Burns's
sweet though rugged Doric first secured the vernacular poetry of his
country a hearing beyond the border. He had, to be sure, a whole
literature of popular songs and ballads behind him, and his immediate
models were Allan Ramsay and Robert Ferguson; but these remained
provincial, while Burns became universal.
He was born in Ayrshire, on the banks of "bonny Doon," in a clay biggin
not far from "Alloway's auld haunted kirk," the scene of the witch dance
in _Tam O'Shanter_. His father was a hard-headed, God-fearing tenant
farmer, whose life and that of his sons was a harsh struggle with
poverty. The crops failed; the landlord pressed for his rent; for weeks
at a time the family tasted no meat; yet this life of toil was lightened
by love and homely pleasures. In the _Cotter's Saturday Night_ Burns has
drawn a beautiful picture of his parents' household, the rest that came
at the week's end, and the family worship about the "wee bit ingle,
blinkin' bonnily." Robert was handsome, wild, and witty. He was
universally susceptible, and his first songs, like his last, were of
"the lasses." His head had been stuffed, in boyhood, with "tales and
songs concerning devils, ghosts, fairies, brownies, witches, warlocks,
spunkies, kelpies, elf-candles, dead-lights," etc.
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