Robert Burns: How To Know Him

by William Allan Neilson

Nae treasures nor pleasures

Could make us happy lang;

The heart aye's the part aye

That makes us right or wrang.

The Piper of Kilbarchan, by Sir Robert Sempill of Beltrees (1595?-1661?), set a model for the humorous elegy on the living which reached Burns through Ramsay and Fergusson, and was followed by him in those on Poor Mailie and Tam Samson. The stanza in which it is written is far older than Sempill, having been traced as far back as the troubadours in the twelfth century, and being found frequently in both English and French through the Middle Ages; but from the time of Sempill on, it was cultivated with peculiar intensity in Scotland, and is the medium of so many of Burns's best-known pieces that it is often called Burns's stanza.

Lament in rhyme, lament in prose,

Wi' saut tears tricklin' down your nose;

Our Bardie's fate is at a close,

Past a' remead;

The last, sad cape-stane o' his woe's—