The life and land of Burns Author:Allan Cunningham 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: THE LAND OF BURNS. ROBERT BURNS. " Now comes the sax-and-twentieth simmer, I've seen the bud upon the timmer." The looks of Barns still live in many me... more »n's memories; but as all such recollections perish, we shall soon have nought to trust to but the descriptions of biographers and the picturings of artists. The truest and best of these are of course from the hands of men who had seen the poet, and were familiar with his ways. " His motions," says Professor Walker, who saw him when he first appeared amongst the wits and bloods of Edinburgh, '' were firm and decided, and though without any pretensions to grace, were at the same time so free from clownish constraint, as to show that he had not always been confined to the society of his profession. His countenance was manly and intelligent, and marked by athought- ful gravity, which shaded at times into sternness. In his large dark eye the most striking index of his genius resided —it was full of mind." A much higher authority speaks of Burns in almost similar words : " I was," says Sir Walter Scott, " a lad of fifteen, in 1786-7, when hecame first to Edinburgh : I would have given the world to know him; as it was, I saw him one day at the late venerable Professor Ferguson's, where there were several gentlemen of literary reputation ; among whom I remember the celebrated Mr. Dugald Stewart. His person was strong and robust; his manners rustic, not clownish ; a sort of dignified plainness and simplicity, which received part of its effect, perhaps, from one's knowledge of his extraordinary talents. I think his countenance was more massive than it looks in any of the portraits. I would have taken the poet, had I not known what he was, for a very sagacious country farmer of the old Scottish school: there was a strong expression o...« less