Our guide informed us that an old man of ninety, who
knew Burns, certifies, this statue to be very like the original.
The bones of the poet, and of Jean Armour, and of some of their
children, lie in the vault over which we stood. Our guide (who was
intelligent, in her own plain way, and very agreeable to talk withal)
said that the vault was opened about three weeks ago, on occasion of
the burial of the eldest son of Burns. The poet's bones were
disturbed, and the dry skull, once so brimming over with powerful
thought and bright and tender fantasies, was taken away, and kept for
several days by a Dumfries doctor. It has since been deposited in a
new leaden coffin, and restored to the vault. We learned that there is
a surviving daughter of Burns's eldest son, and daughters likewise of
the two younger sons,--and, besides these, an illegitimate posterity
by the eldest son, who appears to have been of disreputable life in
his younger days. He inherited his father's failings, with some faint
shadow, I have also understood, of the great qualities which have made
the world tender of his father's vices and weaknesses.
We listened readily enough to this paltry gossip, but found that it
robbed the poet's memory of some of the reverence that was its due.
Indeed, this talk over his grave had very much the same tendency and
effect as the home-scene of his life, which we had been visiting just
previously. Beholding his poor, mean dwelling and its surroundings,
and picturing his outward life and earthly manifestations from these,
one does not so much wonder that the people of that day should have
failed to recognize all that was admirable and immortal in a
disreputable, drunken, shabbily clothed, and shabbily housed man,
consorting with associates of damaged character, and, as his only
ostensible occupation, gauging the whiskey which he too often tasted.
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