitterly did he, too, bow down and weep in the ashes of repentance. God gave, in both instances, impressive proofs to the world, that glorious talents given to men leave them but men still; and that they who envy the gift should not forget that they too, with the gift, would be exposed to the imminent danger of the fall. There is a comfort and a warning, there is a great moral lesson for mankind in the lives of such men—a lesson of humility and charity. Who shall say that with a nature equally igneous and combustible, his delinquencies would not be far greater? Where is the man in ten millions, that with such errors on one side of the account, can place the same talents and virtues on the other? In the words of Burns himself: "Who made the heart, 'tis He alone He knows each chord-its various tone, Then at the balance let's be mute, We never can adjust it; What's done we partly may compute, But know not what's resisted." The errors of Burns were visited upon him severely in his day; they stand recorded against him; no man can plead his example, for he condemned himself, and the consequences of his aberrations stand warningly side by side with the deeds themselves: but who is he that, with all the perfections of a monotonous propriety, shall confer the same benefits on his country and on his fellow-men? There was in the nature of Burns a manliness, a contempt of everything selfish and mean, a contempt of all distinctions not based on nature, a hatred of tyranny, a withering scorn of hypocrisy, which, had he not possessed the brilliant genius that he did, would, amongst his cotemporaries, have diffused that tone of honest uprightness and justness of thinking which are the truest safeguards of a country's liberties and honour, and would have stamped him as a remarkable man. But all these qualities were but the accompaniments of a genius the most brilliant, the wonders and delights of which stand written, as it were, in lightning for ever. Besides the irresistible contagion of his merriment, the flashes of his wit, the tenderness of his sentiment, the wild laughter of his satiric scorn of cant and priestcraft and self-righteousness, the ardour of his patriotism, the gaiety of his social songs, there is a tone in his graver writing which breathes over the hearts of his countrymen, and of all the world, that high and dignifying feeling which ever hallows the heart of man. With Burns, to be a man is the grand distinction. All other dis tinctions are but the clothes which wrap the figure-the figure itself is the real thing. To be a man, in his eye, was to be the most glorious thing that we have any conception of on this side of heaven;-to be an honest man, was to be "the noblest work of God!" That was the great sentiment which animated him, and made him come forth from between the stilts of his plough, from his barn or his byre, into the presence of wealth and title, with a calm dignity and a proud bearing which astonished the artificial creatures of society. Titles, carriages, gay garments, great houses, what were they but the things which the man had gathered about him for his pride or his comfort? It was for the man that they were created and gathered together. Without the man they were nothing, had no value, could have no existence. Without that solid and central and sentient monarch, titles are but air, gay clothes but the furniture of a Jew's shop, great houses but empty useless shells, carriages no better than wheelbarrows. From the man they derived all they were or counted for; and Burns felt that he and his poorest brother of the spade, and poorest sister of the spindle, were as entirely and essentially that as the king upon his throne. The king upon his throne! He was set there and arrayed in all his pageantry, and armed with all his power, solely for the man and by the man. In the man and his inner life, the heart, the soul, and the sentiment, that wondrous mystery which, prisoned in flesh and chained by matter to one corner of the limitless universe, yet is endowed with power to range through eternity-to plunge down amidst innumerable worlds and their swarming life-to soar up and worship at the footstool of the Framer and Upholder of suns and systems, the Father of all being. In him the poet recognised the only Monarch of this nether world. For him, not for lords, or millionaires, or mitred priests, but for him was this august world created. For him were its lands and waters spread abroad; for him the seasons set forward in the harmony of their progress; for him were empires and cities framed, and all the comforts of life, and the precious flowers of love and intellect breathed into the common air, and shed into the common heart. That was the feeling of Robert Burns, which made him tread down all other distinctions as he did the thistles of his own fields. That was the doctrine which he was created and sent forth to preach. Robert Burns was the apostle of the dignity of man,-man, in his own proper nature, standing calmly and invincibly above every artful distinction which sought to thrust him from his place in God's heritage, and set over him the selfish and the base. When contemplating such delusive distinctions, the winged words "A man's a man for a' that!" burst like a lightning flash from the poet's bosom, and became the eternal watchword of self-respecting humanity. "The king can make a belted knight, A marquis, duke, an a' that; |