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Updated: June 5, 2025
A gentle wind begins to blow, swaying the bracken a little, the flowers and the straw; but the straw cannot sway, it only trembles. I walk on along my great arc and come down by the first cotter's house. "Well, I expect you'll end up by building a summer resort too," I tell him in the course of our conversation. "Oh, no; we couldn't venture on anything like that," he replies cunningly.
Tying it round my breast again, I gave the other end into Cotter's hands, and he, bracing his back against the cliff, found for himself as firm a foothold as he could, and promised to give me all the help in his power.
On the one hand, this spectacle led him, as it led others, to look back fondly to the good old times of homely food and primitive habits, to the peasantry as represented in Burns's Cotter's Saturday Night or Scott's Heart of Midlothian, when the poor man was part of a social, political, and ecclesiastical order, disciplined, trained, and self-respecting, not a loose waif and stray in a chaotic welter of separate atoms.
Chaucer's "Clerk's Tale;" Shakespeare's plays, particularly "Julius Caesar," "Merchant of Venice," "Macbeth," and "The Tempest;" Milton's "Paradise Lost" and "Comus;" first five cantos of Spenser's "Faery Queen;" Goldsmith's "Deserted Village" and "She Stoops to Conquer;" Scott's "Lady of the Lake" and "Marmion;" Burns's "Cotter's Saturday Night;" Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner;" Keats' "Eve of St.
"The Cotter's Saturday Night," perhaps the most quoted of any of Burns' poems, is plainly the result of a terrible tip to t' other side. Bobby had gone so far in the direction of Venusburg that he resolved on getting back, and living thereafter a staid and proper life.
Drawing the glittering cloak closer around her, she began as if she were reading it, in the very words of the green and gold volume: "'Now there was a troubadour in the kingdom of Arthur, who, strolling through the land with only his minstrelsy to win him a way, found in every baron's hall and cotter's hut a ready welcome."
Besides the satires and epistles we have during this fertile period poems as different in subject, sentiment, and treatment as The Cotter's Saturday Night and The Jolly Beggars; Hallowe'en and The Mountain Daisy; The Farmer's Address to his Auld Mare Maggie and The Twa Dogs; Address to a Mouse, Man was made to Mourn, The Vision, A Winter's Night, and The Epistle to a Young Friend.
But the sky to eastward was growing red, the lower clouds were flushed with rose-colour, the higher hills were warm with the coming of the sun. Here and there on the slopes which faced them a cotter's hovel stood solitary in its potato patch or its plot of oats. In more than one place three or four cottages made up a tiny hamlet, from which the smoke would presently rise.
The Cotter's Saturday Night has usually, in Scotland, been the most lauded of his poems. Many writers give it as his best. It is a pious opinion, but is not sound criticism. Burns handicapped himself, not only by the stanza he selected for this poem, but also by the attitude he took towards his subject. He is never quite himself in it.
He might have sat to a painter for some Covenanter's portrait, except that there was nothing dour about him, or for an illustration to Burns's 'Cotter's Saturday Night. The air of probity and canniness combined with a twinkle of dry humour was completely Scotch; and when he tapped his snuff-box, telling stories of old days, I could not refrain from asking him about his pedigree.
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