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 Blithesome Bridal) consisted largely in preparations of meal and vegetables and what is technically known as "offal." But the Scots peasant was a creature of the Kirk; the noblest ambition of Knox 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; and he did the very best he could for his children in the matter of education. Robert went to school at six; and in the May of the same year ( 1765) a lad of eighteen, one John Murdoch, was "engaged by Mr. Burness and four of his neighbours to teach, and accordingly began to teach, the little school at Alloway:" his "five employers" undertaking to board him "by turns, and to make up a certain salary at the end of the year," in the event of his "quarterly payments" not amounting to a specified sum. He was an intelligent pedagogue--he had William Burness behind him--especially in the matter of grammar and rhetoric; he trained his scholars to a full sense of the meaning and the value of words; he even made them "turn verse into its natural prose order," and "substitute synonymous expressions for poetical words and . . . supply all the ellipses." One of his school-books was the Bible, another Masson's Collection of Prose and Verse, excerpted from Addison and Steele and Dryden, from Thomson and Shenstone, Mallet and Henry Mackenzie, with Gray's Elegy, scraps from Hume and Robertson, and scenes from Romeo and Juliet, Othello, and Hamlet. And one effect of his method was that Robert, according to himself, "was absolutely a critic in substantives, verbs, and participles," and, according to Gilbert, "soon became remarkable for the fluency and correctness of his expression, and read the few books that came in his way with much pleasure and improvement." It is very characteristic of Murdoch that when, his school being broken up, he came to take leave of William Burness at Mount Oliphant, "he brought us," Gilbert says, "a present and memorial of him, a small English grammar and the tragedy of Titus Andronicus," and that "by way of passing the evening" he "began to read the play aloud." Not less characteristic of all concerned was the effect of his reading. His hearers melted into tears at the tale of Lavinia's woes, and, "in an agony of distress," implored him to read no more. Ever sensible and practical, William Burness remarked that, as nobody wanted to hear the play, Murdoch need not leave it. Robert--ever a sentimentalist and ever an indifferent Shakespearean, --"Robert replied that, if it was left, he would burn it." And Murdoch, ever the literary guide, philosopher, and friend, was so much affected by his pupil's "sensibility," that "he left The School for Love (translated, I think, from the French)" in Shakespeare's place. . .

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