[See Burns' Birthplace: The living room in the Burns birthplace
cottage.]
It is not necessary here to attempt to disentangle or explain away the
numerous amours in which he was engaged through the greater part of his
life. It is evident that Burns was a man of extremely passionate nature
and fond of conviviality; and the misfortunes of his lot combined with
his natural tendencies to drive him to frequent excesses of
self-indulgence. He was often remorseful, and he strove painfully, if
intermittently, after better things. But the story of his life must be
admitted to be in its externals a painful and somewhat sordid chronicle.
That it contained, however, many moments of joy and exaltation is proved
by the poems here printed.
Burns' poetry falls into two main groups: English and Scottish. His
English poems are, for the most part, inferior specimens of conventional
eighteenth-century verse. But in Scottish poetry he achieved triumphs of
a quite extraordinary kind. Since the time of the Reformation and the
union of the crowns of England and Scotland, the Scots dialect had
largely fallen into disuse as a medium for dignified writing.
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