One must not come to Scotland without seeing Ayr, the native village of Burns, any more than go to Tokio and not get a glimpse of the Mikado. It is said that more tourists hailing from America visit annually the village in which Robert Burns first saw the light than are seen at Stratford. This may mean that there are probably more prosperous and cultured descendants of Scotsmen in America than there are of ancestral English folk. In addition to the throng from trans-Atlantic lands must be counted a goodly company of passionate pilgrims from all parts of the British Empire. Theodore Cuyler tells us, in his “Recollections,” how Carlyle, when a boy, visited the grave of the poet, his feelings allowing him to say only, but over and over again, “Rabbie Burns, Rabbie Burns.”

The cottage in which the poet was born is probably in a much more substantial condition to-day than in Burns’s infancy. When the poet’s father took hold of the structure, it was a “clay bigging,” which the parent rebuilt with his own hands. On the night of Robert’s birth, a storm came on and part of the cottage fell in, so that the mother with the baby had to fly for shelter to the house of a neighbor until the house was repaired.

We moved down to the road opposite the new florid Gothic church of Alloway, where was a flight of steps, worn by the feet of thousands of pilgrims, leading over the wall to “Alloway’s auld haunted kirk.” In Burns’s day the edifice was whole and in use. All that is now left of the famous building are four bare walls, two of them gabled and one of them surmounted by a bell-cote. Burns’s progenitor is buried “where the rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.”

We were guided around by a most unprepossessing old native, a Dick Deadeye in appearance, who insisted that “preachers were of no use, except to scold the deil.” He made himself rather free in his conversation with and repartees made to the clerical gentlemen of the party, who were inclined to chaff this apparently self-appointed defender of His Satanic Majesty. The old Scotsman seemed, with his malevolent eye (not whole, if I remember aright), to be the very incarnation of the dogma of total depravity. By a sort of counter-irritant, his wit served but to stiffen up whatever “orthodoxy”—after studying the Bible, with and without the aid of the creeds—some of us had left. In any event, the cicerone “got as gude as he gie.”

We glanced at the big monument of nine Corinthian fluted columns emblematic of the nine muses. With all due respect to the Greeks, but much less to the Scots, who reared the token, some of us wondered why such a true son of the soil as Burns could not have had for his memorial in architecture something more original than a Greek temple, for Scotland lacks neither brains nor taste.

Here is said to be the Bible given by Burns to his Highland Mary, held in the hand of each at their last interview, while both promised eternal loyalty to each other. This “blessed damozel,” made immortal in the poem, was Mary Campbell, a dairy maid. Their last meeting was when, “standing one on each side of a small brook, they laved their hands in the stream, and holding a Bible between them, pronounced a vow of an eternal constancy.” The scene of the parting of the lovers is still pointed out. In returning from her visit of filial duty, Mary fell sick and died at Greenock. At Ellislan in 1789, on the third anniversary of the day on which Burns heard of her death, he wrote that loveliest of all his ballads, the address to “Mary in Heaven.” Since 1898, one may see her lofty statue reared in her native place, Dunoon, on Castle Hill, now famous for its seaside villas and as a summer resort, with Loch Eh, not far away. Thousands come, also, to see the proof that man worships woman.

Nevertheless, after his Highland Mary, Burns had many spasms of affection, for he seems to have worshipped womanhood. One of his loves was a young girl, in whose honor he wrote a poem when she was about to leave for America, whither she went and married, rearing a family of sons who became famous in science. One of her descendants settled at Ithaca, New York, to live by the side of our beautiful Lake Cayuga. It is after him that Port Renwick on its shores is named.

In a grotto, at the end of the garden, are the figures of Tam o’ Shanter and Souter Johnnie. Except for the natural beauty of the spot in the Doon Valley, the country seems very monotonous and uninteresting, though the two bridges are worth attention. One, “the auld bridge,” has a single slim arch, which Meg tried to gain when she fled from the witches. Here flows the river Doon, to which the writings of Burns have given such celebrity. It rises in a lake of the same name, about eight miles in length, and the river has a seaward course of eighteen miles, its banks, especially in summer time, being laden with floral richness and beauty. Besides looking so small to one used to the Hudson, Susquehanna, and Delaware, it seemed almost lost in trees and shrubbery. Yet in some parts its rocky banks are imposing.

There is also a statue of Robert Burns, between whom and Americans there will ever be an indissoluble bond of sympathy. For, apart from his wonderful work in liberating Scottish poetry from the bonds of classical moulds and traditions, he had that profound sympathy with man as man, which enabled him to see into the real meaning of the French Revolution and its effect on the whole world. Though not blind to its horrors and mistakes, he saw far more clearly its ultimate results and blessings to mankind than could the men then in power and office in England. These, in 1790, were too much like their successors of 1861, when the struggle between slavery and freedom set armies in shock. Then the British leaders of public opinion, the proprietors of the Lancashire cotton mills, “Punch,” the London “Times,” and even the great poets uttered no voice of appreciation of Lincoln or of the freedom-loving American masses, not only of the North, but in the highlands of the South.

Burns not only taught in verse the principles of the American Declaration of Independence, but in his famous lines made forecast of the United States of the world, which our descendants are to see.

As a creator of poetry, as one who took the genius of Scotland by the hand, as it were, and led her out of the old paths, Burns will ever awaken undying gratitude among Scotsmen. He drew his inspiration from living nature and not from dead antiquity, or from books, old or new. To him, indeed, there was an antiquity that was living, and that part of the past which was its true and deathless soul, he clothed in new beauty. There is no nobler vindication of John Knox of the Reformers, who, with all their shortcomings and human infirmities, demanded reality and the uplift of the common man. They gave Scotland public schools, and the result was a sturdy, independent, and educated peasantry. It was from that class that Burns sprang. John Knox and the Reformers made a Robert Burns possible.

Burns had the virtues and defects of his class. He had vices that were not peculiar to the common people, but were shared in by the lordly and those high in office. Apart from his wonder-working power in the witchery of language, Burns, though called “the illegitimate child of Calvinism,” has wrought a moral influence for good in Scotland such as can be attributed to very few men who possess the reputation of higher sanctity. For besides Burns’s strong common sense, lively imagination, keen sympathy with what was beautiful in nature and noblest in man,—withal, in love with his native land and ever susceptible to fair women,—Burns purified and uplifted popular song. Out of the black mire of the obscene and indelicate, he called forth to bloom and glory deathless flowers of song.

Burns seemed to be the very incarnation of all that was necessary to be a true poet of the people. He illustrated the saying, ascribed to more than one man, that others might make the laws, but he would make the songs of the people—and he did. Many an old snatch of song, bit of sentiment, or scrap of poetry, which in form was vulgar and even indecent, he made clean. Purifying what was dear to the people, he set the substance in new shape and gave it wings of song. Some of the ancient ditties, now in happy oblivion, are too obscene to be sung to-day in their old form by refined society, but after their new baptism by Burns, they have become teachers of piety that excel in lasting power preachers or sermons. Such, for example, is “John Anderson, my Jo, John,” now so sweet and pathetic. In fact, Burns’s transformation of certain specimens of Scottish song is like that which we have seen when a handful of jewelry, of fashions outworn, was cast into the crucible made white hot and salted with nitre. The dross went off into vapor and fumes and the old forms and defects were lost in oblivion. What was of value remained. The pure gold was not lost, rather set free and regained. Poured forth into an ingot, that would become coin or jewels, it entered upon new life and unto a resurrection of fresh beauty.

Above all, Burns disliked to be tutored in matters of taste. He could not endure that one should run shouting before him whenever any fine objects appeared. On one occasion, a lady at the poet’s side said, “Burns, have you anything to say to this?” He answered, “Nothing, madam,” as he glanced at the leader of the party, “for an ass is braying over it.”

Since the ploughman-poet of Ayr was so generous in confessing inspiration and indebtedness to his greatest teacher, it is not meet that we should ignore this man and name in any real view of the forces making intellectual Scotland.

Robert Fergusson, though less known in countries abroad than in Scotland, was the spiritual father of Robert Burns and none acknowledged this more than Burns himself. When the man from Ayr visited Edinburgh, in 1787, he sought out the poet’s grave and erected the memorial stone which is still preserved in the larger and finer monument. Fergusson, born in 1751, was a graduate of St. Andrews. In Edinburgh, he contributed poems to Ruddiman’s “Weekly Magazine,” which gained him considerable local reputation. His society was eagerly sought and he was made a member of the Cape Club. Unfortunately, Fergusson fell a victim to his convivial habits, and was led into excesses which permanently injured his health. Alcohol probably helped to develop that brain disease usually called insanity. It was while in this condition that he met with Dr. John Brown, of Haddington, whose name is a household word in Scotland. The good man, a sound Presbyterian and Calvinist, was much more. He made “the love of the Lord” the real and ultimate test of a man’s orthodoxy. Brown’s “Self-Interpreting Bible” has been amazingly popular throughout heather land. The John Brown, whom some of us knew, who wrote “Rab and His Friends,” and “Pet Marjorie,” was the grandson of Fergusson’s friend.

After meeting with Dr. Brown, Fergusson became so very serious that he would read nothing but his Bible. A fall, by which his head was seriously injured, aggravated the symptoms of insanity, which had already shown themselves. After two months’ confinement in the only public asylum then known in Edinburgh, he died in 1774. His poems had been collected the year before his death.

Perhaps Fergusson’s fame rests as much upon his unhappy life and early death, and upon the fact that he was a true forerunner of Scotland’s greatest son of genius, as upon the essential merits of his verse. Burns read carefully Fergusson’s poems, admired them greatly, and called the author his “elder brother in the muses.” The higher critics declare that his influence on the poems of Robert Burns, such as “The Holy Fair,” “The Brigs of Ayr,” “On Seeing a Butterfly in the Street,” and “To a Mouse,” is undoubted. Even “The Cotter’s Saturday Night,” when read alongside of “The Farmer’s Ingle,” of Fergusson, shows that Burns’s exquisite picture in verse of homely peasant life in Scotland is a firelight reflection of the older original, at which Burns warmed his genius.

With less of an immediate intellectual debt, Burns was certainly obligated to an older cultivator of Scottish poetry; who, in large measure, must be credited with the revival of public appreciation of the bards of Caledonia and who helped powerfully to create the climate in which Burns’s genius could blossom and bear fruit.

Among the effigies in Edinburgh, city of statues, is that of Allan Ramsay, the poet (1686–1758). When we first saw this work of art, it was comparatively new, having been erected in 1865, by which time national appreciation had ripened.

Ramsay must ever hold the gratitude of Scottish people, because he, more than any one else, made the wonderful world of Scottish music known in England and to the nations. He brought together, in “The Tea-Table Miscellany,” a collection of the choicest Scottish songs. He himself was a poetaster, rather than a great lyrist, and throughout his career proved himself a canny business man.

In literary history Allan Ramsay achieved two great triumphs. He contributed thus early to the naturalistic reaction of the eighteenth century against the slavery to classicism. As an editor, he furnished the connecting link between the “Makars,” as verse-writers were called in the Scotland of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and the poets Fergusson (1751–74) and Burns (1759–96). Ramsay did much to revive interest in vernacular literature. He certainly stimulated an ignorant public to fresh enjoyment.

This reaction in Scotland was followed by one in England, for which the publication of Bishop Percy’s “Reliques of Ancient English Poetry” furnished a sure foundation. Scotland honored herself when she honored her poet Ramsay. Happy is the nation that appreciates her sons who bid her people look within to find enduring treasure. To Ramsay, the prophet’s words apply: “And they that be of thee shall build the old waste places; thou shalt raise up the foundations of many generations and thou shalt be called ... the restorer of paths to dwell in.”

The second Allan Ramsay (1713–84), an accomplished scholar and gentleman, was the son of the poet. Being carefully educated by his father and sent to Rome to study art, he became an able portrait-painter. Through introduction to the Prince of Wales, afterwards George III, he rose rapidly into favor. To him we are indebted for the portrait of that King George, with whose physiognomy, more than with that of almost any other sovereign of England, our fathers became very familiar during the time of their eight years’ disagreement with His Majesty and his ministers.