Introductory Biography.

As suddenly as though he had grasped it at a single bound, Burns, less than a hundred years ago, Prometheus-like, sprang to the possession of a glory of which he can never now be deprived, that of being at once recognized, alike by peer and peasant, as the great National Poet of Scotland. His reputation, achieved upon the instant of his first appearance, and since then only confirmed and consolidated, was, and is, and always will be, distinctly that of the National Poet, as Scott's a few years afterwards became that of the Dominant Genius of Scotland: precisely as Goethe is known to all Europe as the pre-eminent Genius, but Schiller as essentially the supreme Lyrical and National Poet of Germany.

ROBERT BURNS, the eldest of seven children, was born on the 25th of January, 1759, under the thatched roof of a little cottage situated about two miles to the south of Ayr, within a very short distance from Alloway Kirk and the Auld Brig of Doon, localities both of them immortalized within less than thirty years afterwards by the then infant, in his famous poem of "Tam o'Shanter." The humble birthplace is still carefully preserved, being used, to this day, as it has long been, as a little country alehouse, and for half a century has been an object of pilgrimage for travellers, drawn thither from the extremities of both hemispheres. It is a tenement of the very lowliest description, the merest "clay biggin," consisting only, in country parlance, of a but and a ben, otherwise of a diminutive common house-room or kitchen, with an equally small inner parlour, just perhaps a shade better in its appointments. So peculiarly frail and primitive was the structure, within which the future Bard of Caledonia first drew breath, that when he was not yet ten days old, one boisterous morning in February, a portion of the gable collapsing, the child and his mother had to be conveyed through the storm to a neighbour's dwelling, where they remained for a week together, until their own dilapidated cabin was again rendered habitable. The father, who was a gardener by occupation, had been his own architect, and, as the incident just mentioned served only too plainly to show, was as little skilled in building up a hovel as he throughout unhappily proved to be unskilled when he essayed to become the architect of his own fortunes. A peasant in his origin, descended as he was from a race of small farmers, he could nevertheless trace back his progenitors during a period of nearly two centuries. The seventeenth century had hardly begun when the first of

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