cally recalled in one of the finest of the
Scottish ballads. Its size, as well as that of other keeps, towers,
and castles, whose ruins are reverentially preserved in Scotland,
gives a lively sense of the time when population was so scanty, and
individual manhood grew to such force. Ten men in Gilnockie were
stronger then in proportion to the whole, and probably had in them
more of intelligence, resource, and genuine manly power, than ten
regiments now of red-coats drilled to act out manoeuvres they do not
understand, and use artillery which needs of them no more than the
match to go off and do its hideous message.

Farther on we saw Branxholm, and the water in crossing which the
Goblin Page was obliged to resume his proper shape and fly, crying,
"Lost, lost, lost!" Verily these things seem more like home than one's
own nursery, whose toys and furniture could not in actual presence
engage the thoughts like these pictures, made familiar as household
words by the most generous, kindly genius that ever blessed this
earth.

On the coach with us was a gentleman coming from London to make his
yearly visit to the neighborhood of Burns, in which he was born. "I
can now," said he, "go but once a year; when a boy, I never let a week
pass without visiting the house of Burns." He afterward observed, as
every step woke us to fresh recollections of Walter Scott, that Scott,
with all his vast range of talent, knowledge, and activity, was a poet
of the past only, and in his inmost heart wedded to the habits of a
feudal aristocracy, while Burns is the poet of the present and the
future, the man of the people, and throughout a genuine man. This is
true enough; but for my part I cannot endure a comparison which by a
breath of coolness depreciates either. Both were wanted; each
acted the important part assigned him by destiny with a wonderful
thoroughness and completeness. Scott breathed the breath just fleeting
from the forms of ancient Scottish heroism and poesy into new,--he
made for us the bridge by which we have gone into the old Ossianic
hall and caught the meaning just as it was about to pass from us for
ever. Burns is full of the noble, genuine democracy which seeks not
to destroy royalty, but to make all men kings, as he himself was, in
nature and in action. They belong to the same world; they are pillars
of the same church, though they uphold its starry roof from opposite
sides. Burns was much the rarer man; precisely because h