his gladness and tender in his tenderness. We take the mouse to our heart and the limping hare, the auld mare, Maggie Maillie with her lamb, and with these the great human family, because he was so grand, so true a man, and sang so nobly of the common things, the common callings and the life of the common people. A playwright, a hundred years before Burns, said: "I weigh the man, not the title. It is not the king's stamp can make the metal better, for your lord may be mere dross." But Burns caught the idea fresh, as I think, from the fountain, and his song stirs the heart like the sound of a trumpet and sets us marching, as I said, heads up and feet firm, as the answer to the music:

"Is there for honest poverty That hings his head, an' a' that?

The coward slave, we pass him by

We dare be poor for a' that!
For a' that, an' a' that,
Our toils obscure, an' a' that,

The rank is but the guinea's stamp,
The man's the gowd for a' that.

"What though on hamely fare we dine,
Wear hoddin grey, an' a' that?

Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine
A man's a man for a' that!

For a' that an' a' that,

Their tinsel show, an' a' that,

The honest man, though e'er so poor,
Is king o' men for a' that.

"A prince can mak a belted knight,
A marquis, duke, an' a' that!

But an honest man's aboon his might
Guid faith, he mauna fa' that!
For a' that, an' a' that,

Their dignities, an' a' that,

The pith o' sense an' pride o' worth,
Are higher rank than a' that.

"Then let us pray that come it may,

(As come it will for a' that),

That Sense and Worth o'er a' the earth,

May bear the gree an' a' that!

For a' that, an' a' that,

It's comin' yet for a' that,

That man to man the world o'er

Shall brithers be for a' that."

Burns was born in a land and a time when to think freely and tell your thought in religion was atheism, and in politics, treason, but the bands that lay so heavy on his free soul quickened and kindled his genius into some of the grandest strains for freedom that ever rang round the world. He was taught from his cradle that our human nature is utterly depraved, but God's angels trust not each other with a nobler trust in our

humankind than that which filled his soul, and loving as few men have loved, fewer still have told us what a true love may do to lift us toward the highest and the best.

A peasant man by birth and nurture, deplorably poor, he has made the world, and Scotland especially, richer beyond all price by his genius, and, born into the lap of that grim, forbidding time, he has made the time glorious by his advent. His nobler manhood makes good men long to grow better and bad men in their better moments be clean from the sin and shame; and dying, broken down by poverty, he has risen again, led captivity captive and received gifts for men. Sectarian antagonisms grow sweeter as we hear him plead for the human brotherhood, and the atheist gulps down his sneer as he ponders his words that

"When in life we're tempest driven

And conscience but a canker,
A correspondence fixed wi' heaven.
Is sure a noble anchor."

And now may we hear our own noble singer, our good Quaker poet, as my last and best word for Burns:

"No more these simple flowers belong

To Scottish maid and lover;

Sown in the common soil of song,

They bloom the wide world over.

"In smiles and tears, in sun and showers, The minstrel and the heather,

The deathless singer, and the flowers
He sang of live together.

"Wild heather-bells and Robert Burns!
The moorland flower and peasant!
How, at their mention, memory turns
Her pages old and pleasant.

"With clearer eyes we see the worth
Of life among the lowly;

The Bible at his Cotter's hearth
Has made our own more holy.

"And if at times an evil strain
To lawless love appealing,
Broke in upon the sweet refrain

Of pure and healthful feeling,

"Still think, while falls the shade between The erring one and Heaven, That he who loved like Magdalene,

Like her, may be forgiven.

"And who his human heart has laid

To Nature's bosom nearer?

Who sweetened toil like him, or paid

To love a tribute dearer?

"Give lettered pomp to teeth of Time,
So 'Bonnie Doon' but tarry;
Beat out the Epic's stately rhyme,

But spare his Highland Mary!"

CHARLES AND MARY LAMB

A TRUE STORY

I WANT to say something to you this evening about the life of Charles Lamb; and to begin by saying, that such a theme must be its own apology to those who only know the man through a few jests everybody repeats, but which are by no means of the deep and searching sort Hazlitt had in his mind, when he said, "Lamb's jests scald like tears." These jestlings, as he would have called them, were the first thing I heard or read from him in my youth, and might have been the last, had not a gentleman, whose sight was failing, asked me to read for him as I found the time; and one of the books he loved best was the "Essays of Elia." So I read the essays, I remember, with no idea at all of their sweet and subtle charm, and wondered how any man could care for such things as those. But two or three years after I had closed the book for ever, as I thought, some seeds it had sown began to quicken in my mind, from here and there an essay, and especially those on "Chimney-Sweeps" and the "Decay of Beggars," and made me long to see the book again, after it had vanished with its owner, I knew not where. And so when I began to rise in the world, and was earning as much as eight dollars a month and