tle
distance from his original resting-place. This structure was adorned
with an ungraceful figure in marble, representing, "The muse of Coila
finding the poet at the plough, and throwing her inspiring mantle over
him." To this was added a long, rambling epitaph in tawdry Latin, as
though any inscription which scholars could devise could equal the
simple name of Robert Burns. When the new structure was completed, on
the 19th September, 1815, his grave was opened, and men for a moment
gazed with awe on the form of Burns, seemingly as entire as on the (p. 187)
day when first it was laid in the grave. But as soon as they began to
raise it, the whole body crumbled to dust, leaving only the head and
bones. These relics they bore to the mausoleum, which had been
prepared for their reception. But not even yet was the poet's dust to
be allowed to rest in peace. When his widow died, in March, 1834, the
mausoleum was opened, that she might be laid by her husband's side.
Some craniologists of Dumfries were then permitted, in the name of
so-called science, to desecrate his dust with their inhuman outrage.
At the dead of night, between the 31st of March and the 1st of April,
these men laid their profane fingers on the skull of Burns, "tried
their hats upon it, and found them all too little;" applied their
compasses, registered the size of the so-called organs, and "satisfied
themselves that Burns had capacity enough to compose _Tam o' Shanter_,
_The Cotter's Saturday Night_, and _To Mary in Heaven_." This done,
they laid the head once again in the hallowed ground, where, let us
hope, it will be disturbed no more. The mausoleum, unsightly though it
is, has become a place of pilgrimage whither yearly crowds of
travellers resort from the ends of the earth, to gaze on the
resting-place of Scotland's peasant poet, and thence to pass to that
other consecrated place within ruined Dryburgh, where lies the dust of
a kindred spirit by his own Tweed.

CHAPTER VIII. (p. 188)

CHARACTER, POEMS, SONGS.

If this narrative has in any way succeeded in giving the lights and
the shadows of Burns's life, little comment need now be added. The
reader will, it is hoped, gather from the brief record of facts here
presented, a better impression of the man as he was, in his strength
and in his weakness, than from any attempt which might have been made
to bring his various qualities together into