
45 
The Jean Armour courtship and marriage, the feting of 
Burns in the Freemasons’ Lodges in Edinburgh, his Ellis- 
land and Dumfries life, and the saddening circumstances of 
his death, were all sympathetically related. Before his death 
the poet lamented that his MSS. were all in confusion and 
that his enemies would publish everything he had written 
to private individuals and others to damage his character. 
His prediction had come true. He was interred at St. Michael’s 
Church, July 26th, 1796, aged thirty-seven and a half years. 
An excellent series of slides, many of them original, were 
thrown on the screen, and the lecturer interspersed the 
views with interesting personal reminiscences of the tour, and 
his interviews with the grand-daughter and great grand- 
daughter of the poet. In the cottage where the poet was 
born was the following fine poem by Ingersoll : 
Though Scotland boasts a thousand names 
Of Patriot, King, or peer, 
The noblest, grandest of them all 
Was loved and cradled here. 
Here dwelt the gentle peasant prince, 
The lowly cotter King ; 
Compared with him the greatest lord 
‘Is but a titled thing. 
‘Tis but a cot roofed in with straw, 
A hovel made of clay, 
One door shuts out the snow and storm, 
One window greets the day. 
And yet I stand within this room 
‘And hold all thrones to scorn ; 
For here beneath -this lowly thatch 
Love’s sweetest bard was born. 
Within this hallowed hut I feel 
‘Like one who clasps a shrine 
When the glad lips at last have touched 
Something that seemed divine ; 
And here the world through all the years, 
As long as day returns, 
The tribute of its soul and tears 
Will pay to Robert Burns. 
The lecturer himself, in a poem of seven verses, which by 
request had been presented to the great grand-daughter of 
the poet, had also put on record his sentiments “ after seeing 
