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13 & GdWZgi7jgch/67g^Z[7^d\gVe]n In the early nineteenth century, so the story goes, a blue-ribbon Edinburgh committee planned to erect a memorial to Robert Burns. So, they sought out Sir Walter Scott’s advice on the best inscription. Said Scott, “Simply place on the monument, ‘Burns.’ Who does not know the rest?”1 Although Scott’s observation has held for over two centuries in Scotland , as well as in much of the former British Empire, Burns’s reputation has faded considerably in the United States. Most Americans today are not half as familiar with Scotland’s greatest poet as their great-grandparents would have been. From 1908 to 1909, when Harvard President Charles Eliot compiled his famed fifty-volume Harvard Classics—the books a person needed to master to become “educated”—he devoted an entire volume to Burns. Contemporary Americans, on the other hand, might recognize an odd Burnsian phrase but likely would be hard pressed to identify the source. When I spoke to a junior colleague (sporting a fresh Ph.D. from an Ivy League university) about this project, he confessed that he had never heard of Robert Burns. Thus, it is probably best to start with a brief sketch of his life, and there is no better place to begin than with the words of Burns himself. In August 1787, shortly after his first visit to Edinburgh, Robert Burns wrote a letter to John Moore, a distinguished London physician and author, in response to Moore’s praise of his verse. This lengthy missive provides our chief understanding of Burns’s early life. A relevant section follows. Mauchline, 2nd August 1787 Sir . . . I have not the most distant pretensions to what the pyecoated guardians of escutcheons call, A Gentleman.—When at Edinburgh last winter, I got acquainted in the Herald’s Office, and looking through that granary of Honors I there found every name in the kingdom; but for me, robert burns 14 “—My ancient but ignoble blood Has crept thro’ Scoundrels ever since the flood”— . . . Irascibility are disqualifying circumstances: consequently I was born a very poor man’s son.—For the first six or seven years of my life, my father was gardener to a worthy gentleman of small estate in the neighbourhood of Ayr. Had my father continued in that situation, I must have marched off to be one of the little underlings about a farm-house; but it was his dearest wish and prayer to have it in his power to keep his children under his own eye till they could discern between good and evil; so with the assistance of his generous Master my father ventured on a small farm in his estate. . . . —In my infant and boyish days too, I owed much to an old maid of my Mother’s, remarkable for her ignorance, credulity and superstition.—She had, I suppose, the largest collection in the county of tales and songs concerning devils, ghosts, fairies, brownies, witches, warlocks, spunkies, kelpies, elf candles, dead-lights, wraiths, apparitions, cantraips, giants, inchanted towers, dragons and other trumpery.—This cultivated the latent seeds of Poesy; but had so strong an effect on my imagination, that to this hour, in my nocturnal rambles, I sometimes keep a sharp look-out in suspicious places; and though nobody can be more skeptical in these matters than I. . . . This kind of life, the cheerless gloom of a hermit with the unceasing moil of a galley-slave, brought me to my sixteenth year; a little before which period I first committed the sin of RHYME.—You know our country custom of coupling a man and woman together as Partners in the labors of Harvest.—In my fifteenth autumn, my Partner was a bewitching creature who just counted an autumn less. . . . Thus with me began Love and Poesy; which at times have been my only, and till within this last twelvemonth have been my highest enjoyment.—My father struggled on till he reached the freedom in his lease, when he entered on a larger farm about ten miles farther in the country.—The nature of the bargain was such as to throw a little ready money in his hand at the commencement, otherwise the affair would have been impractible.—for four years we lived comfortably here; but a lawsuit between him and his Landlord commencing, after three years tossing and whirling in the vortex of Litigation, my father was just saved from absorption in...

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