Burns - 1898 Author:William Ernest Henley Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: r The Scots peasant lived hard, toiled incessantly., and fed so cheaply that even on high days and holidays his diet (as set forth in The Blithesomf- Bridal) ... more »consisted largely in preparations of meal an 4 vegetables and what is technically known as ' offal.' But the Scots peasant was a creature of the KirK; the noblest ambition of Knox1 was an active influence in the Kirk; and the Parish Schools enabled the Kirk to provide its creatures with such teaching as it deemed desirable. William Burness was ' a very poor man' (R. B.). But he had the right tradition; he was a thinker and an observer ; he read whatever he could get to read; he wrote English formally but with clarity;2 and he did the very best he could for his children in the matter of education. Robert went to school at 1 The Reformer had a vast deal more in common with Burns than with the ' sour John Knox' of Browning's ridiculous verses. He was the man of a crisis, and a desperate one; and he played his part in it like the stark and fearless opposite that he was. But he was a humourist, he loved his glass of wine, he abounded in humanity and intelligence, he married two wives, he was as well beloved as he was extremely hated and feared. He could not foresee what the collective stupidity of posterity would make of his teaching and example, nor how the theocracy at whose establishment he aimed would presently assert itself as largely a system of parochial inquisitions. The minister's man who had looked through his keyhole would have got short shrift from him; and in the Eighteenth Century he had as certainly stood with Burns against the Kirk of Scotland, as represented by Auld and Russell and the like, as in the Sixteenth he stood with Moray and the nobles against the Church of Rome, as figured in David Beaton and the ...« less