ling independence which formed a striking con- | have been deep in all the bloodless contentions trast to the prevailing characteristic of the higher ranks of the period. Scotland needed a poet to embody in song the life of the nation before a foreign element had weakened and changed its conditions. And, obedient to the great law, when the time was ripe for the man, the man appeared, ripe, ready, and specially gifted for the work. He sprang from that class of the people which best suited his mission, a class which has given to Scotland some of her greatest ornaments, but which now, under the influence of what is called "progress," is being blotted from the old country. While from association and sympathy he was a peasant, he had received the education of a farmer's son. The one fitted him to be the poet of the people, the other to wed their aspirations and emotions to immortal verse. In very early youth he cherished the idea which he was fated to work out. "E'en then a wish,-I mind its power,A wish that to my latest hour Shall strongly heave my breast,— That I for puir auld Scotland's sake Some usefu' plan or beuk could make, Or sing a sang at least." Let us take, then, the quality of independence of character which breathes through Burns' poetry, and in teaching which he has deserved well of posterity. Without Burns, I believe, we would not have had so much manly independence among all classes in Scotland. Moralists might write essays innumerable, but they would struggle in vain to teach by any dissertations, however eloquent, what Burns gives in a couple of lines, with a power which brands the sentiment upon the brain for ever. He strove to "preserve the dignity of man with soul erect." Burns was not capable of understanding that spirit of humility which rejoices in cringing to some fellow-mortal merely because he is rich, and who probably has little claim to respect. He held the true Christian theory of the dignity and brotherhood of man, and longed for the time when "man to man the world o'er, should brithers be for a' that." The feeling of independence which he cherished and displayed was something entirely different from any mere envy of rank. To those in high station who were worthy of his regards, he paid them with a poet's heartiness; but he had no respect for mere rank and mere station when dissevered from worth. Here also his position in society stood him in good stead. The class of whom his father was one were the salt of Scotland. They had stood by Wallace in the war of independence. They were ever ready at the call of their country-they were in the thick of the Reformation-they were in the thick of the Covenanters' struggle, and they which have since agitated Scotland. They "At Wallace' name what Scottish blood Still pressing onward, red-wat shod, The The blood of the poet, like that of every true Scotchman, fired at the very name of the Great Patriot. He tells us how he used to visit and muse amid the scenes of Wallace's dangers and triumphs, and how he longed to sing a song worthy of the man and his work. I would the practice were as universal now as then, of recalling the life and labours of one who preserved Scotland from the yoke of bondage, and thus made her what she is in her freedom, her prosperity, and her great aspirations. I would it were more common than it is, to tell the children of the land-they who must in future bear up the country's banner-the legends of that elder time when their fathers struck for freedom. But I presume they are now taught the "philosophy of sport"-taught the nature and attributes of a soap-bubble, or why a fly can walk along the ceiling. It is good to do the one, but not to leave the other undone. It is good to teach them the works of Greek and Latin poets, but teach them first "Scots wha hae wi' Wallace bled." Burns, I say, has done much for Scotland and Scottish nationality by thus becoming a voice to her patriotism. He kindled his torch ere the fire had burned low, and now it passes from hand to hand down the ages, lighting afresh the patriot's zeal. And God help the country where patriotism is no more, and the science of money-getting reigns supreme! God help the people who have no thought to bestow upon the history of their native land, or on the achievements of the great men of their race! Their seeming prosperity may go on widening and deepening till the whole world gazes with admiration and envy, but it is a prosperity which is rotten at the core, and will one day crumble into a terrible ruin. It is not based upon those everlasting foundations which alone can insure permanence to prosperity; it is reared upon a false political economy; and when the storm comes, as come it shall, the nation shall find that it has built its house upon the sand. Yes, initiate your children, if you choose, into all the mysteries of science-make them walking cyclopædias of knowledge, and forget to tell them how the blood of patriots and martyrs was poured out that the bright legacy of freedom might be handed down unsullied and unimpaired-forget to tell them that, next to loving God, their duty is to love their country with all their soul and strengthto treasure its traditions-to extend its fame -to guard its privileges, and to widen its freedom-forget all this, then, I say, God help the nation, for its doom is already written: "Oh, Thou! who poured the patriotic tide, That streamed through Wallace's undaunted heart, Who dared to nobly stem tyrannic pride, Or nobly die the second glorious part, (The patriot's God peculiarly Thou art, His friend, inspirer, guardian, and reward!) Oh! never, never, Scotia's realm desert; But still the patriot, and the patriot bard, In bright succession raise, her ornament and guard!" I thank thee, Burns, for those lines! It is in such strains he gives a voice to Scottish patriotism; and on this the centenary of his birth the Genius of Scotland seems to appear, and mutely plead that the voice may not be raised in vain. I am afraid we all think too little of auld Scotland, and lay too few plans for her sake. I am afraid there are some among us who even act a more ungrateful part-who ridicule the spirit of nationality, and exult in the humiliation of their country! It is of these things that the Genius of the land struggles to speak; but the heart is too big for utterance, and she can only call up before us visions of the past, and point silently and sadly to the future. The future! May we so labour that the future shall be no less glorious than the past-so labour that when the next centenary comes, Scotchmen may look round upon a regenerated land, and seeing, boast the memory of their sires, and utter a blessing over our graves. (Mr. Gorrie, who was warmly applauded throughout his speech, resumed his seat amidst loud applause.) Speeches were then delivered by Mr. John M'Laren, advocate, and Mr. Fraser, one of the Trades' Delegates Committee. At this part of the proceedings the meeting was visited by The LORD PROVOST, who stated that he had been at the meetings held in the Music Hall and the Corn Exchange, and was much gratified at.being able to attend this one also. Mr. Simon Glover, a contemporary of Burns, and who is now upwards of 100 years of age, made his appearance on the platform during the evening, and was enthusiastically received. He gave a very interesting description of the manner in which he became acquainted with Burns; and also recited the poet's poem of "Death and Dr. Hornbook." Several of Burns' songs were sung during the evening; and Mr. Macdonald gave some readings from his poems. DUNEDIN HALL. The "Working Man's Festival" in Dunedin Hall was crowded by an audience numbering upwards of 2,000 individuals, while many were unable to gain admittance. Mr. Donald Ronald rated with flags and evergreens, and had a very Macgregor presided. The building was decofine appearance. A superb band from the Castle was in attendance. On the platform, beside the Chairman, were Councillors Alexander, Redpath, Jamieson, Anderson, &c., and a perfect galaxy of female beauty. After tea had been served, The CHAIRMAN then rose, and having congratulated the meeting on its numbers and heartiness in the cause, proceeded as follows— William Burns, the father of our great national poet, was driven at an early age from the parental roof, in consequence of family misfortunes, which had their source in the forfeiture of the Dunnottar estate in Kincardineshire in 1716, by the attachment of the Keith Marischal family to the cause of the exiled Stuarts. He came to Edinburgh, and for many years worked hard as a gardener when employment could be had, at times in difficulty and trouble enough; but still, by self-denial and economy, managing to spare something for the support of his aged of the Scottish nation, and there will he be en- parents. He afterwards removed to Ayrshire, | world's care. Robert Burns lives in the heart where he took a lease of some seven acres of land near the bridge of Doon, and commenced business as a nurseryman. On this piece of ground, with his own hands, he built a clay cottage, and in December 1757, brought to it Agnes Brown, his young bride, the daughter of a small farmer in Carrick. It was in this humble cottage, exactly one hundred years ago this day, that Robert Burns, their eldest child, was born, and it is this event which we are now met to commemorate, an event which is this day being celebrated not only in every city, town, and village, and hamlet throughout Scotland, ay, and England too, but in every land, and in every clime where the Anglo-Saxon language is spoken, or an adventurous spirit has carried one of Scotia's sons. (Great Applause.) And well may the whole Scottish nation celebrate the birth of Burns, for Scotland herself is this day exalted and glorified in the fact that, sprung from the bosom of her people, and living and dying among the children of toil, she has produced a poet whose genius has pictured, in undying words, all that is lovely and loveable in her daughters, all that is manly and independent, noble and devout, in the character of her sons. (Hear, hear.) In Robert Burns we recognise the true representative, so to speak, of his countrymen. His genius searched into the hearts of those among whom his life was spent, and gave utterance to the nobilities he found there. The simple piety which erected a family altar in every household, speaks to us in the "Cottar's Saturday Night" -the pure unselfish love of our lads is expressed in such sweet strains as "My Nannie O," and "Of a' the airts the wind can blaw," rising into the sublimity of chastened tenderness and love in the "Ode to Mary in Heaven "-our slow to give, but fast to hold, friendship in "Should auld acquaintance be forgot"—our pride even in our honest poverty, our independence, manly but not boorish, the peasant casting no glance of envy on the peer, is pictured in "A man's a man for a' that"-while Scottish patriotism as it existed in the time of Burns, as we are proud to know it exists among us still, thrills through our every vein, as if we heard the trumpet's call to battle for freedom and our hearths, in "Scots wha hae wi' Wallace bled." (Great cheering.) Robert Burns is truly, par excellence, the poet of the Scottish people. His songs are with us in our every mood, are associated with us in our every memory, that takes us back to the days of langsyne, to the days of our boyhood and our youth, to friends who have passed away, and to joys that return no more. His songs lighten the toil of labour, and bring balm to the spirit oppressed with the Robert Burns was barely thirteen when he commenced a life of hard toil, and with a stout, willing heart did he put forth his young strength to help his loved father on the little farm he had taken, for the sake of keeping his family together under his own roof tree. At fifteen he was chief labourer on the farm, and relieved his father from holding the plough; and in this capacity he remained until his father's death in the spring of 1784, when being then in his twenty-sixth year, he and his brother Gilbert took the farm of Mossgiel, in the parish of Mauchline, whither the whole Burns family removed. The farm-house of Mossgiel, which still exists pretty much as when it was inhabited by Burns, is a humble dwelling, mainly two rooms, a kitchen and a parlour, with a kind of garretcloset entering by a trap stair from the lobby. This little garret was the chamber of the poet and his brother. It had a small window of four panes in the sloping roof, and under the window a small deal table. Here he transcribed the verses he had composed in the field, his youngest sister often slipping up to search the drawer for them. Burns was not a farmer in the modern sense of the word, but the douce guidman who held his own plough. The plough was drawn by four horses, driven by a help or gaudsman, as he was called. His gaudsman at Mossgiel was one John Blane, who related, in illustration of the poet's humane disposition, that one day the plough having turned up a field-mouse, he chased and was on the point of killing it, when he was called back by the tender-hearted Bard, who not only saved its life then, but immortalized it by an ode to -- the "Wee sleekit, cow'rin' timid beastie,"-one of the earliest and one of the sweetest he has written. (Great applause.) After two years of hard work on Mossgiel, getting from it barely his wages as a ploughman of £7 a-year, Burns became disheartened, and had well-nigh emigrated to Jamaica; but a volume of his poems having been published at Kilmarnock, and realized the, to him, large sum of £20, he abandoned that idea, and in November of 1786 made his first journey to Edinburgh. Here the genius of Burns quickly made him known and welcomed by all classes. Among the first places Burns visited-places of interest to him -were the house of Allan Ramsay, on entering which he reverently took off his hat, and the humble grave of Robert Fergusson, where he knelt and kissed the sod, afterwards erecting a tombstone to his memory-still to be seen in Canongate Kirkyard. (Great applause.) It was at this time that Walter Scott, then a lad of sixteen, employed in his father's house, had an opportunity of becoming acquainted with Burns; he met him in the Sciennes, at the house of Dr. Ferguson, whose son, Sir Adam, tells us that the poet's attention was arrested by a picture in the room representing a soldier lying dead on the snow, his dog sitting in misery on one side-on the other his widow with a child in her arms. These lines were written underneath : "Cold on Canadian hills or Minden's plain, Burns read the lines aloud, but before he got to the end of them his voice faltered, and his big black eye filled with tears. He asked if any one could tell him who had written the lines. The philosophers were silent, but the lame boy modestly told him it was one Langhorne, and mentioned where they occurred. The poet looked at the lad with kindly interest, and in a serio-comic voice said, "You'll be a man yet, sir." (Great applause.) Although Robert Burns associated with the greatest and wealthiest of the land, he never resorted to the meanness of overlooking the child of honest poverty. One day, walking down Leith Walk with a modish friend, he met an old Ayrshire acquaintance very poorly dressed, and stopped to have a crack. His dandy friend told him he was surprised he had stopped to speak to such a shabby-looking fellow. "What!" said the manly bard, "do you think it was the man's clothes I was speaking to-his hat, his coat, and his waistcoat? No, it was the man within the coat and waistcoat; and let me tell you, that man has more sense and worth than nine out of ten of my fine city friends." (Applause.) This visit of Burns to Edinburgh was perhaps the happiest period of his life. He mingled with a society comprising undoubtedly the first names of the day in philosophy, literature, and science, and enjoyed with his friend, Alexander Nasmyth, the landscape painter, many a ramble in the magnificent country around. Arthur Seat being a favourite resort, he would lie down on the top of this romantic hill, and for hours, poet-like, gaze delighted on a view stretching from far beyond the May to the huge Ben Lomond guarding the couch of the weary sun in the far west. By the Edinburgh edition of his poems, Burns netted something like £400, about half of which he generously advanced to his brother Gilbert, who struggled on at Mossgiel, and with the remainder he stocked, in 1788, the farm of Ellisland, on the Nith, between five and six miles from Dumfries, and to this farm he brought his wife, and set up house late in the same year. Ellisland, turning out no better than Mossgiel, the poet, in 1789, got an appointment as an exciseman, £50 a year, out of which he had to find his own horse, and for which, as one part of his duties, he had to ride, on an average, 200 miles a-week, "Searching auld wives' barrels, Och hon the day! That clarty barm should stain my laurels; But-what'll ye say? These movin' things ca'd wives and weans Wad move the very hearts o' stanes." I give the lines, as they show the motive for accepting the uncongenial office, and do the bard honour. (Great applause.) Two years later, having reason to expect promotion in the Excise, he gave up the farm altogether and removed to Dumfries, where he remained until his death, which occurred 21st July 1796, at the early age of thirty-seven. (Sensation.) Of this part of his life I cannot bring myself to speak. No man can read of it with dry eyes; and we are met, my friends, not to weep, but to rejoice. Suffice it to say that they were years of sorrow and anxiety beyond what commonly fall even to the lot of man. The expected promotion never came-the poet's free political opinions even jeopardising the poor situation he held, and alienating many friends. Burns never would consent to write poetry for money; and hence we cannot wonder that he left his widow and five children very slenderly provided for. The poet's death-bed was soothed by the conviction that his countrymen, after his death, would be kind to them for his sake. C He bequeathed them to his country, and she has shown herself worthy of the trust. (Great applause.) We cannot help wishing that some of his great friends had been more true to Burns, and more energetic on his behalf; that in his case, at least, politics had been overlooked, and that the rulers of the nation had honoured themselves in honouring him, although perhaps we are wrong to expect much in that way in times of Sedition Bills, imprisoning of newspaper editors, and prosecutions of Thomas Muir, Skirving, and others. But whatever views we may take of the doings of the great men in power-the titled, the wealthy, the philosophers, the clergy, and the critics of that timewe are bound to say this, and we say it with pride the working-men of his day with their wives and their sons and daughters-the men who, like himself, had earned their bread by the sweat of their brow, and knew what it was to toil, and to bear, and to suffer were ever true to him; and their successors of the present generation, whether it be their lot to whistle at the plough, or, far from the light of heaven, to dig out the hidden treasures of the earth, to tend the loom, or wield the hammer; whether watchers of sheep or diggers for gold in far Australia; pioneers of civilization in Africa or America; fishermen on our rivers, or sailors on the ocean; old warriors at the ingleside, or Scotchmen, worthy of the country of Wallace and of Bruce, avenging, 'neath India's burning sun, their murdered and outraged kindred, this day hail Robert Burns as their poet and their brother, and proclaim that his memory shall be hallowed and enshrined in their hearts for ever! One word as to the various festivals now being held in honour of our great national poetand they are as varied in their character as are his poems: there is the great festival in the Crystal Palace, which was held at noon to-day, and has been attended, I learn by telegramkindly sent me by the directors-by 15,000 persons; there is the St. George's Hall banquet in Liverpool, for which 3,500 tickets have been issued; there are the great demonstrations in our own city, in Glasgow, Ayr, and Dumfries, in Dundee, Aberdeen, and all our great towns, the hearty gatherings in every country village, and in every Highland clachan. Dinners there are, and suppers, sheep's heads and haggises, washed down by Edinburgh ale and whiskytoddy. Masonic lodges, enthusiastic enough, but ungraced by the fair; and social gatherings like our own, where Scotland's bonnie lasses grace the festive boards, and prove that spirits are not indispensable to happiness and mirth when we have their pleasant smiles and gracious presence. Tea we have from China, coffee from Arabia, sugar from the Indies, and fruit from Spain and the sunny south; bread from the metropolis of the Land o' Cakes, songs by Burns himsel', sung by lads and lasses he would have loved to listen to; stringed music from a generous-hearted German admirer of the Bard, and matchless wind music from our Sussex brothers, the "braw, braw lads" from the Castle. Surely this evening shall be one, not only of honour to the memory of Robert Burns, but of happiness to every one I have the privilege of addressing-a happiness enhanced when we remember that the surplus funds are to be devoted, through the medium of the Royal Infirmary, to the alleviation of human suffering and woe. (Great cheering.) The song, par excellence, of the evening, entitled "Ye sair wrought sons o' daily toil," (written expressly for the occasion by Mr. John Brown.) having been sung with excellent taste by Mr. Bishop-the Chairman then introduced Miss Somerville, who sang with pathos and feeling "My Nannie's Awa." She was well received, and was succeeded by Mr. Shiels, who sang Bonnie wee thing," followed by Mr. Smith, who gave great effect to "A man's a man for a' that," will in the chorus. The part songs of "The Birks of the immense assemblage joining with hearty good Aberfeldy," and "Banks and Braes" came next, and after a tune from the Band, Mr. Manderson, (a blind gentleman,) recited with humour and correctness the tale of "Tam o' Shanter." The Chairman here repeated a few original verses, written by Mr. Manderson, showing a considerable degree of poetical talent. Several other songs were sung--and a vote of thanks to the Chairman was moved by Councillor Anderson, which was warmly responded to. After which the Band gave dismission to the meeting by playing "Auld Langsyne." GLOBE HOTEL. A number of gentlemen dined together in the Globe Hotel in Hill Place, and spent the evening in the most agreeable manner. The chair was occupied by Mr. JAMES BURN, of Elder Street, who proposed the toast of the occasion. After some introductory remarks he said :-It may be argued that Burns was not a poet like Homer, Virgil, Shakspeare, Milton, or many others we might name, and that his experience of men's social habits and modes of thought was confined to a very narrow circle. I grant such to have been the case, but though he could only survey the world of life from a very humble position, the extraordinary quickness of his perception more than compensated for his want of worldly education. And we must bear in mind that much of the wisdom he has left for our inheritance was the produce of inspiration rather than the result of worldly experience. Burns possessed the magic power of acting upon the living sympathies of man's |