To the younger brother, Alexander, he seems to have been even more indebted. If to the one he owed his gift of ready and natural expression, it was to the other that he was indebted for his powers of observation. Originally educated as a cart-wright, he had served for seven years in the navy, sailing with Nelson, witnessing the mutiny at the Nore, the battle of Camperdown under Duncan, and sharing the Egyptian campaign of Abercromby. Even on his discharge, he was still ready in 1803 to shoulder a musket as a volunteer, when Napoleon at Boulogne 'armed in our island every freeman.' The scientific interest, too, of the man may be judged from the fact that in the Egyptian expedition, during the landing, he managed to transfer a murex to his pocket from the beach, and the first ammonite which formed the nucleus of his nephew's geological collection was also brought home from an English Liassic deposit. Facts like these and the presence of such men should go far to dispel much of the cheap sentiment introduced into the current of Scottish life by writers such as Smiles and others, who profess to be ever finding some 'peasant' or 'uneducated genius' in the subjects of their all too unctuous biographies. Such a class has really no existence in Scotland, and between such men as Miller, Burns, or even the unfortunate and sorely buffeted Bethunes, there is a great gulf fixed when they are sought to be brought into relation with men like John Clare and Robert Bloomfield. All the Scotchmen, born in however originally humble circumstances, had the advantage of education at the parish school; and, slight though in some cases the result may have been, it yet for ever removes the possibility of illiteracy which the English reader at once conjures up at the sound of such surroundings. The more the critic studies the facts of Burns' early years and education, and the really remarkable stock of information with which he was to rouse the honest wonder of Dugald Stewart--his mathematical attainments and his philosophical grasp, not to mention his possession of a very powerful English prose style that makes every line of his _Letters_ really alive and matterful--the less we shall hear of peasant genius and untaught writers. We question if one half of the members of the Edinburgh bar, such as Lockhart has described them at the arrival of Burns in Edinburgh, had reached such an amount of general and poetical literature as that easily held in command by the poet. We have heard an old schoolfellow of Edward Irving and Carlyle at the burgh school of Annan remark on the misconception of Froude as to the true social rank of their respective parents. Horace and Burns seem, as Theodore Martin has shown, not unlike in the matter of their fathers, and the possession of such sets their children far out of that circle of contracted social and moral surroundings in which the biographers of the Smiles class have too long set them.