"At her house she received visitors of all grades and from all parts, and with all she was perfectly at her ease. Hundreds upon hundreds from every corner of the United Kingdom and from the Continent and America came every year to the little cottage at Belleisle to see the sister of the poet, and none went away without a higher respect for him and all belonging to him. They saw in her and in her two daughters very much of what they could well fancy the poet in his happier hours would have-frank openness, tempered with that dignified selfrespect which repelled and checked vulgarity, no matter whether it assumed the air of patronising self-importance or of rude impertinence. was the natural manner which art cannot communicate, and which is beyond convention. Mrs. Begg was quite a lady without attempting it, just because she was every inch a woman; and the propriety of carriage, which in the case of her brother astonished the refined circles of Edinburgh three-quarters of a century ago, was not less remarkable in her."

Hers

Mrs. Begg's life was a humble one, and with the exception of its closing

sixteen years, which were passed in well-earned peace and comfort, it was a struggling one as well. Throughout the greater part of its lengthened duration of fourscore and six years, her every aspiration and thought was fettered by the sordid details of a life of privation and trial. Her education, too, was exceedingly meagre, for with the exception of the intellectual culture imparted to her by her father and her brother Robert, and a brief period of systematic tuition under John Wilson, schoolmaster of Tarbolton, immortalised by Burns as "Dr. Hornbook," her mental development, like the mental development of the other members of her family, was entirely self-acquired.

In spite of this serious disadvantage, she seems in her youth to have attained to remarkable discrimination of thought and considerable cultivation of intellect; and in her more mature years she displayed traits of elevated sentiment, and of native force and felicity of expression, which may almost be regarded as akin to that with which her poet brother was so prodigally endowed. This formed a strongly-marked feature, not in her conversation alone, but also, and more especially, in her epistolary correspondence; and keeping in view the limited culture of the period, it is scarce possible to peruse the few extracts from her letters which are embodied in these pages without being

forcibly struck by her peculiar natural gift as a letter-writer. In this respect, as well as in the unwavering independence of spirit and undaunted energy which she displayed, her life and character form a not uninteresting psychological study, illustrating as it does the principle of heredity, and the fact that the brilliant ray of genius transmitted through old William Burness and his helpmate Agnes Brown, was not altogether absorbed by their illustrious first-born, but was to a certain extent reflected even in the very youngest of their numerous offspring.

Nor was Mrs. Begg the only member of the family, in addition to the poet, who was gifted with this fertility of

fancy combined with remarkable felicity of expression. It seems indeed to have been more or less common to the whole of William Burness's children, for we find the poet himself, rather a critical judge, complimenting his youngest brother William very highly on his ability as a letter-writer. Writing to William in March 1789, the poet says:

"I am indebted to you for one of the best letters that has been written by any mechanic lad in Nithsdale or Annandale or any dale on either side of the Border this twelvemonth."

We also know from the existing biographies of the poet that his brother Gilbert was similarly gifted, and the following extracts from a letter