ance'; and his son Robert was not less manly and
independent. He was too sound in judgment; too conscious of his own
worth, to sink into mean and abject servility. But this factor, perhaps
more than anyone else, did much to pervert, if he could not kill, the
poet's spirit of independence.

Curiously enough, the opening sentences of his autobiographical sketch
have a suspicious ring of the pride that apes humility. There is
something harsh and aggressive in his unnecessary confidence. 'I have
not the most distant pretensions to assume the character which the
pye-coated guardians of escutcheons call a gentleman. When at Edinburgh
last winter I got acquainted at the Herald's office; and, looking
through that granary of honours, I there found almost every name in the
kingdom; but for me,

"My ancient but ignoble blood
Had crept through scoundrels ever since the flood."

Gules, Purpure, Argent, etc., quite disowned me.' All this is quite
gratuitous and hardly in good taste.

Yet, in spite of untoward circumstances, ceaseless drudgery, and
insufficient diet, the family of Mount Oliphant was not utterly lost to
happiness. With such a shrewd mother and such a father as William
Burness--a man of whom Scotland may be justly proud--no home could be
altogether unhappy. In Burns's picture of the family circle in _The
Cotter's Saturday Night_ there is nothing of bitterness or gloom or
melancholy.

'With joy unfeign'd brothers and sisters meet,
An' each for other's welfare kindly spiers:
The social hours, swift-wing'd, unnotic'd fleet;
Each tells the uncos that he sees or hears.
The parents, partial, eye their hopeful years;
Anticipation forward points the view:
The mother, wi' her needle an' her shears,
Gars auld claes look amaist as weel's the new;
The father mixes a' wi' admonition due.'

In the work of the farm, too, hard as it was, there was pleasure, and
the poet's first song, with the picture he gives of the partners in the
harvest field, breaks forth from this life of cheerless gloom and
unceasing moil like a blink of sunshine through a lowering sky. Burns's
description of how the song came to be made is worthy of quotation,
because it gives us a very clear and well-defined likeness of himself at
the time, a lad in years, but already counting himself among men. 'You
know our country custom of coupling a man and a woman together in the
labours of harvest. In